There are many smart people who did not get majority A's in high school. High school performance is not a good metric for problem-solving skills (AKA, general intelligence).
Also it is so strange that people here don't think that poor wages has any effect on the quality of workers in construction, even though they believe that to be true basically everywhere else. I strongly believe the reason we see so many problems with construction is simply that the wages today are so skewed and that greatly impacts the availability of talent, since people who can choose to go elsewhere mostly do so today.
Only reason I can think of is that most here assumes construction work is so easy that you don't need to be that smart to do well there. Otherwise I don't understand these comments.
It's a whole microcosm with its own constraints...
In fact, since you piss on construction, one of the oldest running jokes is how dumb the millitary people are, and how illogical millitary is.
Wow, that is a really funny joke. “How illogical military is!”
The half-joke/half-truth that "millitary intelligence" is an oxymoron has been widely circulated - heck, there are even Quora layman questions that take it for granted.
[1] https://www.quora.com/Why-is-military-intelligence-considere...
And of course all kind of insider jokes about such illogicallity and inefficiency (including long standing acronyms, like S.N.A.F.U), about how high command has little understanding of the situation on the ground in any real scenario, things dressed-up to look good, and so on.
Note, I am not saying that the military is stupid, I am saying that the trope is simply very well known by now.
[1] A work of fiction.
Construction is a very conservative business that innovates slowly. This is partly by design. It carries a lot of risk to human safety and capital that isn’t amenable to the “fail fast” paradigm of SV.
I guess that explains why the majority of software is so performant, bug free and a pleasure to use?