Tech Leaderism

Hero

Every engineering organization has a “hero”. This is the person who understands the undocumented legacy code, who jumps on a call at 3 AM to restart a frozen service and the one we intuitively turn to when production is on fire. We typically reward this behavior with praise, bonuses and status. While the individual’s dedication is admirable the reliance on them is a strategic mistake.

In a resilient system the presence of a hero is not an asset, it is an architectural bug. It indicates a single point of failure that happens to be human. If a deployment succeeds only because a specific individual manually intervened, that process is broken. If an outage is resolved only because one person "just knew" where to look, the observability stack is insufficient.

Relying on heroism is unfair to the individual, who inevitably faces burnout, and it is dangerous for the business. It masks the true fragility of the system. Key person dependency creates an unacceptable level of operational risk and the institutional knowledge remains locked in a single mind rather than codified in the platform.

True seniority is shown by making oneself redundant through documentation, automation and mentorship. We must stop glorifying the firefighters and start celebrating the fire prevention. A boring, uneventful release is the ultimate sign of a mature engineering culture.