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I have met those supersmart specialists but in my experience there are also a lot of smart people who are more generalists.

The real answer is likely internal company politics and priorities. Google certainly has people with the technical skills to solve it but do they care and if they care can they allocate those skilled people to the task?

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My observation is that in general smart generalists are smarter than smart specialists. I work at Google, and it’s just that these generalists folks are extremely fast learners. They can cover breadth and depth of an arbitrary topic in a matter of 15 minutes, just enough to solve a problem at hand.

It’s quite intimidating how fast they can break down difficult concepts into first principles. I’ve witnessed this first hand and it’s beyond intimidating. Makes you wondering what you’re doing at this company… That being said, the caliber of folks I’m talking about is quite rare, like top 10% of top 1% teams at Google.

That is my experience too. It sometimes seem the supersmart generalists are people whose strongest skill is learning.

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