I’ve never really thought twice about why people called each other rock stars before today. Apparently I should be according to David Jame’s post titled ‘Cutting off the head of the rock star metaphor’ He recommends the following:
“There have to be more useful metaphors for greatness in software development. They should be fresh, specific, and (hopefully) strange or funny.”
I agree. But the problem is that pop culture dominates our lives. Just look at American Idol or Rock Band (I’m a rock star any time I want to be). I definitely prefer the label that David is dissing to “Top Talent” which seems to be the favorite of the big huge staffing agency crowd.
But to address the why of this, I would point out that there are some companies who hire people like this to help build buzz about themselves (Pownce hired Leah Culver and that definitely helped them climb the charts). Before that she had worked for (blah) IBM. In reality, many of the best software developers that I have met have been the ones that are heads down and have as much passion for programming as they do for many other things in their lives. They are well rounded, balanced people. Contrast that with someone like Zed Shaw. If nothing else, these two examples of engineers who have clibmed the engineering rock star charts.
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