There are all sorts of superstars, and quite often they do things that don't fit this category. Ever been in a design review meeting where some junior guy who

There are all sorts of superstars, and quite often they do things that don't fit this category. Ever been in a design review meeting where some junior guy who has just joined the team asks a stupid question, and an attempt to answer this inadvertently finds what would have been a very expensive to fix design issue? Now that might be the only really significant contribution that junior guy makes to the project, but it might have just saved millions, or saved the product, but I bet if you've been in that situation you don't find them heralded as some sort of uber programming hero. If however the exact same stupid question leading to the exact same problem was found by your super-expensive rockstar programmer, chances are that management would get to hear about how they had saved the project, and their lavish compensation is totally justified.