Nice article. I recently bought "Managing Humans" and read it. It occurred to me that "Rands" could do with some humility, so it's nice to see him writing about it here. Actually I have some comments about the book, but not sure where they belong.

Is there a dating bureau for Russian Lit Majors?

I must take issue with the bell curve bit at the beginning, with your competences on one end and your deficiencies at the other. This is nonsense. A bell curve measures linear data.

It's rather like having a bell curve of language skills with French at one end and English at the other - I get the point, but mathematically speaking it would be fairly bizarre to use a bell curve to describe the relative competences in each language.

Competences and deficiencies are much more complex data, not least because they can not be counted or measured in the same way as (say) distribution of IQ in a population, or average height of daisies in a field, or whatever.

Just wanted to point that out. BTW I am an Art History major and have been working in IT for years. I do write code.