Personally, I don't know any awesome engineers who sucked at school. I don't know if any of them would work at Canonical (which has exhausted most of its growth potential by now), though. Nothing wrong with the question, imho, if you have lots of applicants. I doubt it adversely selects for the job. It drops a lot of legitimately skilled people, but every method does. For interviewing, it makes sense to budget an amo…
This makes me think you don't know many awesome engineers.