The Myth of the Rockstar Programmer

"Some people are stronger than you, some people are better coders than you - it's OK. "

What some people fail to get is that coders have over human powers. A strong person can't surpass human limits. He can't lift a car with his hands. But a person with a machine can.

You can't short all the words in a book as a person, but a machine can in less than a tenth of a second.

If you think you're hiring abnormal developers, you either have a very distorted view of your candidate pool, or your hiring process borks somewhere in the middle.

There is at least one faulty assumption in your post; I don't think it disqualifies it, of course, but I believe it makes it hard to generalize your conclusion:

> they do because they can do machines do work for them, instead of having five people do the work the can do the code 5x to 100x or 1000x faster. They could automate almost everything, even coding(creating new languages when needed specially for the task) and debugging itself, creating testing code, making failures very hard to happen.

First off, the "they make machines do work for them" is a cliche. Please, don't use this to advertise your team. Unless it's a bunch of freshmen doing 100% quality original web design on freelancer.com.

Second, if most of your development process can be automatized, why exactly do you need a team of developers? Original work tends to require thinking and crafting. If you're cranking out Joomla websites and a hundred customized CRMs a month, sure, that works, but most of these mythical rockstar creatures would probably not touch one of those things.

What about processes that naturally don't lend themselves to being automatized, particularly like the DSLs you mention? Yes, you can automate some of the process (e.g. you can use flexx and yacc to generate some of the parsing logic) if the language is too complex to reliably code the respective parts by hand, but you're still a long way to go from there.

> A normal programmer will create new problems, not solve it. She will put mechanisms in place in order for the company to depend on her. She could not be faster but she could certainly make the others to slow down to her level.

This is not what a normal programmer does. If the programmers you normally hire are like this, your company has a serious problem.

> Rockstars programmers exist

Of course they do. The laws of probability ensure that. People and their traits usually follow a normal ("bell curve") distribution. Some individuals are at +2.5 standard deviations, and some even at +3.0 but they are rare.

Using the table from http://www.mathsisfun.com/data/standard-normal-distribution-... we can get some nice numbers to show just how rare they are.

A +2.5 developer is better than 99.38% of the entire population. (1 in 160)

A +3.0 developer is better than 99.87% of the population. (1 in 770)

That kind of talent can not be easy to find, let alone attract. So relying on getting such stars is gambling against some pretty bad odds. Some companies no doubt have found that they can improve the odds of attracting those off-the-charts developers, but for the rest of us mortals...

My main takeaway from the rockstar/ninja programmer thing- many people seem to believe that the average programmer produces net negative value, i.e. causes more problems than they solve.

I'm still uncertain whether I believe this, although I'm sure we all feel like we are carrying the team some days. If it were true, it would mean that firing half of all programmers could be the biggest improvement to the software industry ever seen.

That's exactly what I thought as well.

I'd very much prefer having the 10x engineer meme replaced by that of the 0.1x engineer: the one that gets the same task done with 10% of the code and effort.

The times I've felt by far most valuable is when I found a way to make that multi-month project simply obsolete by just changing a couple hundred lines of code in an unexpected place.