This should be required reading for anyone involved in software. So glad to see someone else experienced this. Literally everything thing you've described happened to me in my lat job.
When it happened to me I actually called myself a firefighter rather than a hero though. I was actually promoted partly because of my firefighting ability which seemed odd to me. I totally agree that if you gain notoriety fighting fires then suddenly there's not much motivation to try preventing them and when there's no fire to fight you feel useless. In the end I wasn't able to affect the kind of changes I wanted as a manger as I didn't have the stomach to fight the CTO (who was also a very intelligent and stubborn firefighter) and I'll admit I enjoyed the feeling of being depended on as much as I hate the stress of the problems themselves.
Sorry for the essay just wanted to say how much this resonated with me and confess my sins : )
I used to call it firefighter too!
One time at a stand-up meeting when I, once again, had to tell everyone I was solving a crisis (putting out fire). I asked the VP to buy me a fire fighter hat so that I don't have to come to these meetings during a crisis. I will wear the hat and everyone knows no to bother me :D
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...
One issue I've found is convincing CTOs and VPs of engineering who love heroes that they should aim for a different engineering culture. It's something that's hard to argue away with logic and even harder to prove.
I think it takes your own time to prove. Once you are in this kind of environment, you are required to put in extra time outside of your work duties to bring it into the team. (ex-Amazon, startup) work.
Since if you are "wasting time" fiddling with infrastructure, why are you not doing actual sprint work.
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This should be required reading for anyone involved in software. So glad to see someone else experienced this. Literally everything thing you've described happened to me in my lat job.
When it happened to me I actually called myself a firefighter rather than a hero though. I was actually promoted partly because of my firefighting ability which seemed odd to me. I totally agree that if you gain notoriety fighting fires then suddenly there's not much motivation to try preventing them and when there's no fire to fight you feel useless. In the end I wasn't able to affect the kind of changes I wanted as a manger as I didn't have the stomach to fight the CTO (who was also a very intelligent and stubborn firefighter) and I'll admit I enjoyed the feeling of being depended on as much as I hate the stress of the problems themselves.
Sorry for the essay just wanted to say how much this resonated with me and confess my sins : )
I used to call it firefighter too!
One time at a stand-up meeting when I, once again, had to tell everyone I was solving a crisis (putting out fire). I asked the VP to buy me a fire fighter hat so that I don't have to come to these meetings during a crisis. I will wear the hat and everyone knows no to bother me :D
I love that we almost have the exact same story!
One issue I've found is convincing CTOs and VPs of engineering who love heroes that they should aim for a different engineering culture. It's something that's hard to argue away with logic and even harder to prove.
I think it takes your own time to prove. Once you are in this kind of environment, you are required to put in extra time outside of your work duties to bring it into the team. (ex-Amazon, startup) work.
Since if you are "wasting time" fiddling with infrastructure, why are you not doing actual sprint work.