"...they get excited over revolutionary developments but grow weary at repetitive small tasks."

Blast! He's got me. I'm not claiming to be brilliant, but, boy oh boy, do I ever tire of repetitive small tasks. If only there were some way to automate them!

Perhaps, one day, some wondrous machine will be created that will relieve us of the burden of empty, mechanical processes. Mayhaps even a small industry might be built around the design and construction of such machines.

What were Larry Wall's 3 programmer virtues? Impatience, laziness, and hubris?

Actually I meant "idea guys" in the pejorative sense. From what I've seen, good ideas come from slogging it out in the trenches of implementation. Self-described "idea guys" (and this term is almost invariably applied to oneself) are generally useless.

The author has decades of experience with people, and has written a full essay about it. How do you support your claim that he "errs"?

For me, it resonated similarly to the Bipolar Lisp Programmer: http://www.lambdassociates.org/blog/bipolar.htm

The problem with job/salary surveys is that the people who respond tend to skew towards the more satisfied and higher paid range. That's why when I was in undergrad, all the jobs seemed so darn great - the companies sent the happiest, chirpiest employees they could find.

On a separate note, does jobbook.org look a bit under developed for a publicized app that "took several months"? Maybe there's magic behind that simple UI.

There is something in what the original author wrote. It sounds like what he means by "brilliant" are the kind of people who describe themselves as "idea guys." And though Google likes to hire PhDs, I hear they too are suspicious of idea guys.

The author is mistaken about Edison, though. He might have had a hard time working for a boss, especially later in his life, but he was not merely an idea guy. Oddly enough, Edison's own PR may be to blame for this. It left people in the early 20th century thinking of him as a lofty genius rather than the tireless tinkerer he had in fact been.

True, although he abandoned Infogami to start reddit, which he left to start the rest (and that's after starting a few other now-neglected projects like the Alex Kozinski Site (http://notabug.com/kozinski/) and a proto-Wikipedia at http://theinfo.org/).

He appears to be very smart -- but a little too brilliant (http://taoyue.com/stacks/articles/brilliant-men.html).

People listen to Woz because he's smart.

"start reddit" ?