The author clearly showcases how this is not true in his (and probably others') case. Anonymous functions, function pointers, etc. are not language-specific fea

The author clearly showcases how this is not true in his (and probably others') case. Anonymous functions, function pointers, etc. are not language-specific features, but rather something you learn when learning to program. I think the point of the article is that being smart at puzzles is not enough. It may not matter whether you have 3 or 10 years of programming experience, but if you have 20 years of puzzle solving experience with only 6 months of (real-life) programmering experience you have a lot of non-trivial learning left to do. Being in a startup setting where everyone (usually) is expected to be a bit of jack-of-all-trades, I would argue that having programming experience trumphs being smart, at least for the first period. You may be the master of finding smart algorithms to design your application, but if you can't build the first CRUD website it does you little good.