The author immediately confuses 'latent talent' in the general sense, with companies attempt to acquire 'talent' - which are separate things. 'Latent Talent' f

The author immediately confuses 'latent talent' in the general sense, with companies attempt to acquire 'talent' - which are separate things. 'Latent Talent' for special activities, probably does exist, while mastery also necessitates love and labour. 'Hiring Talent' is another thing entirely. You're looking for smart, creative, hard working people who 'accomplish things' and 'get along' and who hopefully have a depth of knowledge. Often this comes from a mix of curiosity, compulsion, raw intelligence, some kind of personality that works, and a lot of hours focused on a variety of things. 'Great Devs' do not have to be super talented in the 'Chess Master' sense, and don't have to be brilliant white boarders, or algorithm designers. It's hard to find but generally you actually do 'know it when you see it'. There's no doubt. You meet a dude who's been coding for a long time, likes to hack on stuff, is really quite familiar in 2-3 core languages, lots of curiosity about the discipline, all the right idioms, can code fairly quickly, see the essence of big problems etc.. In a nutshell 'the developer we all think we ought to be'. They exist, they're just not that common.