Return of the rockstars? Building great teams in challenging times
summary
A cautionary case study describes a “Bob” whose stakeholder-loved work is unmaintainable and is later mostly rewritten, and argues against re-creating that pattern as budgets shrink. Companies adopt T-shaped engineers, inner source contributions, small squads (often two front-end + two back-end), bookable learning days, a transparent growth framework that supports IC tracks to ~100 engineers, and rollout of GitHub Copilot with measurable productivity gains measured via SPACE and DORA-style metrics to shift focus from single rockstars to resilient teams.
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chapters (10)
- 0:00Introduction
- 1:07Bob and the rockstar mistake
- 10:20Rockstar developer persona
- 20:54Post-pandemic team challenges
- 33:48Bloom & Wild’s high-performing teams
- 36:14Building T-shaped skills
- 42:16Inner source reduces bottlenecks
- 47:57Communities and shared learning
- 51:30Rewarding behaviors over metrics
- 55:41Conclusion
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