From the second link: "I work in a place where most of my co-workers are gifted, if not all. Software and hardware engineering tends to attract people like that." HA! I wish. I've heard that places like Google, IBM, and Apple attract that sort of talent, but from my view of the rest of the IT world, it's not that different from any other world of employment... a number of competent but not exceptional individuals, a surprising number of incompetent posers, and a handful of outliers that everyone seeks out. There may be a higher volume of outliers in IT than the general population, but that's not really saying much.
When I was in the Navy, we tech-types used an automotive analogy to describe these groups. We described people as axles (if these people broke, you were going nowhere), wheels (people who carried their own weight), and nubs (decorative features that contributed nothing of value). The fun thing about that environment is that everyone was a nub on day one, because there was just too much to learn.
