In many organizations, the engineer who repeatedly swoops in to "save the day" during a crisis is often lauded. While their efforts might seem admirable, especially to non-technical leaders, this pattern of "heroing" frequently hinders long-term progress and masks deeper issues.
When one person consistently resolves critical issues – especially if those issues stem from problems they may have inadvertently helped create – it highlights systemic weaknesses. It forces us to ask a critical question: If only one person understands or can fix a critical part of the system, how resilient and scalable is that system truly?
Reliance on heroes often leads to several negative consequences:
- Burnout: The "hero" eventually burns out under the constant pressure.
- Knowledge Silos: Critical knowledge remains concentrated in one individual, creating a single point of failure.
- Lack of Team Growth: Other team members don't get the opportunity to learn or take ownership, stunting their growth and engagement.
- Ignoring Root Causes: The focus remains on fixing immediate fires rather than addressing the underlying process, architectural, or testing issues that caused them.
- Reduced Bus Factor: The team's ability to function plummets if the "hero" is unavailable.
The Solution: Build Teams of Proactive Problem Solvers
Instead of celebrating individual heroics, the focus should be on building robust systems and empowered teams:
- Empowerment & Ownership: Equip teams with the tools, knowledge, and clear ownership necessary to address challenges effectively within their domains.
- Proactive Practices: Invest in solid engineering practices – automated testing, observability, infrastructure as code, clear documentation, blameless post-mortems – to prevent issues or detect them earlier.
- Knowledge Sharing: Foster a culture of collaboration, mentorship, and knowledge sharing through pairing, code reviews, and internal documentation.
- Clear Escalation Paths: Define clear processes for handling issues that don't rely on a single individual stepping outside their normal role.
This approach not only strengthens the system's resilience and scalability but also fosters a more fulfilling, collaborative, and sustainable environment for everyone involved, ultimately driving better and more predictable outcomes. True strength lies in the team and the system, not in individual heroics.