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I can think of one real, actual, verifiable superstar: Steve Yegge. There are more, but I don't know who they are. Taking his blogs at face value, and assuming that my sample size of 1 is enough, here's what I've got: "Superstars" get things done because they get things done. They may be ADD in their multitude of projects or in their personal lives, but while they're producing, they produce. They don't fuck around on reddit while they're coding. They might screw around interminably at other times - they might work only a few hours a day - but while they work, they're working, and that's it. They also get things done because they understand what the hell's going on, at least one or two layers of abstraction below the one they're officially working on. Stevey claims that his understanding stops at transistors - transistors are black boxes, but he gets what has to happen at the layers of abstraction above that, from the machine code to the guts of the interpreter. Particularly delicious? Steve Yegge worked at Geoworks (http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/05/dynamic-languages-st...), and he attributes their defeat by the likes of Microsoft not to superior marketing, but to the value of abstractions. |