Being “rockstars”: when software was a talents/creatives industry
Apologies in advance for being a bit negative. I feel like this sentence is just so revealing:<p>&gt; That said, he and I will likely never see eye-to-eye on this because he more-or-less invented Choose Boring Technology, and most of what I advocate is to break playbook, embrace narrative, and be interesting.<p>It really comes down to what you prioritize. Do you prioritize the output and the value added? Or do you prioritize making your engineers feel like &quot;rockstars&quot;? If you don&#x27;t care about your end product, then yeah sure let your engineers break prod using untested technologies.<p>The reason playbooks have sprung up, is because 99% of use-cases for businesses are for the most part &quot;solved.&quot; We&#x27;re not in the era of renting colos and manually setting up MySQL anymore (which the author advocates for in order to return to &quot;creatives,&quot; btw). We have managed solutions that you can throw money at. So, do you leverage those solutions to help you solve your problem? Or do you let your engineers re-invent the wheel so they can feel smart?<p>The &quot;rockstar&quot; treatment is a result of supply and demand. Talent in Hollywood&#x2F;music can get the rockstar treatment, because the talent alone is the difference between millions of dollars. If you have a really talented coder who can be interchanged with another really talented coder, you do not have a &quot;rockstar.&quot;<p>The &quot;rockstar&quot; era of coding was the result of a massive imbalance in supply&#x2F;demand for engineers, so the rockstar treatment would help attract talent. Now that the supply has began shifting up to meet the demand, it makes sense that the &quot;rockstar&quot; treatment is starting to go away.<p>And good riddance to all that too. I don&#x27;t need to work with any more software engineers who think it&#x27;s okay to be a massive dick to everyone just because they can implement a CRUD app. If you want to be a rockstar, go actually be a rockstar, don&#x27;t make software engineering worse.