I was just speaking with a surprisingly enlightened CEO of a tech company, who shared an interesting claim, which I surprisingly quickly agreed with:
Most startups don’t really need rockstars.
If we agree that “rockstars” is a ridiculous term used to describe engineers who can solve hard technical problems, this claim may sound depressing to most engineers. It would have sounded depressing to me, too, only a few months ago. But I gave it the benefit of the doubt.
The modern day tech culture was built on the success of companies like Microsoft, Apple or Google. These companies employed (and hopefully still do) genius engineers who have found previously unimaginable solutions to insanely hard technical problems. These engineers are true rockstars, whom all other engineers, myself included, admire and look up to. Their technological breakthroughs have also made technology so mainstream, that it’s become hard to imagine that any modern business can operate without employing said technology and, consequently, us — engineers. Everybody needs technology, so everybody needs us. “Everybody needs us!” — this is our hidden leitmotif and we certainly feel like rockstars while playing it in our heads.
But it is true. Everybody does need us. And they are prepared to do what it takes to get us. They are prepared to call us “rockstars”, to promise we will be solving hard problems, to throw money, stock options and perks at us, so we know they mean business. But in reality, most companies are not Microsoft, Apple or Google. Hell, maybe even Microsoft, Apple and Google are not Microsoft, Apple and Google anymore. What do I know? What I do know is that most companies don’t need to solve insanely hard technical problems to make (tons of) money. They just need to develop an app. Or a social network. Or run some Hadoop jobs to crunch some numbers.
Innovation is necessary but it’s not necessarily a technical one. In most businesses, innovation is in the product domain. For example, even though Amazon’s online store is certainly an example of technical innovation, most of the innovation that led to its success is purely operational. 37Signals have succeeded with Basecamp not because David Heinemeier Hanson invented Rails (although it helped) but because they nailed project management.
Could it be that we, engineers, have become spoiled brats? And could it be that we are being treated as such? “Tell the princess she is the smartest, most beautiful in the world and get her a new toy”. We are known to judge business culture and advertising culture and X culture as being full of it, but maybe our culture — tech culture — is no different.
I am not trying to say engineers should be less ambitious. But lets try to be more realistic. Take a good look at your career and answer a simple question: Are you solving hard technical problems? Insanely hard technical problems? Are you, really? Most of us aren’t, at least most of the time.
But maybe we are solving hard non-technical problems? The hardest problem I solved at Celtra was to hire a team of rockstars. It required many skills but most of them aren’t technical. And you know what? This is perfectly OK. Engineers are good at abstract thinking and this trait doesn’t come handy in programming only. There are tons of business, organizational, creative or operational problems you may be able to solve. Solve hard problems if you can, even if they are not technical. Sure. Why not?
On the other hand, if you’re spending years doing plain old CRUD, developing yet another CMS, doing yet another 3rd party integration, styling yet another set of tabs, buttons, dialogs or charts and Sunday evenings make you a little depressed… well, let some other engineer do that. The business will be fine without you, trust me. Maybe it doesn’t need technical innovation. Maybe it’s just you who needs it.
Maybe you’re a cannon who should find a bigger fortress to demolish. A ninja. A rockstar. Or maybe you’re not. Either way, you won’t know if you don’t try to find harder problems to solve. There are companies where business depends on technical innovation, on solving hard technical problems. God bless them. Just have in mind that there aren’t that many of them. At least not as many as we are being told.
Baby Reasoning 
At first blush I’d agreed with you. But you forgot that the most important aspect of rock stars is their capability of attracting and retaining top talent. For example, countless engineers decided to join Zemanta just because of Andraž. And I’m sure 37signals never lacked Ruby developers who all want to work with the master himself.
In order to sustain rock star’s reputation you must keep him or her doing the most challenging tasks. Otherwise (s)he won’t have anything intersting to tweet or talk at the conferences and his or her star will start to fade. That’s why I think rock stars are here to stay and with the war for top talent intesifying, their role will become even more prominent.
I agree that rockstars attract other engineers and rockstars generally are (and always will be) welcome in any startup. But Zemanta has been known as one of the technically sexier startups, the pioneer of the region and Andraž is this rare combination, half geek – half PR genius, who happened to host a TV show, so I don’t think Zemanta is a good example of what I’m talking about here. There are only so many Andražs and DHHs in the world and not every startup depends on having them on board.
I am not sure what exactly do you mean by rockstar, but I agree that some random IT shop very likely does not have (m)any hard technical problems.
But you should still want to hire the best developers you can afford, get *and* keep because what good developers bring is among other things an ability to execute well. By that I mean the code itself will be of higher quality with fewer bugs, easier to understand, extend and generally nicer to maintain. A good developer will care about details so even simple applications will work better (e.g. more responsive, recover more gracefully from errors…).
My argument is that better developers will produce better end-experience and increase development velocity (or to put it another way lower development costs). I don’t think there are many companies that don’t care about those.
I also disagree with your examples. First there’s are many hard problems in building Amazon’s website and the best logistics on the planet wouldn’t help you if your customers could not buy what they want. Similarly a good technical foundation allowed 37Signals (still does) more rapidly iterating to a good solution. Web is littered with counter-examples that did not have that. Reducing success to one factor is rarely if ever correct.
As a side note I find this industry’s use of words like rockstar, ninja etc. just inane.
I agree with you wholeheartedly, including the side note about the words like “rockstar” or “ninja”. I’m actually known for using these terms ironically.
My post is one-sided and is observing the engineer’s perspective only. Of course, any company can benefit from having better engineers and, of course, anyone would love to hire “rockstars” and “ninjas” as much as any Slovenian league basketball team would love to hire LeBron, if they only could. My point is that most startups don’t really have insane technical problems to solve and, if you are a rockstar (or at least a ninja), not every environment can satisfy your hunger for technical innovation.
It is certainly not a piece of cake to develop a world-wide online store or one of the most popular SAAS… But the larger part of innovation that brought these companies to the success they enjoy still had to be in the product/service domain and was not technical (e.g., how do you ship millions of products to customers around the world in 7 days, how do you enable people to collaborate better, etc.). I used Amazon and 37s as examples on purpose, because I wanted to stress that event the companies that we, engineers, admire the most for their technical superiority had to innovate even more in non-technical areas to be as successful as they are.