No capes: the perils of being a hero-engineer

I've seen this "hero" approach far too many times in my career. I'll admit that early on I didn’t even see it as a problem. There were a core group of people that could be trusted to fix pretty much anything. But inevitably this fails at multiple levels.

People start expecting you to take on every emergency, so you don’t get praised for it any more. The company grows and the number of fires you’re fighting increases. You probably have important company goals you’re expected to be contributing to.

It’s easy to start to start feeling stressed out, under-appreciated and struggle to find the time to work on anything else.

I've had people burn out from being a hero multiple times. Ultimately the hero themselves, and the organization lose. One of the benefits of a defined, trained on, and well understood incident management program is to limit the extent that you get hero problems in your tech team.