Don’t be a rockstar engineer!
Instead, be like a session musician…
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I spend way too much time on LinkedIn these days. Not sure why, but probably because of its weird mix of interesting work-related information, thinly veiled commercial acquisition, blatant self-promotion, and regular Internet craziness such as anti-vaxxing and holocaust denial. Working from home has blurred the lines between work and the rest of your life and today’s LinkedIn reflects that.
One of the weirdest trends on LinkedIn is people writing posts where every sentence is a single paragraph. Don’t do this.
One of my friends has a small recruiting agency and she uses LinkedIn as a way to promote herself and her agency. In one of her recent posts she asked her followers to help her define what makes a candidate a “rockstar”. This got me thinking, because I recently spent a week on a cruise ship in the company of a lot of music fans and quite a few extremely good musicians, some of which might be actual rockstars.
Let me start by saying that I love music. All sorts of music, ranging from Bach to Rammstein and most things in between, with the exception of most country & western and all Serbian turbo folk (don’t ask). Consequently, I go to a fair amount of live concerts.
Fun fact: The first live concert I attended was in June 1982: The Rolling Stones in De Kuip in Rotterdam. I thought it might possibly be their last tour because at the time the Stones were already in their late forties 🤣.
I have been a lifelong fan of certain artists and bands, some of which I have seen over a dozen times. But here is a thing I am not: A musician groupie. Some of my fellow fans are also fans of the actual musicians, as people. They know for instance for which soccer club the son of the bass player plays or that the keyboard player recently got married and who the new wife is.
That last thing was kinda hard to miss because on the aforementioned rock cruise, every time we saw the keyboard player, he was walking hand in hand with his new missus…
I typically don’t care about the musicians. I love the music, I am in awe of the knowledge, skills, and experience of the players, but I don’t need to be friends with them. Also, some of them are not necessarily very nice people. For instance in the early 2000s I loved listening to French band Noir Désir; their hit song Le vent nous portera (The wind will carry us; also an elegant example of the futur simple) was played incessantly on European radio stations. But when singer Bertrand Cantat beat his girlfriend to death, that took a bit of a shine out of their music for me.
In the 1950 and 1960s, hand in hand with the rise of modern popular culture, the leading musicians of popular bands became celebrities and we started calling them rockstars. They came to personify the perceived greatness of the bands they were fronting. In the 2000s, an era of hyperbole if ever there was one, we started calling accomplished and successful people in all sorts of professions rockstars. Great chefs became rockstars, all mothers became rockstars, and great software engineers became rockstars too.
By now the meme of the rockstar engineer has been going strong for quite a while. Companies want to hire them and recruiters are perpetually looking for them. For instance this company is looking for a “rockstar Software Engineer who will:
Work with a cross-functional team to design, develop, test and deploy innovative solutions to a wide range of complex business problems.
Actively participate in all aspects of our agile development process.
Utilize effective debugging techniques to identify and resolve software defects.
Continuously keep themselves up to date on changes in technology, with an emphasis on the tech stacks being used by your team.”
Seems like an average software engineering job to me, but who am I?
Hyperbole left aside, do you really, really, want a rockstar? What do we know about rockstars?
First of all, are they usually very good musicians? Are they even the best musicians in their bands? By and large I think we have to answer these questions with a resounding no. Rockstars are the face of the band, they are often very charismatic, usually decent singers, can maybe play an instrument (tambourine doesn’t count), and are often good lyricists (though I will accept dissent on this).
My piano teacher likes to say that the better you are at music, the less popular you are. This was recently reiterated by John Young of Lifesigns. On stage in the Stardust Lounge on the Cruise to the Edge, he retold a story of being interviewed by BBC Bristol. When asked to describe their music, John answered: “Deeply unpopular”.
What rockstars are famous for on the other is attitude. There are plenty of stories around of rockstars smashing up hotel rooms, rockstars getting into fights, rockstars committing sexual assault, and rockstars spending time in jail for various offenses and/or crimes. And of course I am not even mentioning doing illegal drugs, because that one just comes with the territory it seems.
