Comment by codeshaman

All that you say is true, but there's another side of the coin.

Nobody wants rockstars in teams, because rockstars are bad team players. That's the reason why they're rockstars. Nonconformity (sometimes) leads to innovation. Like it or not, a lot of the tools and libraries which we use every day and on which the internet runs, was written by lone-wolf 'rockstars' too weird and too eccentric to work in large corps.

You don't want your whole army to go over those mountains, you send scouts. Scouts are terrible soldiers, but they are quick to find a path between the trees and rocks and they come back with new information, new ideas and concepts of how to optimally win the battle. Then and only then you bring the whole army and win.

A company, imho, should always have a small number of rockstars - impossible characters, crazies and lunatics with universe-sized egos, who have a track record of successful projects in the wild, working on insane things, alone or in very small groups, carefully managed by someone who can earn their respect - usually a lone wolf turned general.

They might be terrible programmers, they may have no education, but they have this unusual ability to see into the future and come back with interesting ideas and prototypes, which the 'soldiers' - people with solid fundamentals - can polish and transform into profitable products.

If a company innovates 'from the top', then it's trend is going to slowly be downwards towards irrelevance, because true innovation comes from the trenches and is done by the rockstars nobody wants to work with.