Bring able to do those sorts of problems isn't important.

Having the logic solving ability to do those sorts of problems is.

I'd say the real world doesn't reward being actually gifted.

School rewards obedience and memorization. If you're aggressively mediocre, but sufficiently agreeable and willing/able to memorize a bunch of bullshit, chances are, you'll get pretty good grades. I know several people with very good grades who are simply not very intelligent.

Universities also reward memorization. If you're good at learning facts and writing bullshit like the prof wants to read it, chances are, you'll get good grades in at least some areas (business, psychology , medicine, and as a CS graduate, even CS to a frighteningly high degree).

If you're gifted (like I'm actually certified to be, whatever that means), you're often bored at school, you won't learn because you don't really need to, and you don't really want to play ball with all the bullshit. You can see through it, and especially for teenagers, that's extremely frustrating.

In the "real world" being gifted isn't really a huge benefit either. I'm good at what I'm doing and what's the result? I'm now de facto managing other people at doing what I'm good at. I can't complain, cushy job, very good pay. But a literal monkey could do 70% of my tasks. I'm inside a corporate cage, that I realistically can't escape from.

And I think that's where many of the "gifted, but neither genius nor psychopath" people are at. Overqualified for what they're doing, but caught in a system where they can't really excel in the ways they could.

I don't know how it is in other countries, but Spanish high school math competitions are designed to test both logic and creativity. They'll require you to use the material from your current year, but the way in which you have to apply that math isn't obvious if your only competency in math is specifically passing high school tests. You don't get a good score by being a proficient human calculator, but by applying good abstract analysis, which you should be able to apply in other areas of your life.

I memorized all 151 pokemon before the second generation came out.

I also write Jira tickets.

It usually means that their logical thing is pretty good because discrete math is pretty much all that.

You learn a concept, then you modify it to apply to different contexts for different applications.

The math competitions is a good training for that.

Dealing with this at the moment - in an org that's been pretty lax at writing anything down about what and why as far as internal software goes, trying (with support from C-suite) to get people to actually write up any amount of detail in their requests is like pulling teeth.

I tend to take that position as well; if it's not defined, I get to define it. If I ask for feedback or review and get silence, that means you approve.

The problem is that requirements refinement has been unceremoniously dumped in your lap. The failure here is organizational; maybe you have a design person involved, maybe devs are expected to do this. Either way, your job now also includes communications.

One strategy I've used is to draw a low-fi example of what they're going to get - Figma is great at this these days. Then I add it to the issue and push the whole thing back for early approval in order to suss out these finer points.

Not to come off as misanthropic here, but many people are hot garbage at describing what's in their head. Most of the time, it's all abstract concepts up there until you start asking the real questions. They really do need a whole-ass conversation to sharpen that mental image. Or in this case, what they want that feature to look like. Incidentally, this is also the reason why therapy is a thing, and why it takes people years to make sense of themselves, and that outcome is usually far more crucial than anything we're doing at the keyboard.

If it's someone else's job to design things, then that's a pretty terrible specification. But depending on your role, it's common enough for there to be one person who designs and builds a feature like "User projects dashboard", and the job is to decide what's important based on the product. Especially with smaller companies.

This is me, writing jiras for myself.

Reminds me of this gem: https://lizengland.com/blog/2014/04/the-door-problem/

The most creative artistic minds of today, are probably working on advertisement.

Maybe it's badly implemented where I work, but I feel it's clunky and messy

I don't hate jira. I just hate the managers who make me use it.

Seems like the hate I see for JIRA and Bitbucket consistently boils down to whoever implemented them being bad at their job

I feel it bloated with a lot of add ons that are not used, or not implemented.

Should we make a club?