You Don’t Need Superstar Developers

It depends so much on what you&#x27;re building. If you&#x27;re doing _groundbreaking_ research in, say, AI or facial recognition or whatever, you may need people who are technical superstars.<p>If you&#x27;re building the average CRUD-plus-workflow application, the last thing you want are superstars who are going to get bored with routine work. Then they&#x27;ll go off over-engineering some minor feature or spending weeks at a time inventing some algorithm you don&#x27;t need instead of building the product you do need - just to keep themselves from going stir crazy.<p>What you really want are people who are technically not outstanding but quite capable and have very strong soft skills. People who can work well as part of a team; people who mentor and learn well; people who follow through on their tasks; people who not only can, but want to understand your product and business so they can make small decisions independently and well as they work; people who are good at prioritizing their own work; people who are good at identifying risk and knowing when it&#x27;s worth the time to address; people who are good at communicating with both teammates and management.<p>Although you might argue that people with several or all these qualities are rare enough to be superstars in their own way, they&#x27;re not superstars in the sense often discussed in forums like HN.

One of my most useful insights in software development is that no matter how smart you are, if you write code that can&#x27;t be understood by a junior developer, it means that you didn&#x27;t do a good job writing that code.

I think most of this is, or should be, uncontroversial. While it&#x27;s incredibly important to avoid bad developers, once you hit a certain high level of technical ability other traits become more important. Besides, this isn&#x27;t a fixed scale. Except for a few outliers, the concept of &quot;more skilled&quot; doesn&#x27;t really have a meaning once you pass a certain level.<p>At that point, what many shops do is hire people they enjoy being around, which is usually a shorthand for hiring people just like them, and then create all sorts of pseudo-psychological justification for it. The truth is that one day isn&#x27;t going to tell you much about a dev. Some people are really good when first meeting strangers, some people are very uncomfortable for at least a week. Everyone deals with that nervousness differently, and on the other side, most people are incredibly unaware of their own prejudices that might be affecting their one-day reaction to a new person.<p>At the end of the day, there&#x27;s really no magic formulas for creating great teams.

There is a third measurement. Experience. And the superstar developers tend to have more of it, although not exclusively.<p>Specifically they have probably seen and done the problem you are trying to solve already and don&#x27;t need to spend as much time learning and researching.<p>Less seasoned developers take a lot of mentoring and not every company can do that. In fact the words &quot;mentor&quot; and &quot;train&quot; are nowhere in this article.<p>Granted you don&#x27;t have to be a superstar to have experience. And also, on some projects (like CRUD as someone else mentioned) less experienced developers have plenty enough experience to do the job.<p>There is also the added benefit of experienced developers being able to see when something is being done the hard way. I&#x27;ve seen many cases in my career where a less experienced developer didn&#x27;t know a tool or technique and would have (or did) go down the more expensive and time consuming path.<p>What this article should be (and i think might be getting at slightly) is &quot;you don&#x27;t need superstar developers if you have superstar mentors.&quot; If you have neither you&#x27;re in for longer development time and higher cost over time.<p>The flip side of the coin is that superstars also have a tendency to favor projects that are mentally &#x2F; academically challenging which leads to over-engineering or boredom and attrition.

Team dynamics are of course critical, but part of that dynamic is &quot;game recognizes game&quot;. Having highly skilled developers makes it easier to have an overall highly skilled team... and ironically that makes it easier to be selective for factors like &quot;team dynamics&quot;. It&#x27;s when you have weaker developers that you have conversations like, &quot;we are just going to have to put up with the a<i></i>hole because without them we&#x27;d be really screwed&quot;.

Yeah, hire below-average developers instead and never end the job of cleaning up.<p>I heard about startup that changed team three times, and had to rewrite codebase likewise.

&gt; In our case, we want a new hire to be able to act as an independent contributor, i.e. their work doesn’t have to be double-checked. We also focus a lot on craftsmanship since it means that we all are getting better at what we do and at a good pace.<p>Maybe this varies between cities and job markets but when I read that baseline description he gives in an off-hand manner for the programmers he hires, I think I would probably be calling them &quot;superstars&quot;. I don&#x27;t know if the availability of skilled employees is great in Krakow, but when FizzBuzz type tests are still filtering a large percentage of applicants, it makes it sound like it&#x27;s from another world.<p>That&#x27;s my concern when reading these kinds of hiring articles, it feels very different to how hiring looks when you aren&#x27;t privileged to have an abundance of skilled candidates available.

It&#x27;s always interesting to work with geniuses, but I think..<p>If your business model is based on your employees being geniuses, then you probably have a wrong model.

I would add a second element to the title &quot;You Don&#x27;t need Superstar Developers: You Need High-Acheivers&quot;<p>The challenge is really having a mixed team of high talent and minimal talent. While yes, those who are of lower talent will learn more from the super talented, the inverse is not always true.<p>I have found many lazy (or at least not super motivated) devs who have the required minimum competence level, but are not super driven to crank out high quality work. This then makes me not want to work as hard.<p>This is a little different in that in general companies should go after high-achievers, rather than a minimum technical competence.

Well that&#x27;s a broad statement. We don&#x27;t all need the same thing.

Team working skills, business understanding, the ability to communicate from a social constructive point and an openness to working with prototyping in consumer focused project groups are much more important abilities than technical skills in a lot of modern development.<p>Superstars and best practice masters can be important, but all those enterprise applications we build on all the right practices are being replaced by web-apps, microservices and a range of other things, effectively rendering all the brilliant work useless because no one ever revisited shit.<p>I get why you&#x27;d want a technical superstar for certain things, like developing your long term libraries, but for most tasks a shitty programmer who is business savvy and actually capable of talking to non-it people will deliver a better end project.<p>Of course a lot of superstar developers do the other things really well, as well.

<i>Evenness of communication is about giving everyone roughly equal chance to speak up, not having some parties dominate the conversation.</i><p>in my work experience, there are almost always one or two leads who dominate the conversation.

Why wouldn&#x27;t you try to get the best developer you can pay for?

the real question is, can you afford Superstar Developers?

True, mostly. You might steel need few of them to lead by example.