I had a conversation with a CPU designer by chance at a fast food restaurant. He described exactly this, except that everyone he hired was brilliant but didn't fit in with education or other jobs because they thought in more dimensions than just "pass this class", and that's exactly what he needed for silicon design. I can only assume it's a team consistency issue in that if not everyone is on the same page then it's possible the outlier will move on.
What do you mean by thought in more dimensions? Like abstract creative / divergent thinking that defies a canonical answer? Or being constantly distracted by meta problems?
Pretty much. Thinking from different planes of knowledge and connecting them, recognising, applying and folding over abstractions and patterns. Imagine if your knowledge of software development was a tree, and imagine if your knowledge of design was another tree and you had one for hardware, biology, music, math, physics. And a lot of times contain the same patterns and abstractions, so you can recognise them and apply them where you see fit instead of just using them from one tree only, so that gives you a lot of mental models on how things work. That turns out well in abstract stuff and thinking in complex systems, especially when you need optimisation thinking like a CPU designer would need.
Lack of focus on the class, boredom, lack of will to obey rules and instructions, punishment instead of rewards (for example, bad grade on a math test because they did it in their head instead of writing down the whole process) for different behaviour and many more
