Not sure how I feel about an anon account presumably created for the sole purpose of denigrating someone's ability.

A kid showing their age.

When I started at a company, I listened to stand-ups of 'yeah 4 weeks' and whined I could do it -today-. And I could. I was a rockstar, everyone else was an old lump.

FF to today and I realize how much I didn't know. Mostly business relations, relations with product, proper testing and pipeline integration, and honestly...just thinking. I used to be prolific and just write and write. Today I think way more than I write, and accomplish more.

Really trying to keep this in mind lately. The code is the easy part.

This would be more meaningful if we knew what you think makes a rockstar engineer.

Some people value extreme speed.

Others are impressed by somebody who will dive down a rabbit hole and follow however deep it leads, discovering the linker bug or kernel driver interaction that causes a failure, and patching it.

Or maybe you are impressed that they go away for a month, talking to nobody, and come back with a complete system all ready to ship.

Or they write libraries that everybody uses because they are so exactly what people need.

Or they are always available to explain things to junior people and get them going in the right direction.

Each of those would be unusually valuable, at some places, and would have trouble getting any recognition, at others.

The dude couldn't write code. Not a bad hardware engineer though.