The Truth About Hiring "Rock Star" Developers 487
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.'"
Re:Don't hire union workers (Score:5, Funny)
Rock Star Developers, seriously? None of them are that good.
Agreed. Rock Stars suck as developers. And most of them suck at rock, as well.
Re:Don't hire union workers (Score:4, Funny)
in Germany the purpose of an organised workplace is to have a forum between workers and management. The union wants the company to be productive because that secures jobs and usually results in higher wages.
Sounds like Germany still has labor unions. In the USA, we have organized crime posing as labor union organizers, and their purpose is to tax the workers to pay for hookers and blow for mobsters and politicians.
Re:Unmanageable (Score:5, Funny)
"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,
No disrespect, but we developers also have a name for people that describe developers the way you do :-)
Re:Don't hire union workers (Score:4, Funny)
I think it's hard to claim the USA and UK are falling back when pitted against Germany for that reason.
USA and UK are falling back to slave labor.
echo -e "HEAD / HTTP/1.1\nHost: slashdot.org\n\n" | nc slashdot.org 80
Re:Troll Indeed (Score:4, Funny)
You need to work in IT in the porn industry. Everyone gets tired of the penis measuring very quickly.
Re:Unmanageable (Score:5, Funny)
"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,
No disrespect, but we developers also have a name for people that describe developers the way you do :-)
Let me guess: "Sir".