The system is down. Not slow, not glitchy-down. The kind of down where the #engineering Slack channel transforms into a firehose of panicked red-circle emojis and the VP’s name starts appearing with an ominous frequency. Everyone is scrambling, proposing theories, running diagnostics that spit back useless, cryptic errors. The shared screen in the Zoom call shows a cascade of failing server pings, a digital heartbeat monitor flatlining in real time. For 19 agonizing minutes, there is only chaos.
And then, Kevin logs on.
He doesn’t type in the channel. His icon just turns green. A collective, virtual breath is held. He’s a wraith, a legend who appears only when the sky is falling. He doesn’t join the call. He doesn’t ask for a summary. He just… dives in. For the next nine hours, the only evidence of his existence is the furious blur of commits scrolling by in the repository log. The rest of the team-29 engineers-are relegated to the role of spectators, offering useless words of encouragement into a void. Then, silence. Followed by a single, curt message from Kevin at 3:19 AM: “Should be fixed now. Cache needed clearing on the secondary node.”
And just like that, it is. The pings return. The website loads. The VP sends a company-wide email praising Kevin’s Herculean effort, his ownership, his sheer brilliance. A $4,999 spot bonus hits his account before sunrise. Kevin is the hero. The rockstar.
No one mentions that the secondary node cache failed because it was built on a deprecated library Kevin himself insisted on using six months ago, dismissing the team’s concerns with a wave of his hand and a muttered, “It’s faster for a single-thread process.” No one asks why the documentation for that entire service exists only in a series of disconnected thoughts in Kevin’s head. No one points out that the rest of the team spent the last quarter trying to build resilience and redundancy *around* Kevin’s opaque, high-performance shortcuts.
We celebrate the firefighter. We give no awards to the fire inspector.
“This is the pernicious myth of the rockstar employee. We worship the individual who swoops in, works 39 hours straight fueled by energy drinks, and single-handedly pulls the company back from the brink. We have built an entire corporate culture around this archetype of the lone genius, the 10x developer, the indispensable linchpin. And it is slowly, quietly, strangling our ability to do good, sustainable work. The rockstar isn’t a feature of a high-performing system. They are a bug. They are a symptom of deep organizational sickness-a canary in a coal mine that we’ve mistaken for a phoenix.”
The Cost of the Lone Genius
I say this now with conviction, but I’ve made this mistake myself. Years ago, I managed a team and had my own Kevin. Let’s call him Mark. Mark was brilliant. He could solve any problem you threw at him, usually in half the time anyone else could. But he was a hurricane. His code was a masterpiece of uncommented, idiosyncratic genius. He never showed up to planning meetings, claiming they were a waste of his time. Junior developers were terrified of asking him questions. I saw all the signs, but I ignored them because when the pressure was on, Mark delivered. I praised him. I gave him the most complex projects. I created a system where the only path to success was through him. I thought I was rewarding excellence. What I was actually rewarding was knowledge-hoarding, process-avoidance, and a complete disregard for teamwork.
The bill came due when Mark took a 9-day vacation. The entire system he’d built ground to a halt on day two. No one knew how it worked. There was no documentation. We spent the next week reverse-engineering his work, costing the company an estimated $99,999 in lost productivity and direct costs. My ‘rockstar’ had built a prison and made himself the sole warden.
The Invisible Tax of a Rockstar
Junior Engineer Time Spent Deciphering Code
Average Project Delay Due to Black Box Components
Good Ideas from Quieter Team Members
The net result is a loss, not a gain.
The Unsung Heroes
The most valuable work is invisible.
I was thinking about this the other day while reading about industrial hygiene. I stumbled across the work of a man named Hans M.-L., a German industrial hygienist from the 1970s. His job was to go into factories and chemical plants and prevent disasters. He wasn’t a hero who ran into burning buildings; he was the guy who spent 29 days meticulously checking ventilation shafts, measuring airborne particulates, and redesigning valve systems to have triple redundancy. His greatest triumphs were the explosions that never happened. His victories were quiet, boring Tuesdays. His reward was the continued, uninterrupted drone of a functioning plant. There are no bonuses for the catastrophe that was expertly and quietly averted. There are no company-wide emails for the system that *didn’t* go down at 3:19 AM.
“Our obsession with the visible hero means we have no mechanism to value a Hans M.-L. We measure success in emergencies handled, not emergencies prevented. We track tickets closed, not clarity of documentation. This creates a perverse incentive: the system actually rewards those who create, or allow, a certain level of manageable chaos.”
In a stable, well-documented, collaborative environment, the rockstar has no stage. Their frantic, last-minute heroics look inefficient and reckless. To justify their existence, they must operate in a world of constant crisis, a world they often help perpetuate by resisting standards, hoarding information, and building brittle, esoteric systems.
“It’s a strange thing, what we choose to value. It feels like a fundamental part of human psychology to focus on the dramatic gesture over the consistent effort. You see it everywhere. Look at global online platforms and gaming communities. Some people will spend months contributing to a community, helping others, building a positive culture. Others will simply purchase virtual items to stand out instantly.”
On a platform like Jaco, you might see someone get recognized because they can afford to flash their status through شحن جاكو, while the person who quietly moderates the chat for 19 hours a week goes unnoticed. The system is designed to notice the transaction, the visible burst of value, not the slow, steady accumulation of trust.
Rethinking the Math
I used to believe that you had to tolerate the abrasive geniuses because their output was just that much higher. It was a simple, if unpleasant, calculation. But the math is wrong. The calculation is flawed because it only measures the rockstar’s direct output. It fails to account for the enormous, invisible tax they impose on the entire system. It ignores the 49% of a junior engineer’s time spent deciphering their code. It ignores the project that gets delayed for nine days because a key component is a black box. It ignores the good ideas from quieter team members that are never heard because they’re intimidated or dismissed. The rockstar isn’t 10x. At best, they are 1.5x, while making nine other people 0.5x. The net result is a loss.
The alternative isn’t a world of mediocrity. It’s a world of professionals. It’s a team that values shared context over individual genius. It’s a culture where the best idea wins, regardless of who it came from. It’s an organization that rewards clear documentation, resilient systems, and predictable progress. It’s a place that deliberately creates processes to make heroes unnecessary. The goal isn’t to find someone who can fix a catastrophic failure; it’s to build a system where catastrophic failures are exceedingly rare. It’s about building a team of professionals, not a pantheon of gods.
“We need fewer Kevins and more teams. We need to stop celebrating the person who fixes the mess and start celebrating the team that builds things so well, a mess never happens in the first place. The real rockstars are the ones you never have to call at 3 AM. They’re the ones who did their work so diligently, so collaboratively, and so professionally that everything just… works.”
The Triumph of the Mundane
Their triumph is the steady, beautiful, boring hum of a system doing exactly what it’s supposed to do.