No it's not strange at all -- I once had a colleague who went on to become a brilliant engineer at Google, but was horrible at the small startup we worked toget

No it's not strange at all -- I once had a colleague who went on to become a brilliant engineer at Google, but was horrible at the small startup we worked together at, because his solutions were over-engineered, fanciful, totally ignored the day-to-day messy problems we had, and did NOT help further our mission - to make the customer happy.