"Correlation does not equal causation. Another possible explanation: She was a monster at predicting project success and worked her way onto projects that were going to succeed with or without her."
Fair point, but what would you pay for knowing in advance what projects are going to succeed and by inference which may fail...
And how would you measure Intuition then? Maybe she had terrible intuition but is just a fantastically productive programmer.
Correlation not implying causation is a big deal because it's possible to draw (probably exponentially) many alternative causal chains than the one that you're discovering correlation along.
If the above isn't the case, and it's at least theoretically possible to design experiments like that, then correlation does[1] equal causation.
[1] Sort of. See pretty much anything written by Judea Pearl.
Fair point, but what would you pay for knowing in advance what projects are going to succeed and by inference which may fail...