This is a great article and it resonates with me as well.
One additional aspect I would add: if you are looked on as the hero, management starts to expect everything to be solved as though it were a crisis. Even new features are now presented as crises. This lends itself to clever, but unmaintainable code. It's clever because you are smart. It's unmaintainable because you are in hurry-up-and-duct-tape-it mode instead of spending time to design.
Followed to its logical conclusion, the code you develop is a fragile ball of mud and the job is unbearably stressful. Worse, a new dev from a more-healthy environment hires in, and shines a light on the fact that your code is crap. You can't believe it because your hero experience leads you to the opposite logical conclusion about your skill.
It's a setup for failure of the software as well as personal failure for the hero.
Beekey Cheung is a software engineer with a large amount of enthusiasm for economics and a passion for education. He loves mentoring other programmers and is currently building an application to te...
That's an interesting perspective. I've usually seen heroes, including me, suffer professionally mostly because we spend so much time fighting fires that we don't have time to actually build new features. We end up letting that skillset rust. What you say makes a ton of sense though.
For further actions, you may consider blocking this person and/or reporting abuse
We're a place where coders share, stay up-to-date and grow their careers.
This is a great article and it resonates with me as well.
One additional aspect I would add: if you are looked on as the hero, management starts to expect everything to be solved as though it were a crisis. Even new features are now presented as crises. This lends itself to clever, but unmaintainable code. It's clever because you are smart. It's unmaintainable because you are in hurry-up-and-duct-tape-it mode instead of spending time to design.
Followed to its logical conclusion, the code you develop is a fragile ball of mud and the job is unbearably stressful. Worse, a new dev from a more-healthy environment hires in, and shines a light on the fact that your code is crap. You can't believe it because your hero experience leads you to the opposite logical conclusion about your skill.
It's a setup for failure of the software as well as personal failure for the hero.
That's an interesting perspective. I've usually seen heroes, including me, suffer professionally mostly because we spend so much time fighting fires that we don't have time to actually build new features. We end up letting that skillset rust. What you say makes a ton of sense though.