If you are smarter than 99 out of 100 people, there are still millions of people as smart as you in USA alone. If someone said 99.999th percentile I would agree with you, but IME being smarter than 99 out of 100 people is not that high of a bar.

Excluding 99% of the population from applying fairly generic advice from listicle isn’t that high of a bar?

I am assuming that the advice given is not just to get any tech job at all, but to be highly successful in the field. Clearly, below some analytic intelligence level, being highly successful in engineering is not a realistic or useful pursuit. Where that threshold is would be up to debate, certainly. I think most would agree it’s above 90th percentile, at least. Calling it 99th might be hyperbolic, sure, but I don’t think it’s intensely out of touch or anything. It’s like if an NBA player is giving advice about how to succeed in a basketball career. Presumably they are speaking about succeeding in the NBA or at least college level basketball, not some rec league. And, if you are 5’5”, while it is not strictly impossible for you to succeed, it is probably not realistic for you to pursue it. The advice is implicitly aimed at people who stand any chance at all of making it into the NBA.

It’s funny that you use the NBA as an example. You are talking about a league with less than 1,000 players (aka less than .00001% of the population of the US, and players are recruited globally), and even still there are people who are that short who has lengthy careers.

As I understand it, and I’m not going to pretend to know everything about him, Sam Altman is not a successful programmer but a successful businessman. To assert that his success is even primarily due to IQ rather than being at the right place at the right time and having connections to the right people demonstrates a dogmatic deviation to the notion that IQ is all encompassing, when in reality is it consistently shown to be poorly correlated with success.