Do you need a Rockstar developer?
Do you need a Rockstar developer?
When we talk about hiring, what is a Rockstar? Is this a profile you need in your company?
The road for a Tech company to be successful goes through different stations, and we used to hear sentences like:
The people who reached the company until here not necessary will be the people to ride the company to the next stage.
I agree with that sentence in most cases, always with exceptions, based on the capability of the people to adapt themselves to the company’s evolution.
That sentence means many things and one of them is that you will need to have different flavors of Software Engineers during the life of a company.
In today’s issue, I will address the flavor of the Rockstar Software Engineer, which is common in the lifecycle of most companies. More concretely:
What do I mean by Rockstar?
When a Rockstar is needed?
Let’s kickstart this.
📝 What do I mean by Rockstar?
A Software Engineer could categorized as Rockstar when you identify the following symptoms:
She/He is able to implement a whole application individually with enough quality.
She/He is the source of truth for all the things in his team and potentially in the organization.
She/He is a get-things-done person.
She/He is very technical, driving many conversations on the technical side, no matter the target persona.
She/He is not the most communicative member of the team (if there is any).
You might call this employee a Rockstar or use another adjective, but I think you get the idea.
I’ve asked in the community about this kind of person, and I love the definition from tiago@mastodon.social
🕣 When a Rockstar is needed?
As I mentioned at the beginning of this essay, a company drives through different stations in its life.
From my experience, there is a time at which a Rockstar Software Engineer is important: The kickoff of the company.
The first months or years, and moreover in a StartUp, you need a Software Engineer:
Strong, capable to ship code as fast as possible.
Capable of jumping into production issues and fixing them.
With the whole technical vision of the company’s product, from high-level to every detail.
Those 3 key points fit in the definition of Rockstar Software Engineer mentioned before.
This flavor of Software Engineer, is a senior profile, with experience in several programming languages, being more experienced in one in particular though, systems, platforms, and third-party libraries, that will be able to ship code in a fast and continuous manner. New features for your product will be in production very fast. This is an advantage to your company because the faster you deliver, the faster your product grows, and the faster your customers get new features and bug fixes.
A Rockstar will have no problems to jump into production issues. She/He built the feature or product, so the knowledge of it is complete. This person will be able to patch the product in live or even provide the final fix on the fly. This is an advantage to your company as well because the downtime of your product should be short, avoiding customers’ pain.
When a Tech company starts, most of the employees are close to every aspect of the business, and the Rockstar Software Engineer will specialize in the whole technical vision, from the big picture to any small detail. Thanks to this, the new features will be analyzed faster, reducing the time to make decisions, since all the knowledge lives in one single person. This, once again, brings the advantage of delivering fast.
Even though this makes a lot of sense, we have to categorize a Rockstar into 2 sub-groups:
Old-style Rockstar
Modern Rockstar
This is something we will address in the next article.
✨ Final words
In today’s issue, we put in words an employee profile that most of you have met in your career. Even if you are or have been a Rockstar yourself.
In a future essay, I will share with you the considerations to take into account at the time of hiring this profile for your company and the differences between an old-school Rockstar and a modern Rockstar.
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PS: Photo from Lauro Rodríguez
