Being super smart isn't always a plus in business. People like to hire the smartest guy in the room simply because he's the smartest guy in the room and not be

Being super smart isn't always a plus in business. People like to hire the smartest guy in the room simply because he's the smartest guy in the room and not because he'll do the best job. One of the issues of having a super genius is that they will often find the work boring or beneath their skills so they do things that are interesting to them, like implement a complex caching system from scratch -they probably thought it would be interesting to do and since it save a few bytes they could justify the work, a good manager needs to keep this kind of worker on track or they wander off to do things that interest them more. A slightly above average engineer would simply take the requirements, look at the constraints and come up with a solution that works -it would be boring but it would work. So that's the price you pay your average employee will get the job done but they likely won't do anything that makes you step back and go wow, I would have never have thought of doing it that way that's so much better. In the end you have to ask yourself is it worth the extra effort of keeping that too smart engineer engaged and on target because every now and then his brilliance creates a huge pay off or do you want a work horse that will get the job done with little fan fair.