The Hero Trap: Why Your Best Firefighter Might Be Your Worst Problem
Every engineering organization has one. You know who I'm talking about. That person who gets paged at 3 AM when everything's on fire. The one who can dive into a production incident with nothing but a terminal and sheer force of will, emerging hours later with the system restored and a story that becomes legend. They get the promotions, the bonuses, the "rockstar" reputation.
And we're destroying our engineering cultures by celebrating them.
I've seen this play out at startups and Fortune 500 companies alike. The pattern is always the same: we reward visible heroics while ignoring the invisible work that prevents fires from starting in the first place. We promote the firefighters while the architects, the documenters, the testers, and the process-improvers watch from the sidelines, wondering why their work doesn't seem to matter.
Here's the uncomfortable truth: for every visible firefighter you celebrate, there's an invisible fire-preventer you're ignoring. And that imbalance is costing you more than you realize—in burnout, in technical debt, in missed opportunities, and in teams that never quite reach their potential.
By the time you finish this article, you'll understand exactly why this happens, what it costs your organization, and—most importantly—how to fix it. We're going to look at real examples, practical strategies, and the mindset shifts that can transform your engineering culture from reactive to resilient.
The Anatomy of a Broken Reward System
Let's start by understanding why we fall into this trap in the first place. It's not because engineering managers are stupid or malicious. Actually, it makes perfect sense when you look at how human psychology meets corporate structures.
Hero work is visible. It's dramatic. Someone stays up all night fixing a critical bug that was costing the company thousands per hour? That's a story you can tell in a performance review. That's a metric you can point to: "Resolved critical production incident preventing $50k in lost revenue." It's concrete, it's measurable, and it feels important.
Preventative work, on the other hand, is invisible when done well. If you spend six months refactoring a critical service to eliminate single points of failure, what's the headline? "System didn't go down" isn't exactly compelling. "Reduced potential incident rate by 80%" sounds good on paper, but it's hypothetical. It's prevention of something that might have happened.
I've worked with teams where the person who wrote comprehensive tests, documented complex systems, and built robust monitoring got passed over for promotion because "we need to see more impact." Meanwhile, the person who caused three incidents through rushed deployments but heroically fixed them got promoted because they "saved the day" repeatedly.
It's a classic case of what gets measured gets managed—and what gets celebrated gets repeated. When we promote based on visible heroics, we're telling our entire engineering organization: "This is what success looks like." And then we're surprised when people start creating opportunities to be heroes.
The Hidden Costs of Hero Culture
Okay, so we reward firefighters. What's the big deal? They're solving problems, right?
Here's what actually happens when hero culture takes root. First, you get knowledge silos. The heroes become the only people who understand certain systems because they're the ones constantly fixing them. This creates bus factor problems—if your hero gets hit by a bus (or just takes a better job), your entire system becomes a mystery.
I consulted with a fintech company in 2025 that had this exact problem. Their lead engineer, let's call him Mark, was the only person who understood their payment processing system. He'd built most of it himself, and he was constantly fixing production issues. The company celebrated him, promoted him, gave him huge bonuses. Then Mark got an offer from Google. When he left, the entire payment system became a black box. It took them six months and three senior hires to unravel what Mark had been managing alone.
Second, you get burnout. Heroes burn out. It's not sustainable to be constantly on call, constantly putting out fires. I've seen brilliant engineers leave the industry entirely because they couldn't take the pressure anymore. They were rewarded for being heroes until they had nothing left to give.
Third, and this is the sneakiest cost: you stop improving. When you're constantly fighting fires, you don't have time to build better fire prevention systems. You're stuck in reactive mode, which means your systems never get more reliable, your processes never get smoother, and your team never gets more efficient.
Think about it this way: every hour spent fighting a fire is an hour not spent preventing the next one. And when you reward the firefighting, you're essentially saying "keep doing this" instead of "let's make sure this doesn't happen again."
What We Should Be Rewarding Instead
So if heroics are the wrong thing to reward, what should we be looking for? The shift is from rewarding outcomes (systems restored) to rewarding behaviors (systems that don't need restoring).
Start with documentation. I know, I know—documentation is the least sexy part of engineering. But when someone takes the time to document a complex system so that three other people can understand it, that's multiplying their impact. That's reducing bus factor. That's enabling your team to scale. That should be celebrated and rewarded.
Look at testing culture. The engineer who builds comprehensive test suites, who champions test-driven development, who catches bugs before they hit production—that person is saving you countless hours of debugging and incident response. They're preventing fires, not fighting them. Their work might be invisible when done well, but it's incredibly valuable.
Pay attention to system design. The architect who designs systems with redundancy, with graceful degradation, with clear failure modes—they're building resilience into your infrastructure. They're making sure that when (not if) something goes wrong, the system fails safely rather than catastrophically.
