You lose every battle when you leave a company. That's just something you have to accept. They get to put whatever narrative out there that they want, and you won't be there to defend yourself.
There are way more than "slim to none" doctors/lawyers who are at or below 100 IQ.
Your citation is not accepted (it's from nearly 30 years ago, is a sample of men over 30 in Wisconsin, cites research from many years even older [50s and 60s], there's no accounting for correlation -- maybe doing harder work makes you better at taking IQ tests).
It's only doctors, who happened to be the folks who ran the study, that are substantially higher than every other group listed. I wonder why.
IQ is a predictor of success, but it is not an exclusive predictor. Unless you have a mental disability, you can be literally anything you want to be, and even if you have a mental disability, you can still be nearly anything you want to be.
Hard work is astronomically more important than IQ. The literal article you're commenting on is written by someone with one of the highest IQs in the world.
You're in disagreement with all these "high IQ" people you think are worthy of studying other humans, and given the option, I'm going to listen to them over you.
There is no universal ranking of doctors, you can't really claim "percentile of success" for doctors or lawyers, and it's weird you're trying to do so.
Why is it so important to you that you have to be "smart" to be a doctor/lawyer?
There's probably a limit to how much "work hard" can make someone competent/successful in any field, and it'd guess it's around 85, or 1 standard deviation lower than average.
If IQ is important to you, I think you'd be quite alarmed by the number of successful doctors and lawyers who don't meet the 100 IQ bar you're setting here.
There is no requisite IQ, and I absolutely would tell someone with a definitionally average 100 IQ to "work hard" to become a software engineer/lawyer, as they could be in the absolute top of their field if they did.
The whole point of the submission is that even when high IQ is required, you also need to "work hard" to do anything substantial.
The common thread is "work hard", not "be smart", but people obsess over intelligence/natural gifts, and consistently underestimate the "ditch diggers".
Jobs was a ditch digger.
Gates was a ditch digger.
Musk is a ditch digger.
PG is a ditch digger.
Tao is a ditch digger.
Jordan was a ditch digger.
Woods was a ditch digger.
Carlsen is a ditch digger.
Some (all) of them also are naturally gifted, but their success is due to their ability to "work hard", or at least that's what I've read them say over and over again. Maybe I and they are all wrong about it, I'm open to that possibility, but theres a consistent theme that every successful person I can think of repeats when asked, and it's some variation on "work hard".
I've held for a long time that you must know the rules quite well before you're "allowed" to break them, and I think this reinforces my opinion on that.
Additionally, I think the obsession over "intelligence" and "natural ability" is vastly overstated, in general. It absolutely helps, and it compounds, to be smart, but a person who "works hard" is infinitely more valuable to their colleagues than a smart person who doesn't, and tries to rely on raw intellect.
My problem, and I wonder if others have this issue as well, is how hard it is to know these things intellectually, and also apply them to my life. I just cannot, for the life of me, maintain a "work hard" mindset. I'm still trying, but I very often fail at this, and its frustrating because I know how valuable it is to being good at what I do.
I cannot be more direct about this, it is not seamless, or even close to seamless, in general, to work across continents such as you describe.
Maybe you've cracked a nut here, and we'd all benefit from your wisdom, experience, and stories, but that is not the experience most folks have working across continents or cultures.
Simply? You lose, most of the time, when you "come forward". There is no parade, there are no articles in the New Yorker about your bravery, you just lose your livelihood, your dreams, and sometimes your life.
It's a sad, often poorly understood reality about whistle blowing, given the heavy survivorship involved. For every success story you hear, there are dozens you don't hear about, because nobody believed them, they were successfully demonized, or because it wasn't "big" enough to really, ultimately matter to American society in a way that could effect change.
That's why it's so impressive when people to come forward anyway, knowing this. It's far from "risk free" to come forward, and usually it's a gigantic negative experience, sometimes rivaling the original abuse itself in negative impact on your life. It's one thing to have the worst day of your life happen, now imagine having to relive it publicly, forever.
What would, "Blizzard is done" look like? Are you suggesting that the IP (Overwatch, Warcraft, Starcraft) would be shut down, all employees laid off or incorporated into Activisions other departments?
I could not imagine any business abandoning billions of dollars of IP like that.
Having worked with overseas contractors on a number of projects, I can say my personal experience is that the work product varies wildly in quality, shop to shop. I wouldn't say it's "relatively decent quality" in any universal or guaranteed sense.
Not that American developers are necessarily more skilled, just that the lack of a culture and sometimes language barrier is pretty evident in the resulting work product, in my experience.
This is true unless you own a meaningful portion of the company (>1%). To dump your entire investment because of extra hours is not a way to get that asymptotic upside.
Maybe... none of this applies to people who own meaningful portions of the companies they work for.