Does Your Company Need Rock Stars?

A lot of companies, if not most of them, think they need to hire rock stars. It’s perfectly legitimate to want to hire the best, but where do you make the cutoff? Many companies insist on hiring only the top 10%, or the top 5%, or even the top 1%. If all companies thought like this then it’s a wonder that most people get hired at all.

“The Mythical Man Month” is a seminal work in Software Project Management, written over 30 years ago. It contains many ideas, some of which are controversial, and some that are dated, but one that I like is that of a “Surgical Team.”

A surgical team is led by an experienced surgeon who is assisted by more junior surgeons, anesthesiologists, nurses, and other supporting personnel. Transposed to software development, this model means that an architect or other senior engineer works on the most critical portions (i.e., architecture & design) while others support the architect by working on supporting tasks (i.e., coding & testing).

This model is attractive because it requires only a few rock stars compared to supporting characters. If you only need 1 out of every 10 engineers to be rock stars, that makes hiring a lot easier. Of course, the proportion of rock stars in the developer population is probably a lot less than 10%, but perhaps for some teams you could substitute a medium level star instead. So instead of a top rock act, you might have a good cover band instead.

Finally, consider the possibility that you may not need rock stars at all. CRUD development is a favorite whipping boy of mine, perhaps unfairly. But the fact remains that there are a lot of projects out there that do not require rock star level talent. And if rock stars were to work on them, they might quickly become bored and disillusioned.

Boredom in this case may result not just because such projects don’t use leading edge technology. It may also be because those projects actually rely more on other skills, such as project management, internal marketing & selling skills, political negotiation, and people management. Those are not necessarily the skills that rock star engineers possess, yet they may be essential to the success in the organization.