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Ask HN: Biggest waste of talent you've seen

3 points by bhag2066 ↗ HN
What's the biggest waste of talent you've ever witnessed? In two categories, either an individual capable of breakthroughs spending their time optimizing buttons, or a group of people attracted to a vapid industry (finance comes to mind).

5 comments

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cranberryturkey
back in 2003 i had a shitty little job at one of the newest "SEO" companies. A team of two brothers, me, and their highschool buddy who admitted he thought he was just there because he was like a bouncer incase someone harassed them at the office.

i hired this kid who worked at fry's electronics, he was about 20. He was a genius programmer and worked for us for about a year. I eventually got fired because I needed to consult and they said i was passing company secrets by telling customers to use title and h1 tags lol.

Anyway, I had an interview with a contracting company for a tellme contract they were one of the first VOIP XML companies. I went to the interview and told them to hire this kid I knew, they did. TellMe eventually got acquired by MS

colesantiago
anything in blockchain.
hammyhavoc
Oh yes. The number of wildly talented devs I saw squander years of valuable time on grifts like yet-another-ERC-20-derivative, or NFTs, was nauseating.
stop50
Apart from women and other minorities in Tech: no. After nearly 10 years i still can count the women i worked with one hand. Other minorities are exactly 0.
herbst
Don't we all spend some of our time optimizing buttons?