Note that this says "best programmers" not "people best at having business impact by making software".
I wonder about this often: If you want to have impact/solve problems/make money, not just optimizing killing your JIRA tickets, should you invest a given hour into understanding the lowest code layer of framework X, or talk to people in the business domain? Read documentation or a book on accessibility in embedded systems? Pick up yet another tech stack or simply get faster at the one you have that is "good enough"?
Not easy to answer, but worth keeping in mind that there is more to programming than just programming.
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