Of course superstars are rare. But rare is not the same thing as &quot;don&#x27;t exist&quot;. And of course people will claim to be superstars even when they are not. But that, again, doesn&#x27;t mean they don&#x27;t exist.<p>The very last two paragraphs of my blog post:<p>&gt; It’s important to put things into perspective. Star programmers, athletes, writers, and scientists are exceedingly rare. I wouldn’t recommend building a hiring strategy around solely hiring “rock stars”; you’ll end up looking foolish and lonely. Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good: hire the best engineers you can get and give them ample opportunity to develop and get even better.<p>&gt; However, don’t fall into the fallacy that all programmers are created equal. There is a vast spectrum of ability in any creative profession. On one end are the type of hires that can sink an organization, actively increasing tech debt with every line of code they write. On the other, there are people who can write code that changes what is <i>possible</i> and have an impact that is an order of magnitude greater than the average.