Nobody wants crazies who think they are superstars.
Any decent business wants dependable people who will follow the processes and work in a team. If you can’t do that because you think you are above that you won’t last long.
Any decent business wants dependable people who will follow the processes and work in a team.
I mean, they want people who can do the job. And most businesses don’t need a guy who can program fantastically complex solutions in obscure languages at a breakneck pace.
They also don’t want to pay above the “going rate”, which is inevitably less than what the market actually demands.
So while programming contests are fun, they don’t do much to improve your pay scale. Much better to climb the management chain and lead programmers than excelling at the actual work. Then you get to take credit for whole teams and land an outsized bonus as a result.
Tbh, I’ve worked with self-professed “superstar programmers” so far. In every case their cockiness, ther “I’m always right” attitude and their inability to receive criticism or to adjust in any way to the team lead to major issues.
These “superstar programmers” are much more likely to produce live bugs (because they don’t listen to anyone, don’t follow procedure like code reviews and stuff and after a time nobody wants to invest time into reviewing their code properly because it always ends in a fight). They are also really harmful to team cohesion. Their behavior usually ends with most of the team quitting unless they are fired before that happens.
Programming is teamwork. It by definition needs to be unless you work alone. Someone who can’t work well in a team is a bad programmer.
We have a superstar programmer in our sister team. Both teams work on the same project but in different sections, but there’s a core area where we overlap. That guy recently caused a massive 5h outage of our customer-facing website, which is our main access point for much of the business. We have customers in the order of 100 million that couldn’t access the website.
What had appened is that our superstar programmer worked in the middle of the night when nobody was online. He made a non-urgent but critical change and pushed to production without code review or testing by the QAs, because, you know, he’s a superstar and he doesn’t need to follow processes. Our process for a change like that would have been that he needs a code review from his team and from our team (since the change affects us as well), and then it would have to be tested by their and our QAs in the preview env before and on production after the push.
There’s around 20 domains for our website for different countries and different client companies. Our superstar only tested one of them after the push and that one was working, so he didn’t check the rest. Turns out he made a simple typo and all other domains weren’t accessible, until the rest of the team members came online at ~9 in the morning and noticed the massive outage. We then spent two hours trying to troubleshoot what exactly went wrong until someone found and debugged his merge request, because of course he didn’t even inform anyone that he did the change. (He didn’t even create a ticket for it, even though our processes require that.)
Superstar programmers are great at contests but terrible workers.
It’s pretty much the same as why you wouldn’t hire an artisan instagram bricklayer influencer to work on a block of flats.
Tbh, I would hire none of the competition.
Nobody wants crazies who think they are superstars.
Any decent business wants dependable people who will follow the processes and work in a team. If you can’t do that because you think you are above that you won’t last long.
I mean, they want people who can do the job. And most businesses don’t need a guy who can program fantastically complex solutions in obscure languages at a breakneck pace.
They also don’t want to pay above the “going rate”, which is inevitably less than what the market actually demands.
So while programming contests are fun, they don’t do much to improve your pay scale. Much better to climb the management chain and lead programmers than excelling at the actual work. Then you get to take credit for whole teams and land an outsized bonus as a result.
Tbh, I’ve worked with self-professed “superstar programmers” so far. In every case their cockiness, ther “I’m always right” attitude and their inability to receive criticism or to adjust in any way to the team lead to major issues.
These “superstar programmers” are much more likely to produce live bugs (because they don’t listen to anyone, don’t follow procedure like code reviews and stuff and after a time nobody wants to invest time into reviewing their code properly because it always ends in a fight). They are also really harmful to team cohesion. Their behavior usually ends with most of the team quitting unless they are fired before that happens.
Programming is teamwork. It by definition needs to be unless you work alone. Someone who can’t work well in a team is a bad programmer.
We have a superstar programmer in our sister team. Both teams work on the same project but in different sections, but there’s a core area where we overlap. That guy recently caused a massive 5h outage of our customer-facing website, which is our main access point for much of the business. We have customers in the order of 100 million that couldn’t access the website.
What had appened is that our superstar programmer worked in the middle of the night when nobody was online. He made a non-urgent but critical change and pushed to production without code review or testing by the QAs, because, you know, he’s a superstar and he doesn’t need to follow processes. Our process for a change like that would have been that he needs a code review from his team and from our team (since the change affects us as well), and then it would have to be tested by their and our QAs in the preview env before and on production after the push.
There’s around 20 domains for our website for different countries and different client companies. Our superstar only tested one of them after the push and that one was working, so he didn’t check the rest. Turns out he made a simple typo and all other domains weren’t accessible, until the rest of the team members came online at ~9 in the morning and noticed the massive outage. We then spent two hours trying to troubleshoot what exactly went wrong until someone found and debugged his merge request, because of course he didn’t even inform anyone that he did the change. (He didn’t even create a ticket for it, even though our processes require that.)
Superstar programmers are great at contests but terrible workers.
It’s pretty much the same as why you wouldn’t hire an artisan instagram bricklayer influencer to work on a block of flats.