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Comment by jimnotgym | Hacker News Reader

This all makes sense for knowledge workers, but what about the rest of the world?

In a supermarket chain you need 1000 people following the exact process developed by a small team of superstars at head office.

Sometimes you will get someone who is good at convincing the others to stay on process, they get to be managers. IE the smarter staff rise up.

This is quite different to your example. Perhaps the corporation is not so stupid, its just not good at writing software?

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This hero worshippong always puzzles me. All real world examples, from certified sport super stars to actual rock stars, show us that the proverbial employee rockstar is a myth.

No Messi, Ronaldo or Mbappé can win a Championship or the Champions League on their own. Nor can Brady win the Super Bowl without a team. Every rockstar has a team of song writers (there are exceptions to that so), producers, marketing and tour people behind them.

A "rockstar" that is unable to follow rules or work in a team is nothing but a loose cannon.

Caveat is so, you can be a great fit in team / corporation A and a terrible one in team / corporation B. And what people like Sinsek have to say about all of this, is horse crap.

>Nor can Brady win the Super Bowl without a team.

I'm pretty sure you can run whatever analytics you'd like and they'd all say that (prime) Brady is more than worth 100x the salary of the JAG qb3 on the practice squad.

The skill curve for athletic and knowledge work is steep and tall. Measuring it outside of games is the hard part.

I didn't say anything about salaries, did I? Which team so do you think would do better:

- Brady at his prime in a team of highschool amateurs

- the back-up team of, I have no real idea about american football so feel free to pick a better example, the Cowboys

What do you think?

Backup team of the Cowboys (or any NFL team) would absolutely destroy Brady and a high school team.

How else do you define rockstar? Does being worth 100x the next guy not qualify? This is specifically relevant because football is a salary cap sport - every dollar on Brady is money not spent on someone else and therefore is a direct reflection of his measured value on the field.[0] As opposed to euro-football or older F1, where budgets are more flexible.

To your question: You can always saddle a 'rockstar' with enough negative-value players to result in poor overall performance. You've contriving an irrelevant situation -- also one where you've put 53 rockstars,[1] against a bunch of highschoolers plus one rockstar. Just about every player on the Dallas cowboys, except maybe the kicker/punter would drag an average highschool to the state championship.

[0]And we all know how that has turned out over the last 20 odd years.

[1]Rockstar-ship is situational/relative - the backup RB on the cowboys is a scrub in the NFL. He would also be the best highdchool player in the country by a large margin (aka a rockstar).

Saying "a star can't do it without a team" is very silly. That's like saying "well, sure but Shakespeare couldn't have written anything with a pen". True at some level, but I think we both know in that equation whether the pen or the man was more valuable. The point is that teams are necessary, but in many cases, are easier to come by than stars. Engineering stars do exist. Not all are loose cannons, like in popular culture. Some just do great work that others can't.

Shakespeare's works likely wouldn't have been known without a team of performers to perform them, without an audience willing to accept them, no one gets anything done alone.

I thought it was pretty well established that Shakespeare had a team of writers?

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