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The Truth About Hiring "Rock Star" Developers
snydeq writes "You want the best and the brightest money can buy. Or do you? Andrew Oliver offers six hard truths about 'rock-star' developers, arguing in favor of mixed skill levels with a focus on getting the job done: 'A big, important project has launched — and abruptly crashed to the ground. The horrible spaghetti code is beyond debugging. There are no unit tests, and every change requires a meeting with, like, 40 people. Oh, if only we'd had a team of 10 "rock star" developers working on this project instead! It would have been done in half the time with twice the features and five-nines availability. On the other hand, maybe not. A team of senior developers will often produce a complex design and no code, thanks to the reasons listed below.'"
Article is weak on expertise.
1) No, you don't need 10, idiot, you just need ONE, and about a dozen or so relatively obedeient and competent non-novice developers.
2) Those weren't senior developers.
"Rock stars" - we called them divas in my company - are notoriously unmanageable: many of them are temperamental, don't work well with others, tend to do what they "know" is right instead of doing what they're told, and have an overinflated sense of ego. It's a high price to pay to exploit their expertise.
At any rate, one diva per project, provided a good supervisor is found to manage them and the project is in early development, is okay and probably does bring added value. A team of them however is sure to bring chaos, as individual personalities will inevitably clash. And forget about getting these guys to work on products that are in the middle of their product lives.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
No-one who identifies himself as a rockstar developer is a rockstar developer, and no good developer would call himself a rockstar. The only thing certain is that in any article about "rockstar developers", a few dozen people will wander in and complain that the only reason the world isn't perfect is because rockstars like them just aren't looked after well enough.
So, for all of you thinking about making this claim: if you're so fucking great, go out and start your own business and rewrite every single software product in your own image. Be the rockstar you think you are, identify everyone's desires, and out-compete every other firm on the planet. Internet capitalism is more meritocratic than most forms of capitalism - if you write a killer operating system or office suite or CRM system or time&billing app or whatever, people will take notice. So team up with as many people as your ego will allow (you're a rockstar so you already have considerable savings) and go get 'em, tiger!
Description starts by talking about rockstar developers, then makes assertions about senior developers. These two groups are not even close to equivalent. Seniority (generally) implies experience -- not "rockstar" status.
Sounds like your employer/colleagues were pieces of shit. Doesn't necessarily mean that's the norm, or that you can't find better. But, keep on fighting the good fight, sir!
Surely the recent past has shown you what 'ratings' are worth.... These are the same people who stamped all those dubious mortgage backed securities as AAA, remember how that turned out..
These ratings are simply an opinion that is correct until it isn't - it's worth bat shit.
Never happened. True story.
Actually, thanks to workfare it seems that people do end up doing work for less than minimum wage. There is an, admittedly anecdotal, story that a woman was dismissed from a paying job and then ended up at the same place doing the same job under workfare. Not exactly the definition of slave labour but makes a mockery of minimum wage laws.
And you really think that anybody here in Germany gives a fu*k about what an american credit rating company says about this country? What kind of reputation do you think they have here? Germany has NEGATIVE interest rates on short-term bonds, and lower interest rates that anyone else (US included) on 10 year bonds.
A low-level german factory worker with middle school education makes 50K a year, cannot be fired if not for just cause, can vote for 50% of the seats in the Council of Surveillance (what you call "board of directors" in america) so the company is substantially co-managed by workers themselves and shareholders have limited power compared to the US (yes, it's a semi-socialist system, and it works great!). And he/she gets complete and high quality healthcare coverage from the government, a generous pension benefit when he/she retires (67% of the last salary, and completely tax free), all paid for by a highly progressive tax system. Of course also education is free, college included.
Instead, if you're american, you live in a country where the richest 10% of the population has 70% of the wealth, and the remaining 90% are beggars brainwashed by trashy hollywood movies since birth. That's the "american dream", right? Just keep it.
No it is more of a case that most companies don't need a team of rockstar developers.
Because in truth you don't. For an average medium large project
1 Rockstar Developer
3 Mid Level Developers
6 Jr. Developers
The Rockstar works on the proof of concepts, and the base architectural design.
Mid Level make the core building blocks
Jr. Developers put all the pieces together.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
That's okay, the banking executives in the United States caused the biggest recession in 80 years without a single criminal prosecution or even getting fired. When the people on top of the economy get their house in order, I'll start listening to their advice for curbing the excess of the working class.
Get out of here with your 'logic' and 'sensible suggestions'! USA! USA! USA!
