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by trunnell
1093 days ago
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I think the "rock star" analogy did more damage to our profession than most care to admit. Rock stars get treated a certain way, they are catered to, their egos might get fluffed up, etc. None of those behaviors are compatible with working in software teams, and none of the "best" developers I know want to be treated that way, anyhow. That said, I think this article is essentially correct. I would put it like this: building information machines out of pure information is a creative endeavor. Human performance tends to fall on a bell curve, and IMO it's true for developer output in particular. So if you want to create a hugely valuable solution to a big problem, you should probably hire the best people you can find and organize them in a way that lets them max out their creative power. The main obstacle to this IMO is poor leadership attitudes & practices. This article's author said it best in another post: "Boring" is a good strategy if you think the bigger existential risk for your company is that Product & Engineering will [...] fail to ship a reliable product on a reliable schedule. But if you're more afraid of the business risks of shipping average product, at an average cadence, over the course of years, you should consider deviating, at least sometimes, from the playbook whose entire definition is "optimized for safety."
https://morepablo.com/2022/04/against-boring.html |
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Stars are a thing, they are way beyond what the average dev can ever accomplish and they would only be held back by a team. They should be catered to and really be accountable to nobody as far as technical decisions go. Their time and energy is just too precious to be spent soothing your fragile egos. And that's not just my opinion either. That's why companies have positions like fellow, distinguished, etc.
The whole "rock-stars are toxic" is just the inability of some people to accept their limitations. Most of us are nobodies, easily replaceable code monkeys who will never accomplish anything of note. If you're of the opinion that a nice personality somehow is worth more than being excellent you are lying to yourself first and foremost. And you're not that nice anyway since you are willing to spend your time digging through stars' closets in the hope of finding any skeleton to bring them down.
Being agreeable only qualifies you to easily being worked in what are essentially sweatshops who produce crap, the subject of the article. Take note though that said sweatshops would not exist without the stars that CREATED this industry. Never in a million years, you and your team of "nice" people would have produced any of the foundations of current IT.