Once, there was a boy .... what a boy ... golden boy ...
The "golden-boy" antipattern is one of the most glorified antipatterns , yielding a ton of effort on the management the eliminate this "well-known" bottleneck in the system. Whereas this is indeed true - let's ask the golden one what does he think about it:
Golden : "Wha ? hey - I've done a good job and worked hard - it's not my fault that I ended up being golden - no - please - don't take me away ... i will behave ... no..... please.........
A tragic story indeed. However, this is what usually happens as a part of "natural growth" process of a almost each engineering company. Once the organization starts growing in size, the "search for bottlenecks" begin. Naturally - first one that a I-have-read-couple-of-books-on-software-engineering-and-think-I-have-figured-it-out manager would look for is indeed the lookup for the golden one. As a part of this process - a lot of blood will be shed, and as the bottlenecks get "eliminated" - the notion of "gold" will start to diminish,and smaller and smaller "bottlenecks" will be
found. Finally - in the "regression towards the mean" - style - this process can converge to one of two possible outcomes - either the system will become predictable, controllable and easy to manage or it will gradually collapse under the pressure of pending work and inability of the team to deliver it. Still - regardless of the outcome (which mainly depends on the problem domain the organization is addressing) the general flipside of this process is it's natural bias towards "promotion of the averageness".....
(to be continued)
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