Personally I've always found organizational and inter-personal skills at the very tippy top of what "qualifies" someone as a "rock star".

Writing code that's "good enough" ... usable ... and readable by any and everyone that may come across it is the hard part. The "hard" algorithms are a tiny portion of the work, or not a portion at all for a good majority of us.

"The field" seems to emphasize this ideology that coding is "hard". Therefor the "best" code must be the "hardest" to write, and the "best" coder is the only one capable of writing or understanding this kind of "brilliant code".

Reality is though, the most efficient .. "best" code is more about how accessible it is to your peers. The "best" code is easy to write, easy to read, and easy for everyone past, present, and future to understand. The "best" coder writes code in a way that not only amplifies their own performance, but amplifies the performance of everyone that may ever have to work with it.

The unfortunate reality is I don't really believe the culture or especially some of these interview processes are especially good at identifying this type of programmer. Quizzing you for 4 hours on big O notation and sorting algorithms, isn't exactly going to help set you apart from the pack should you be one of these "rock stars".

In my experience it's not so much that the "rock stars" are just 3-4x *faster* ... it's that this type of programmer will amplify the quality and limit the required effort to deliver a product for every member on their team. If you have 1 "rock star" they won't just be churning out "the work of 4 men" ... they'll be able to organize the effort of the 4 working closest to them so that *each* of them are doing "the work of 4 men". The 25% that need "hand holding" ... won't. The other 75% that are "good" ... will be great. You can kind of see this played out with certain frameworks or languages that "just click" with you. Coding is often put up as this ultra high skilled work. In reality, 99% of the work is mind numbing-ly repetitive ... and *personally* I have a really hard time believing the "bottom 25%" aren't *capable* of producing. Lazy-ness .. a lack of confidence ... or just all around poor organizational skills or even management play a much, much larger roll in performance than individual intelligence or aptitude in this field.

The DuckDuckGo Android app is in fact a full web browser, not just the search engine.

https://duckduckgo.com/app

I think this complaint is in regards to how the BROWSER goes to the DuckDuckGo servers for the favicon ... and is not about how the Favicon is displayed in a regular list of search results.

My guess is this bit of server-side logic is the result of a code-base that has evolved from a "Search App" into a fully fledged web browser.