So if you want to write some amazing music, having a rockstar in the band seems to be a huge distraction. Genuine rockstars might help you get attention, draw crowds, and sell records, but if your goal is to write the best possible music, maybe you should not have any rockstars; they don’t always seem to be very productive. Sometimes they are geniuses, but even if they are, they are often unstable and destructive. Jim Morrison comes to mind…
Compare rockstars with another type of musician: The session musician. These are roving musicians who are hired for a recording or live show to augment the complement of the band or sometimes to replace a band member who is indisposed. For instance, on the rock cruise I mentioned earlier, my fav band Marillion’s bass player was in hospital and replaced by Nick Beggs (of Kajagoogoo fame; maybe not really a session musician pur sang, but definitely not a full-time member of a regular band). He did an amazing job and Marillion’s lead singer Steve Hogarth (a bit of a rockstar in his own right), announced Nick as “a consummate professional who learned to play in a few weeks what has taken us forty years to come up with.”
Session (or roving) musicians are awesome because they can play different types of music on different instruments in different bands. They really are, as Steve described Nick, consummate professionals. Seems to me that if you want to hire a great musician for a project, you need to hire a session musician and not a rockstar.
One of the most interesting phenomena in music is the supergroup. These are temporary bands that consist of members that are already successful as members of other bands or solo artists. On the cruise, the most stunning performance I saw was by a band called Flying Colors, which consists of people of incredible technical prowess and long careers playing in (or with) other famous bands such as Dream Theater.
A friend of mine, who is a good guitar player and a decent singer, and who is a recorded artist, once told me: “You know, usually when I see a band on stage and I see what they do, I think: I can do that; it might take some practice, but I can do that. But when I first saw Dream Theater, it’s not even that I thought I couldn’t do that, I wouldn’t even know where to begin.”
This is approximately how I feel when I see Rick Wakeman play (fast-forward to 2:55).
These supergroups come together to create amazing music. They often bring out one or a small number of great albums and then they break up or just don’t come together again for a long time because they all move on to other projects. Supergroups also allow you to see another side of a musician: Most musicians that are in a successful band inevitably feel trapped by the format and the demands of the record companies and fans who basically want the band to bring out copies of their first (or most popular) album.
With the notable exception of Radiohead, which seems hellbent on losing half of their existing fanbase with every new album. When Kid A came out it greatly divided listeners and critics, but is undoubtedly one of the great albums of the 2000s.
As an example: I am not a huge fan of Haken, but lead singer Ross Jenning’s contribution to the Troika album (together with Nick D'Virgilio (Big Big Train, ex-Spock's Beard) and Neal Morse (The Neal Morse Band, Transatlantic, Flying Colors, ex-Spock's Beard)) blew me away. Surely if you are a great musician, you want to do different kinds of things every now and then?
Can you imagine a supergroup with all rockstars? Would that work? How fast would that mix of egos collapse into critical mass and then explode? And, holding onto that thought: How many rockstars managed to have a great solo career or become successful members of other bands after their first band imploded? Is there anything sadder than a former rockstar who hasn’t made any music for a while but who desperately tries to stay in the public eye?
One of the big contrasts between a software development team and a rock band is that in the latter case, the band is the product. I wouldn’t necessarily go as far as to say that the music doesn’t matter at all, but there are definitely lots of examples where the music industry relentlessly plugs the band with music seeming to come in a distant second. In contrast, in a software development team, much like with a musical supergroup, the product they create is the actual product. Once the software is there, nobody typically cares about who created it.
A software developer, like a session musician, functions in service to the group they are in and should care first and foremost about the quality of the thing they are creating. Ego and charisma don’t matter and quite often get in the way. Of course you need leaders, but you don’t necessarily need a frontperson. A servant leader works just as well, if not better.
The myth of the rockstar engineer derives from the insight that great engineers are not just twice as productive as an average engineer, they are ten times as productive. Really great engineers excel at technical leadership and at hands-on technical work, including grunt work like being oncall. Of course every company wants engineers like that, but what they shouldn’t want is rockstar attitudes; you want high performers, not high performing bad apples, because no matter how great an engineer is, their greatest achievement is in getting more out of other people. That requires an absence of the egomania that seems to be a core aspect of being a rockstar.
Assuming that an actual rockstar is high performing. As we’ve seen above, the rockstars in a band are not necessarily the best musicians. This point is also humorously made in the Discworld novel Maskerade about the Ankh-Morpork opera.
So instead of hiring rockstars, hire session musicians. They are usually more professional, more knowledgeable, greater masters of their art, easier to work with, and more adaptable to whatever it is that you want to achieve.
Note: Obviously some rockstars are great musicians and still very nice guys. David Bowie comes to mind. And Bruce Springsteen. That said, you probably still don’t want five David Bowies in a band. Nor could you afford even a single one of them to come play on your daughter’s Bat Mitzvah.
