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In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:

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1. \n

   I\u2019ve been an engineer for about 5 years and in the last two jobs, rock-star programmers have made my life very difficult. I define rock star programmers as ones with ability to produce lots of code and implement features at a pace that dwarfs my own. In my last job, the RSP would constantly rewrite core libraries and I would have to figure out his design and rewrite my code to adapt to the new design multiple times.

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   In the current job, the RSP is very uncommunicative but with his sheer productivity steers the project into wild directions that are always coming as a surprise. Half the time my work then becomes throw-away because I was working based on the previous design. Am I a slowpoke and I\u2019m seeing a normal programmer as a rock star or are these programmers just slightly above normal programmers but creating lots of work for everyone else?

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   Managers are completely starry eyed at RSP and so talking to managers seems like a bad idea. What should I do?

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2. \n

   How do you feel about sharing salaries amongst your co-workers? I\u2019m about to have my yearly review and I get the sense that my raise (which has already been promised to me) will be underwhelming given how stingy the company has been previously. That is simply a hunch based on previous experience and the fact that our team budgets have tightened up in the past 6 months. Recently a co-worker let it slip what his salary is, and though I don\u2019t like playing the comparison game, it made me feel underappreciated. I discovered that he was making the same salary I was, but for lower quality of work and less contributions to the team. I\u2019ve heard some devs in other companies advocate for sharing salaries amongst their peers, but I\u2019m not sure if it\u2019s a good idea. Will sharing my salary and encouraging my co-workers to do the same, allow for myself and my co-workers to better understand our value and help us negotiate raises? Or will it simply foster resentment and division?

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