"The idea that we should (in some normative sense, in an ideal world) know the people behind the products we know "better than we know the products" at the risk

"The idea that we should (in some normative sense, in an ideal world) know the people behind the products we know "better than we know the products" at the risk of being "second class citizens" was what I found bizarre." We're in agreement there. "I mostly agree - except that a good part of their products (or their leadership position on their products or "fame" ) is or results directly from the code they wrote." Certainly they wouldn't have been famous without coding anything, sure, but at the end of the day the quality of their end result is what mattered - not the code they wrote to get there. Okay, maybe that isn't true so much with DHH due to the nature of Rails... but Carmack is famous because people like to shoot Nazis and zombies. Romero is (okay, _was_) just as famous, and I've never heard much about his programming skills - he seems to be famous purely for having been co-founder of Id.