Sure I can see if I am near a Pokemon, but I can't actually go after most of them due to GPS jitter and the time it takes to walk/cross at lights in cities.
If I absolutely knew which direction to go there is a CHANCE I could get to a Pokemon before it despawns.
As things stand now I pretty much have to win a small lottery to capture one where I happen to be taking a scenic walk.
If you mean they wouldn't hire him just for having ideas, then that's generally true, although I have seen someone hired as a consultant to design the economy of a game since he was a self-described 'free to play economy expert' with several articles posted on gamasutra (yeah, there was all sorts of problems with that project).
I was mostly just affirming that I thought his idea was a good one, not that I actually thought Niantic would hire him based on a forum post.
EDIT: Apparently you think the feature is not fun, well I think the rules for GPS games are not necessarily the same as static games, and the hunt and exploration and tracking could actually be fun when your movement actually matters. And it's a lot better than "you might get these pokemon if you run around in circles for the next ten minutes and get lucky!" that currently exists right now, which is shit and very unfun.
If you 'hear' a Pokemon near by (maybe you don't know what it is, just that you haven't seen it before), you also know a vague direction it's in; maybe not distance but direction.
That should stay on your map.
You move to a different location so you can triangulate it.
You hear it again and another slice lays on your map.
You investigate, but it's taken too long to get there. All you find are some footprints. (location saved to client device)
Later that day, or another day, the same noise is heard near that area, the client shows the pie slice again, but also loads the local markers within it.
You go to investigate the marker and see (maybe even capture) the Pokemon you'd been hunting.