Lately I've been having a strange thought.
The more chaotic a system became, the more valuable I looked inside it.
The harder things were to understand, the more people depended on me.
The more production pain existed, the more visibility I got.
And eventually I caught myself wondering something uncomfortable:
Was I actually incentivized to reduce any of this?
At first that thought sounded ridiculous. Nobody wakes up thinking: "Today I will make the system worse."
At least I hope not.
But engineering organizations create strange games. And once you notice the incentives, it's hard to unsee them.
You start noticing what actually gets rewarded.
Fast fixes get rewarded.
Heroic debugging sessions get rewarded.
Late-night firefighting gets rewarded.
Being the person who saves the release gets rewarded.
Visibility gets rewarded.
Urgency gets rewarded.
Visible suffering gets rewarded.
Meanwhile, a lot of other things become strangely invisible.
Reducing future complexity.
Eliminating operational pain before it exists.
Making systems boring.
Making onboarding easier.
Documenting things well enough that people stop depending on you.
Nobody gathers the team to celebrate that nothing exploded this quarter.
The email you will probably never receive.
But everybody notices when you jump into chaos and survive it.
I used to genuinely enjoy simplifying things.
I automated repetitive work.
I removed weird dependencies.
I cleaned up ugly flows.
I documented systems.
I tried to make things understandable.
I tried to make myself less of a bottleneck.
But something strange kept happening. The cleaner things became, the less important I seemed to be.
Fewer escalations.
Fewer emergency calls.
Fewer meetings where people suddenly needed me.
Stability made me respectable. Chaos made me important.
And that realization messed with my head more than I expected. Because once you understand the game, the incentives start pulling on you in strange ways.
If I automate this process perfectly, people stop needing me.
If I document everything properly, knowledge asymmetry disappears.
If onboarding becomes easy, I stop being irreplaceable.
If incidents disappear, heroic visibility disappears too.
If systems become predictable, nobody notices how much pain used to exist.
And the worst part is that you don't even need to become malicious. You just slowly adapt.
You postpone cleanup work a little longer.
You stop fighting heroic culture as hard as you used to.
You tolerate complexity instead of killing it immediately.
You leave certain knowledge undocumented because keeping it in your head preserves a kind of invisible leverage.
You optimize for what the organization visibly rewards.
And eventually, part of you starts needing emergencies. They make your value obvious.
That was probably the most uncomfortable realization for me. Not that organizations reward chaos. But how quickly the human brain learns to survive inside systems like that.
I don't think most engineers consciously choose this. I think many organizations accidentally create environments where reducing complexity becomes strategically irrational in the short term.
Then later everybody acts surprised.
Why are there knowledge silos?
Why are certain engineers impossible to replace?
Why does nobody fix root causes?
Why is every release emotionally exhausting?
Why does the organization depend on heroics just to function?
Maybe the real problem is that modern engineering organizations are much better at rewarding visible heroics than invisible stability.
And the hardest part is this: I'm no longer completely sure whether I'm reducing complexity inside these systems anymore. Or simply learning how to profit from it.
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