I see star, lone-wolf ICs get too out in front of their teams all the time. It usually doesn’t end well. The star IC could objectively be building the right thi

I see star, lone-wolf ICs get too out in front of their teams all the time. It usually doesn’t end well. The star IC could objectively be building the right thing (like a state of the art recommendation system). But, like the article says, requirements change, bugs need to be fixed, the team needs to adjust the implementation and eventually the team reimplements the thing to within their capabilities. It’s more than the usual software maintenance too-It’s the entire operation of a piece of software. Scaling it out, being on call for it, adding monitoring, alerting and logging. Inter-operating with other software in the company. Developing libraries and services for other developers to consume. Security. Understanding and deploying the dependencies of the software. And more. The clever recsys in my example is only the tiny kernel of the actual challenge of delivering this to users. Its the complex care and feeding of a live service that matters.