I was something of a rock star when younger, but I like to think that even if it turned out I was not Paul McCartney in talent I was at least Paul McCartney in affability.

I've worked with fortysomething guys that were "10x engineers" or "rockstars" when young a few times. One of them was very smart but really kind of a one trick pony engineer, he kind of always wanted to use the same hammer to solve every problem and that got in his was of self improvement and awareness. The Dunning Krueger effect was strong with him.

The other guy is kind of a legend and never ever stopped being a rockstar and kind of rockstared a few new fields and technologies again. He's also really humble but at the same easy knows exactly what he can do and what he can't do and is very good at always being at 100%.

I'm a 50-something, recently retired but still programming for fun and non-profits. "Rock star" meant something different 30 years ago. Less was expected of you, but also the tools and technologies weren't there to help you. No databases in the cloud, no google or stackoverflow. You had to wait for books to come in and hope they had the information you needed, otherwise you took a week and figured it out for yourself. My very first job, my IBM PC clone had two floppies. My code was on drive b:. I would put the editor floppy in drive a:, edit, then put in the compiler floppy, then the linker floppy. Programming in C, manual memory management. I was good then, I'm good now. Lessons learned then no doubt honed my skills in general, but I don't know if I "use" those skills nowadays.

Please don't say "rock star". It's such a tired term, right behind "ninja".