I remember the exact moment I felt most valuable in my career. It wasn’t when I got a promotion, and it wasn’t when I saw the exit money.
It was late on a Sunday evening. The stakes couldn’t have been higher.
The next morning, we were scheduled to demo our product to the biggest potential client we had ever landed. They were ten times the size of our second-largest customer. This wasn’t just a sales meeting; for my small company, this was survival.
I was the one scheduled to give the demo. I was holding the iPad, running through the flow one last time, when the app froze. Then it crashed.
I tried to restart it. Nothing. A critical, never-before-seen bug (well, our QA process was really bad, I must admit). The backend looked fine, but the device was a brick.
The room went silent. It wasn’t a peaceful silence; it was the vacuum of a looming disaster. My partner and the team looked at me. Nobody knew how to fix it. We built the whole thing in few weeks, hackathon style, just to win the customer. There was no StackOverflow thread. There was just us, the iPad, and the suffocating pressure of the clock.
I spent the next two hours in a trance state. I poked, I prodded, I cleared caches, I rewrote config files on the fly. To be honest, even today, I don’t know exactly how I fixed it. I just know that at ~3:00 AM, the app opened. It worked.
Few hours later, the demo went perfectly (incredible, right?). We signed the client. The company was saved.
I sat back in my chair, adrenaline still pumping, feeling like a god. I told myself that I was the glue holding the business together.
It took me five years to realize the truth: I wasn’t the glue. I was the bottleneck.
The Hero’s High
We need to talk about the “Hero Programmer” archetype, not as a badge of honor, but as an addiction.
Early in our careers, being the Hero is intoxicating. It validates our existence. When you are the only one who knows how to un-brick the iPad, or the only one who knows the undocumented flag that forces the cache to flush, you feel safe. You feel essential. You feel like a wizard among mortals.
There is a specific dopamine hit that comes from being the person everyone turns to when the house is on fire. It feels like love. It feels like respect.
But it is a trap.
If you are the only one who can put out the fire, you are secretly incentivized to let the building burn just enough so that you can save it. You aren’t building a fire-proof house; you are building a house that needs you.
The Bus Factor of One
I used to wear my “bus factor” like a medal. “If I get hit by a bus, this whole place shuts down,” I’d joke.
Looking back at that iPad moment, I realize that wasn’t a triumph. It was a confession of professional malpractice.
That night, the fate of the entire company rested on whether or not I could guess the right sequence of buttons to press. That isn’t a business strategy; that is a gamble.
A team that relies on a Hero is a fragile system. It is a single point of failure masked as high performance. If your team cannot deploy without you, if they cannot debug the staging environment without you, if they cannot make an architectural decision without your blessing, you haven’t built a team. You have built an entourage.
I realized this the hard way 1 year later when I finally took a two-week vacation. At that time I was working every day, weekends included. I left my laptop in the office, I went to south Italy, sea, bad internet connection.
When I came back, I didn’t find a disaster. I found a team that was exhausted, angry, and resentful. They hadn’t been able to ship. They had spent two weeks waiting for the “wizard” to come back and cast the spell.
I hadn’t empowered them. I had crippled them.
The Ego Death of Leadership
The hardest transition in engineering leadership isn’t learning to manage people; it’s learning to kill your own ego.
To move from “Senior Engineer” to true “Leader,” you have to do the most painful thing imaginable: You have to make yourself useless.
You have to document the secret knowledge that makes you special. You have to automate the scripts that only you know how to run. You have to sit on your hands during an outage and watch a Junior engineer struggle to fix it, knowing you could solve it in five seconds, but knowing that if you do, they will never learn.
This feels terrible.
It feels like you are eroding your own value. It feels like you are writing your own severance package. When you stop being the Hero, you stop getting the applause. No one claps for the person who prevented the fire; they only clap for the person who put it out.
You have to learn to find satisfaction in a quiet week. You have to learn to love the boredom of stability.
The “Boring” Architect
I am trying to be a different kind of engineer the last years.
I don’t want to be the firefighter anymore. I want to be the fire marshal. I want to be the one who installs the sprinklers, checks the exits, and ensures the building is up to code so that anyone can survive the emergency.
It is less glamorous. There is no adrenaline rush at 3:00 AM on a Monday. There are no hero moments where I save the demo and look cool in front of the investors.
But my team sleeps through the night. And honestly? So do I.
Are You Hoarding the Fire?
If you are reading this, and you are the person everyone calls when the iPad crashes, ask yourself a hard question.
Are you helping? Or are you hoarding?
Are you the Hero because the system is complex, or is the system complex because you need to be the Hero?
The next time the alarm bells ring, try doing the hardest thing of all: Don’t touch the keyboard. Stand back. Guide someone else’s hands. Transfer the scar tissue. Let them get the dopamine hit.
Let them be the hero, so you can finally just be a leader.