We've all worked with a rockstar developer. They joined the team years ago, full of energy. They had great ideas about new tech, new paradigms, new architectures. Their cutting-edge ideas left everyone else feeling a bit behind and outdated.
The article itself gives a prtty good description. It’s a fairly common term, popularized over a decade ago, during the big tech startup boom, for a super-high-productivity developer. Someone who is just awesome at everything they do and can do everything, and do it all super quickly. I.E. a myth.
Well, it’s not a myth at the ‘do it super quickly’, usually it also meant that a prototype would then need a lot of polishing and that was even before LLMs ‘helped’
Yeah sure if you say so. I guess you could have a front end dev who was a rockstar, but usually it implied you could handle anything and work on any team.
what do they mean by “rockstart devs”? do they mean the people behind GTA?
The article itself gives a prtty good description. It’s a fairly common term, popularized over a decade ago, during the big tech startup boom, for a super-high-productivity developer. Someone who is just awesome at everything they do and can do everything, and do it all super quickly. I.E. a myth.
It’s not a myth, it works for a short while and is a recipe for burnout.
Well, it’s not a myth at the ‘do it super quickly’, usually it also meant that a prototype would then need a lot of polishing and that was even before LLMs ‘helped’
Sure. The myth is that you can the “awesome at everything” and “do it all super quickly” bits together at the same time.
I think they are referring to what they currently call full stack devs, which back around 2007-2009 they called them rockstar devs. It is stupid.
No, full-stack and rockstar were different.
Yeah sure if you say so. I guess you could have a front end dev who was a rockstar, but usually it implied you could handle anything and work on any team.
No. It’s a reference to super productive devs. The 10x devs. You can have unproductive full-stack developers and rockstar back end devs.