> I managed a guy like that. He was capable of very complex thinking, but he wasn't in love with complexity, he was in love with simplicity. His solutions tended to be of the form, "we can ignore all these things, and just focus on X, and it will provide all the value." He'd notice something and simplify it and the benefit to the company would be measured in multiples of his salary.
I did some of that a few times in my life. But I also realised that a large part of the value I brought was not necessarily in coming up with the solution, but in convincing the rest of the company---and in training up enough of the rest of the team to understand and maintain the system.
For example at Goldman, I used an integer linear programming solver to re-shuffle how we assigned compute capacity in different data centres to various departments and how to compute fail-over plans ahead of time.
The actual modelling and implementing barely took any time at all; I used an off-the-shelf open source solver. But I spend multiple weeks teaching the team enough about linear programming so that they can eg change the model when business requirements change.
This is basically my professional career. I've stayed 5+ years at the same place now and it's gotten to the point where people ask for me to build an optimization before it's even clear they have a problem amenable to optimization. Yay! My work has a good rep. But also I'm called upon entirely too frequently to explain work I did years ago or to answer questions like which constraint "comes first". Honestly it's getting very tiring. I think a switch to a new company would help but I wonder what will happen to the optimization work at my current company after I leave. It's weird that such a useful academic field still feels like black magic to much of corporate America. I guess it's just sophisticated enough.