Sorta, but all rockstars also have in common that they all have a band, practice a lot, tour a lot and make lots of decent songs...most rockstars played in 30 seat dive bars at one point or another. The Goo Goo Dolls dwelt in obscurity for about a decade before making it big. Radiohead has a similar story.
What did they do? They plugged on, practicing, writing, throwing stuff against the wall until it stuck.
It's the same for programmers, start building a body of work, learn from every line of code you write, take on hard and high profile tasks, don't fail often, and in the end, maybe after about 10 years of hard work, you'll make it big and people will recruit you rather than you having to hunt out jobs.
Some examples:
John Carmack went to boring State School and made decentish but not well known mail order games for underpowered computers before finally making it mainstream with Wolf 3d (seriously, anybody remember Hovertank 3d? didn't think so).
Tim Sweeny went to another boring state school and made such unknown shareware gems like Jill of the Jungle and Brix before hitting it big with Unreal.
Brendan Eich hammered together JavaScript with a small Jesuit school's undergrad education and a state school's Master's and did it in 10 days, before that he spent a decade writing network and dsp code and porting GCC in obscurity.
D. Richard Hipp went to his local state school next to where he grew up and after about 20 years of banging around at a phone company and going back to school, bouncing around a bit looking for work then doing software consulting for a bit, ended up writing the most popular relational database on the planet.
and on and on....Alan Kay, Phil Katz, Ken Thompson, etc. all didn't go Ivy League, and most even went to public, state schools. But they all produced and in the end that's all anybody cares about.
What did they do? They plugged on, practicing, writing, throwing stuff against the wall until it stuck.
It's the same for programmers, start building a body of work, learn from every line of code you write, take on hard and high profile tasks, don't fail often, and in the end, maybe after about 10 years of hard work, you'll make it big and people will recruit you rather than you having to hunt out jobs.
Some examples:
John Carmack went to boring State School and made decentish but not well known mail order games for underpowered computers before finally making it mainstream with Wolf 3d (seriously, anybody remember Hovertank 3d? didn't think so).
Tim Sweeny went to another boring state school and made such unknown shareware gems like Jill of the Jungle and Brix before hitting it big with Unreal.
Brendan Eich hammered together JavaScript with a small Jesuit school's undergrad education and a state school's Master's and did it in 10 days, before that he spent a decade writing network and dsp code and porting GCC in obscurity.
D. Richard Hipp went to his local state school next to where he grew up and after about 20 years of banging around at a phone company and going back to school, bouncing around a bit looking for work then doing software consulting for a bit, ended up writing the most popular relational database on the planet.
and on and on....Alan Kay, Phil Katz, Ken Thompson, etc. all didn't go Ivy League, and most even went to public, state schools. But they all produced and in the end that's all anybody cares about.