Steve Jobs:
It doesnât make sense to hire smart people and tell them what to do; we hire smart people so they can tell us what to do.
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Exactly. the assembly of a successful team. Hire smart people. They can tell you what to do
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From the linked article about characteristics of âsmart peopleâ:
Yeah thatâs me although I donât know that itâs exactly a badge of honor, lol
Most of the listed characteristics are horse-pucky though, IMO. The only one that I think is really actually valid as a marker of intelligence is curiosity.
All that said, yes, if you hire people who are smart, for godâs sake listen to them or youâll lose them.
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This is ubiquitous to all different types of intelligence.
Intelligence can be in the social, technical, mathematical, physical (think sports) or many, many other domains.
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Yeah, and who cares if they cant have a correct solution on interpersonal relationships, if they are hired for IT 
Except that in my experience and observation, the real differentiator for effective senior devs is good people skills. As Gerald Weinberg was known to say, âall technology problems are ultimately people problemsâ.
For example, stakeholders will ask you for X, you deliver X, then they are upset with the deliverable because what they asked for, specified, and signed off on still had implicit requirements that they canât articulate. So one has to elicit the business concerns and priorities and understand how the supposed request aligns with those, and more often than not, what they really want but canât describe is something else thatâs only vaguely related to what theyâre on about.
My most recent example of the above was the client asked for an immutable unique ID for every business in the DB Iâm building. But in the real world, you deduplicate or split entities at times, either because of minor name/address differences or merger & acquisition / spinoff activities, so one ID will be the âsurvivorâ and 1 or more others the âvictim(s)â. Instead of dutifully adding complexity to the system I dug deeper and what was really wanted was something the CEO called ânot having split businessesâ. I dug deeper on that and they meant 2 or more instance of a business at a location that are really the same location but due to some minor variation in the business name and/or address, donât get properly combined. And they fancied the answer to that is a static ID #.
In reality the answer is good data hygiene practices and various technologies I was already building into the system and once I explained this her ârequirementâ evaporated and she was entirely happy. She had a requirement but didnât know how to express it in actionable terms. My job was to translate between her product pain points and the system design and to empathize with her daily world which is quite different from mine. People skills.
Disclaimer: This is a different set of people skills from being a husband, parent, etc. There are many such problem domains. Being good and practiced in one by no means implies you will be just as good in others.
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Abso - frigging - lutely !
Understanding your users, and their business, helps you to understand those unarticulated desires.
Sometimes you get to know your users, and their business, so well you can DO their job.
I have done that before - esp when at one time a client had the person fulfilling a role quit and they had no replacement. So I did the job and the supervisor signed off on the work (it required an accountant to sign off on it - and Iâm not an accountant but he was)
Iâve also worked with other developers, & analysts over the years that jumped ship from IT roles into the business.
Fewer business people that jumped from the business into the IT roles though
EDIT : And, its impossible to get those unarticulated desires through filing feedback reports.
You need to talk and interact with people - through in person meetings, forums, emails, and all sorts of other means.
You cant do it in isolation.
EDIT II : One client Iâm working with we do have a feedback system in place.
BUT when they file a bug report one question I like to start with is âOK I see what youâre trying to do. Can you tell me something about what made you try to do it that way ?â
Not to say âyouâre doing it wrongâ but I want to understand their thinking and make whatever it is they are/were thinking work they way they expect.
Its been very useful for them and me since in the system weâve created I try to test everything in the UI but I knew I would not test everything the same way they would. (man how I would LOVE automated UI testing for this sort of stuff ⌠hmmmmmmm)
And that has made the system better
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One time (pre-Internet era) I was on-site fiddling with an AR module I had installed and noticed a bug and fixed it. I mentioned it to the user and they said, âI just assumed I was doing something wrong so I never reported itâ. I had to give her a little pep talk about how the software is supposed to conform to her, not the inverse, and the needlessness of putting up with this for 6 months when she didnât have to. She always reported problems to me after that ⌠or at least it went up to a nonzero percent of issues being reported, lol. And I always made sure she knew how much I appreciated it rather than being annoyed or resentful.
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Yep, the difference between what stakeholders ask for and what they need.
Muahahahaha. Hilarious.
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Iâd guess Dave never got any warning 
They did the first day in jail thing where you beat up a bunch of people to get everyone else to leave you alone.
Now everyone knows theyâll be banned, so they just shut up.
A few days ago they killed a thread with a title like âTranslate Xojo code to Swiftâ.
The other way round it is still there:
https://forum.xojo.com/t/translate-swift-to-xojo/76124
I guess killing threads and banning is now on the down-lowâŚ
They probably just made the thread not visible in the listings
Thats possible
So it hasnât been deleted (which they regularly get shit for)
But its inaccessible to the casual reader
And probably most participants unless they go through their activity and see which threads they posted in
Functionally its about the same as deleting it for most users of the forums
I had a link which doesnât work anymore. It is gone.
The link in your previous post just above still works though ?
And it appears this has NOT been removed - its just far down the list (9 days ago)
Scroll a bunch
Or search for Translate and its in the rest list if you sort by date
No, it was a different one.
It really doesnât matter. Weâve all seen how Xojo reacts when presented critical information.
Links to INN are banned on the Xojo Forums for a reason.
Oh NOT the one posted in that thread linked above
Gotcha