That is true. But also noone is writing critical systems staying up all night drinking Red Bull. Look at other engineering disciplines. Where are the bridge and dam building rockstars? Where are the nuclear power ninjas?

I wonder what "rock stars" are going to do when they discover other uses for their time, hobbies, families, sports, travel and so on. Resign?

I think you're talking about two different things:

1. People that are dedicated to their craft, write A LOT of code and self-study in their free time.

2. Red bull drinking Valley stereotypes.

People from camp 1 don't live up to the stereotype of the "rock star" but definitely work way more than 9-5. Where work is defined as studying languages, domain specific knowledge, low-level code...

People from camp 1 also do not generally curate a public profile, since they generally come from traditional engineering cultures where judgements are made based on past experience and ability to reason about complex systems during interviews than on flashy portfolios and pop quizzes.

I don't think it is much of a stretch to assert that the vast majority of code in the world that accomplishes important business goals is not "high performance" and in most cases doesn't need to be "high performance". So this is not really addressing the main point of the comment it is replying to.

> medical devices, air traffic control, credit card processing, phone switches

Those are all high performance areas of coding that would require great skill to execute correctly. Aside from medical devices, they all require a lot of concurrency and real-time processing in the case of air traffic control and phone switches. They are practically the definition of high performance programming.

No, if there is a definition of "high performance" in colloquial use, it's number crunching on a supercomputer e.g. weather forecasting and so on. Guess what, thats a very important application of computing, and once again, rock stars are notable only for their absence.