Instead of “Rock Star,” they chose “Virtuoso” as a metaphor. Why? Because a virtuoso has to have both tremendous individual skill and the ability to play expertly with others. A virtuoso is also not required to know everything (no guru illusion). Nor is there only one virtuoso in a symphony. In the ideal symphony, everyone is a virtuoso.

Ha, I like the idea of being thought of as a web developer rockstar But maybe that just plays in to my secret fantasies about being an actual indie rocker (in my vision, I’m the cute bass player/backup vocalist… never mind that I can’t actually play guitar outside of a video game).

I do think that people have to have team skills, communication skills, and be able to funnel their ambitions towards the business’s purpose/profit, etc… someone who is simply a “rockstar developer” without having those things is a highly productive/efficient worker who ends up costing a company money (especially when they eventually leave and no one knows how to pick up where they left off). That said, the fundamentals of being a rockstar developer that you’ve mentioned: the challenge, the drive, the emphasis on productivity and quality (over a 9-to-5 put-in-your-time mentality)… this is all near and dear to my own heart.

I do think that people have to have team skills, communication skills, is able to funnel their ambitions towards the business’s purpose/profit, etc… someone who is simply a “rockstar developer” without having those things is a highly productive/efficient worker who ends up costing a company money (especially when they eventually leave and no one knows how to pick up where they left off). That said, the fundamentals of being a rockstar developer: the challenge, the drive, the emphasis of productivity and quality (over a 9-to-5 put-in-your-time mentality)… this is all near and dear to my own heart.

Candidates are generally looking at a sea of similar job post titles and don’t have time to focus on all of them. If a company wants to get their attention subtle it is not but it gets the job done.

Another benefit would be that if they’re looking for a “superstar” then I’d expect their pay to match that skill expectation. Nothing like spending time on a potential job that requires X years of experience, only to discover that they don’t value that position much at all.

As far your complaints against a transient, superficial rockstar attitude, I can dig it. Personally, though, I think I would tend to work harder and better if I get to be called a “Java Rockstar” rather than a “Applications Engineer IV”.

I really admire the work that you’re doing and the motivation of your project, and I wish you the best of luck. If you can fix the hiring process in software, you can add a lot of value and, if you even capture a small fraction of the value thus added, become very successful.

My problem with the term “rock star” is the attitude that it reflects in society as a whole. It encourages a mentality of looking like a high performer rather than actually being one, which often involves making others more productive and making everyone succeed. Rockstarism is about our society’s fetishism of transient individual success rather than long-term value creation. It’s the general attitude– not that a few people resort to using this terminology in job ads– that I take issue with.

Finding good programmers is very difficult. First, you have to be well-located. You need to be in a city with a good university of serious size, or you won’t even get started. Second, tools and languages are big. Paul Graham writes of the “Python Paradox”. Jane Street Capital has a lot of incredibly talented people because it uses Ocaml; JSC practically *is* the New York ML job market. The traditional excuse for defaulting to Java is that it’s standard and has a lot of libraries; but now that Clojure and Scala exist, if you want to use Java and be able to get good programmers, you should probably use one of those languages.

To be frank, I would be turned off by a job ad asking for a “rock star”. It shows a lack of subtlety. You don’t show that you’re an elite company by screaming it; you show this by producing great products.