Re: The myth of the "rock star" IT worker
Not IT as such, but close - Actuaries, particularly the sorts working with simulations that predict future customer dead-ness. Several years ago when I was but a nub-cake in a large financial abomination, one of the (many) actuarial teams ended up working a 36-hour shift to get their year-end numbers out by the deadline. These poor sods were responsible for data coming out of a dozen legacy systems, most of the team were new graduates, and the documentation was a litany of unexplained TLAs. Really not their fault they ended up there, and credit to them, they did what they thought needed to be done to make their deliveries. There was some celebration at the time, since we'd all been concerned about the fallout of missing that particular milestone.
Unfortunately, thanks to the joys of sleep deprivation, they screwed it up royally. It took another two months to find and correct all the mistakes. Surprisingly, the team themselves had no fallout other than having to fix all the mistakes - Those Upstairs concluded, with a little advice from the unions, that the manager should have stopped them doing it, and the process should never have been allowed to end up that badly. Said manager, though, found himself working elsewhere before terribly long.
The new manager put a lot of focus on getting the process locked down and documented to avoid last-minute hell-panics, and to my understanding still works there, just a grade or two higher now.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
