“Rock star developer” was originally coined to mean literally the anti-pattern of what you want from a Dev team.

It’s someone who undeniably has plenty of skill, but who also:

• Has an unbearable ego.
• Doesn’t work well with others.
• Doesn’t document or comment their work properly.
• Refuses to work to other people’s designs.
• Becomes an enormous key man dependency.

(Or some combination of similar traits).

The fact that recruiters heard the term and thought “hey, rock stars are cool, let’s get as many of those as possible” is hilariously tragic.

Every time I’ve heard somebody referred to unironically as a rockstar, they’ve treated the company’s code base exactly the way a rockstar treats a hotel room

I hated working with rockstars. Most of the time they’re just competent developers that got in there early with a high ambition but given too much power with a bad attitude.

I’m stereotyping obviously. I’ve worked with some absolutely devs and far better than me, but were never described as Rockstars.

I remember this one and he would always ask to be on the hard projects. He’d waste a shit load of time. Whine about the project. Do only what he wants to do. Gets the juniors to do the parts he hates (writing tests). Writes no docs or does no handover and then f&s off to the next project.

I remember trying to get one to help me with a caching issue because they implemented the cache. I was told not to bother them because he’s working on “feature” work and can’t spend time on bugs.

I’m so glad that in general, places have matured as a whole.

The hip new term is “10x developer” now. I’m sure a new term is right around the corner.

I’d like to https://codewithrockstar.com/ but I don’t have a use case for that.