Gates' big send-off | CNET News.com

Gates' big send-off | CNET News.com:
Bill Gates on "fungible IQ":

"You even see another company in the industry doing this bit where you'll hire somebody who's a good scientist, and you say they can be a programmer, and you only--you interview them on sort of their--the depth of knowledge about the field they've spent in, and assume they can come to the other field. Some of that is true. But when you go into, say, management-type things or dealing with people-type things, then the number of people whose IQ is fungible is surprisingly low.
The thing that I would drool over is to walk over to Microsoft Research and see that here are people spending full time on vision, full time on speech, full time on machine learning, full time on software proof, where at early Microsoft we couldn't give back to the intellectual base.

I mean, that's the greatest surprise to me of all in my whole business career is that you find people who are so good at one thing, and where the principles and models and approaches in that and in the other area are actually very similar, very similar, and yet they're very poor at the one and just beyond brilliant at the other."