I'm constantly fighting that same urge. The problem is one of domain. UI coding for straightforward data models (which is 90% of all "web" development) just ... isn't very hard or impressive. Great programmers in that regime produce software that is smaller, cleaner, tighter and higher quality. But it's still just a bug database or social thing or web store, etc... Anyone (even mediocre programmers) can look at it and say "I know how that works."
There's plenty of rock star coding out there, of course. But it tends to be either hidden inside companies due to secrecy concerns (Google's scaling architecture or the NVIDIA driver stack, say) or exposed in the open source community instead of the startup world (Fabrice Bellard is a great example here).
Startups all say they want rock stars, but then they put them to work doing "better versions" of the same boring stuff we all recognize. Which, if you think about it, is sort of what startups are supposed to do.
Although the article never used the word "super star", it's something I see around HN and the startup world quite a bit....
I sort of snicker when I see startups post jobs looking for "rock star" coders [1]. What self respecting person would call him or herself a "rock star", let alone apply for such a position? Maybe it's just a gimmick to get mediocre developers to get to work on boilerplate web work..
[1] I also saw a job posting recently where they were looking for a coder "to work on hard problems and blow a hole through the universe"... Why not have them blow bullshit of their face while they're at it? Is this just HR trying to sound too cool, or what?
It's just a meme. Some people are into it, some aren't. There are lots of ways to motivate people, and this works for some. I try not to get to wound up over language usage.
I'm just guessing here, but I bet its more about communicating a shared perspective on software development than people thinking they're actually "rock stars". When a job ad says "looking for rock stars to blow a hole in the universe", you would be a fool to take that literally. But its along the lines of a "secret handshake" that lets both parties know something about the other in as few words as possible. A job posting like this is basically saying "hey, we read HN, reddit, etc, we know there's a ton of crap jobs out there full of walking-dead programmers. But this isn't one of them". Of course, the whole "rock star" meme has been hammered to death so that you're more likely to be a company pretending to be something you're not. The point is there is validity in this method of job posting.
It's nonsense.
I recoil every time I see a job description like that. Anyone who believes in those mythical rock star programmers has a serious problem and I certainly don't want to be part of it.
When a job listing says ninja/rockstar/badass coder, its really just a codeword for someone they can force to do anything at all costs. They act like they want a 10x'er but really just want someone who they can get to do 10x much work.
The term "rock star programmer" is by now a symbol that people intuitively understand the meaning of. Essentially equivalent to the "creme de la creme" of programmers, but if we switched to using that term few would balk at the comparison to dairy production. I've described support staff coworkers as "total rock stars" before. Everybody gets what I mean when I say that.
So it's hilarious when companies like Geico or whatever post ads on Stack Overflow Careers 2.0 saying they only accept "rock stars"... Because we all know that's where all the hot shots flock to...
Rock stars generally don't get a salary, but royalties or profit sharing. The better the star/band does, the more money they make right now at the gig, and longer term in increased sales over time.
If someone wanted me as a 'rock star' developer, I'd want some serious profit/revenue sharing plan in place - something more than "10% of profits are held back and divvied up amongst 90 other people based on seniority".
Not sure about that—a lot of famous guitarists were originally pickers, and while the electric guitar may be a sexier instrument, most of the drummers I’ve known have actually been very attractive.
The majority of amazing software that has not been created yet is "CRUD". Why developers keep thinking the low level stuff is the good stuff.
A huge class of such systems that are waiting to be created are crowd labor systems. How do you create leaderless organizations that produce what google or boeing or walmart produces and that compensates individuals for performance.
The answer today is a messy unorganized market system. Proper information systems that better organize that would create a lot of value. The analogy would be this site. Thousands of people communicating, without the organizing software it would be much worse (thousands of people standing around talking to each other, the good ideas spoken would not easily reach the top as it does in this organized software system).
tldr; the biggest value opportunities lie in CRUD apps, not the low level code
The answer, of course, is that the "good stuff" is subjective (and almost never aligned with "the biggest value opportunities", ick).
Yes, CRUD pays. Being able to make more CRUD in less time (and/or CRUD that is better performing or more maintainable, etc...) is a valuable skill.
But it's boring. And more, it's just not impressive in the same way that, say, qemu/kvm is (or Mesa, or Linux, or llvm, etc...) That stuff is hard, and fun, and interesting in a way that CRUD will never be. So it has value too, and IMHO it's entirely reasonable to celebrate its practitioners even if they don't make as much money as CRUD jockeys like Zuckerberg do.
I agree, the classic engineers like to work problems with an easily definable end result (so that business types don't tell them what to write).
It's a pity though, there's a huge space of products that are needed but the talent is going into slugging it out in societally useless and relatively low paying niches (such as many of the most talented programmers entering the game industry or social networking or linux kernels). Meanwhile dumbasses are raking in millions with shit like SAP and the like.
While I agree on your remark about talented programmers in game and linux kernels. I don't necessarily agree with lumping social networking with the two fields aforementioned. I also disagree of your remark about SAP.
I don't necessarily agree with SAP or SAP consultants but there are cases where people would prefer to use SAP to implement some of their core: http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Building-a-Hybrid-Cloud-a.... SAP is a complex, specialized tools that requires specific knowledge on how to tame it.
(I'm not arguing if complexity is good, bad, or anything like that. I'm focusing on what SAP is good at).
There's plenty of rock star coding out there, of course. But it tends to be either hidden inside companies due to secrecy concerns (Google's scaling architecture or the NVIDIA driver stack, say) or exposed in the open source community instead of the startup world (Fabrice Bellard is a great example here).
Startups all say they want rock stars, but then they put them to work doing "better versions" of the same boring stuff we all recognize. Which, if you think about it, is sort of what startups are supposed to do.