Seriously, though, I totally agree. I agree that welfare should not be a handout with no strings, but at the same time the helping hand should be there to help them change their lives to the point where they no longer need government assistance. Sometimes there are mental health issues that need to be addressed, or untreated medical conditions that aren't being adequately covered by our Medicaid/Medicare programs. Sometimes there needs to be skills training to make them more employable. The private sector can help as well; instead of exploiting the fact that the job market sucks by hiring these people into no-benefit, minimum wage jobs that nobody would take under normal circumstances, they could hire people into positions that have potential for raises and promotion based on hard work. I guarantee you that 99% of the jobs listed at your local unemployment office are dead-end garbage that only reward hard work with more hard work, and pay so little that frequently a person would be better off without the job at all. (At least then they might be eligible for Medicaid and have SOME health coverage.)
Your child care suggestion? You'd get laughed out of the room if you proposed that. The attitude is that they had the kids, it's their problem. They're literally being punished because they had children.
And yes, there are some who game the system to collect benefits without putting in any sincere effort. It's human nature for some people to want something for nothing (hell, it's probably human nature for all of us) but the baby shouldn't be thrown out with the bathwater. The system isn't perfect, but it's a damn sight better than the alternative.
Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.
I strongly disagree in the concept that rockstars only design and don't code. Sure, lots of senior people I meet seem to think they've earned the right to just think all day on problems and let more junior people slog through actually coding anything. Many times you end up with (as Joel put it wonderfully) architecture astronauts that do much more harm than good. Many of the ones that avoid that particular trap just cost you a lot of money to work at a way lower productivity level than what they're capable of producing.
Coders need to constantly code, or they start to drift off the reservation. They develop odd ideas of what software development should be (which can end up quite burdensome since they don't have to do a lot of it themselves), and chase down crazy edge cases as thought experiments.
While the junior people need to learn somewhere, I'd much rather just work with just 'senior' level people personally. (That's generally a watered down ranking anyway, and certainly not rockstar level) Sorry, you guys deal with the rest. :) Any competent senior-ish level person can code faster than they can explain what to do to/clean up after junior developers. Even assuming a really well architected system broken up into easy blocks for the junior people to code (which doesn't happen in practice quite as often as/well as it should) just means that the easy blocks could be done in minutes by the more senior people.
At the moment, at my largest client they've got one near-rockstar guy and myself. We get things done about 10 times faster than -competent- teams I've work with in the past. When the platform evolves to a point where it needs some refactoring, there's no whining and it gets done FAST. (it's R&D, the requirements change rapidly) It's awesome. I wish I could hire the guy.
One of the weakest points of having more junior developers is handling signficant design shifts. On past teams we ended up avoiding or delaying making changes we needed to make because we were afraid of dealinng with the confusion from the juniors. The code ended up accumulating cruft to a much greater extent as a consequence.
Indeed, the article is not actually talking about "rock stars" but about poaching senior developers. It is also quite possibly the most perniciously agist thing I have ever read. "People do their best work when their head is barely above water," huh? How about the "truth" that the person who's "slogged through it 100 times before" also knows where the pitfalls are? The entire article reads like a bad stereotype of crotchety old developers too arrogant to follow directions.
I sometimes ask revealing, often ignorant-seeming questions. Maybe they're harder to answer than you think.
You are describing a cowboy coder, not a rock star. The two could not be further apart. Rock stars are the ones who, by definition, get shit done right. If they cannot write maintainable code, then they are not a rock star, plain and simple. Maintainability is almost always the number one most important quality of any project. Anybody can get v1 out quickly. A cowboy does it by cutting corners and rushing. A rock star does it fast and right, which is what makes them a rock star. If your good, solid, dependable devs can do that, you might have a couple rock stars without knowing it. Remember that skill and ego rarely match up. Joel Spolsky's definition of a rock star is still the best one IMHO: smart and gets things done.
This "rockstar" term is so fucking stupid and abused. If you have millions of end-users who know your name and what you did, THEN you can call yourself a rockstar programmer. It's mostly a public image thing too, rather than quality or quantity of code. Programmed some lame server-side java app in half the time it takes most people? Not rockstar.
The only rockstar programmers I can think of off the top of my head are John Carmack, Tim Sweeny, Brian Fargo, Warren Spector, Sid Meier, Peter Molyneux, John Romero (classic rock I suppose), and Cliff Bleszinski. All of these guys are games industry programmers that are high profile. When's the last time you saw publicity on generic corporate coder #81635?
You are describing a cowboy coder, not a rock star.
The problem is that management equates "gets stuff done fast" with "rock star", regardless of the unmaintainable mess they may leave behind.
Couldn't agree with you more.
Rock-star Engineers produce designs, implementations and tests that are easy to comprehend and extend. They don't produce Golden Code that will never be put in to use. Also they have a more than effective knowledge of the technology and the problem being solved. They are able to lead-by example, and true rock-stars are able to realize when they need to follow and/or team lead when they are are on a larger project.