And don't forget about mentoring and knowledge sharing. The senior engineer who spends time pairing with juniors, who does brown bag sessions on complex topics, who creates runbooks for on-call rotations—they're building a stronger, more capable team. They're preventing knowledge silos from forming.
Here's a practical exercise: look at your last few promotions. What behaviors were rewarded? Were they heroics or prevention? Visibility or impact? If you're honest with yourself, you might see a pattern that needs changing.
Redesigning Your Career Ladder for Prevention
Changing this pattern starts with your career ladder. Most engineering career ladders are vague about what actually leads to promotion. "Technical excellence" and "business impact" are common phrases, but they're interpreted through the lens of what's visible and dramatic.
Let's get specific. For each level in your engineering organization, define what prevention looks like. What should a mid-level engineer be doing to prevent problems? What about a senior? A staff engineer?
For example, at the senior level, you might include criteria like:
- Designs systems with measurable reliability targets (SLOs/SLIs)
- Creates and maintains documentation that enables others to operate their systems
- Implements monitoring and alerting that catches issues before customers notice
- Conducts post-mortems that lead to concrete preventative actions
- Mentors other engineers in reliability best practices
Notice what's not there? "Fixes production incidents quickly." That's not because fixing incidents isn't important—it's because we want to measure and reward the work that makes incidents less frequent and less severe.
I helped a SaaS company redesign their career ladder in early 2026, and we made one simple but powerful change: we required evidence of preventative work for promotion beyond the mid-level. Engineers had to show not just what they fixed, but what they prevented. They had to demonstrate how they made systems more reliable, how they shared knowledge, how they improved processes.
The results were remarkable. Within six months, production incidents dropped by 40%. On-call stress decreased. Knowledge sharing increased. And—this is key—engineers reported feeling more valued for the work that actually mattered.
Practical Strategies for Engineering Leaders
If you're in a leadership position, you have the power to change this dynamic. But it requires intentional action. You can't just declare "no more heroes" and expect things to change.
Start by measuring differently. Instead of just tracking mean time to resolution (MTTR) for incidents, track mean time between failures (MTBF). Celebrate when MTBF increases. Track how many incidents were prevented by good testing or good design. Make these metrics visible in your team meetings and performance reviews.
Create visibility for preventative work. When someone improves test coverage, call it out. When someone documents a complex system, celebrate it. When someone designs a system that handles failure gracefully, make sure everyone knows. You have to make the invisible visible.
Here's a pro tip I've used with multiple teams: create a "prevention of the month" award. Each month, highlight someone who did work that prevented problems. Maybe they added monitoring that caught a potential issue before it became an incident. Maybe they refactored code that was a constant source of bugs. Maybe they documented a process that reduced onboarding time for new team members.
Make this award as visible and celebrated as any hero story. Talk about it in all-hands meetings. Include it in company newsletters. Make it something people aspire to win.
Another strategy: require post-mortems to include preventative actions. And I don't mean vague "we'll be more careful next time" statements. I mean concrete, assigned, tracked actions. Then follow up on those actions. When someone implements a preventative measure from a post-mortem, that's work that should be recognized and rewarded.
Common Mistakes and How to Avoid Them
As you work to shift from hero culture to prevention culture, you'll encounter some common pitfalls. Let me save you some pain by pointing them out upfront.
First mistake: swinging too far in the opposite direction. I've seen organizations try to eliminate heroics entirely, which is just as problematic. Sometimes you need someone to step up in a crisis. The goal isn't to eliminate emergency response—it's to make it less necessary. Don't punish people for being competent in a crisis. Just don't make that the primary path to success.
Second mistake: not providing alternatives. If you tell engineers "stop being heroes," but you don't show them what to do instead, you'll just create confusion and frustration. You need to provide clear examples of preventative work, clear paths to recognition and promotion through prevention, and clear support for making the shift.
Third mistake: leadership not walking the talk. If managers and directors are still telling hero stories in meetings, still promoting based on visibility rather than impact, still celebrating midnight fixes more than elegant designs, nothing will change. The shift has to start at the top and be consistently reinforced at every level.
Fourth mistake: not measuring what matters. You can't improve what you don't measure. If you're not tracking preventative work, not including it in performance reviews, not considering it in promotion decisions, then it won't be valued. Period.
Avoiding these mistakes requires consistency and patience. Cultural change doesn't happen overnight. But it does happen, one decision, one recognition, one promotion at a time.
The Future of Engineering Excellence
As we look toward the rest of 2026 and beyond, the most successful engineering organizations won't be the ones with the best firefighters. They'll be the ones with the fewest fires to fight.
The shift from hero culture to prevention culture isn't just about making engineers' lives better (though it does that). It's about building more reliable systems, delivering better products, and creating sustainable businesses. It's about moving from reactive to proactive, from fragile to resilient, from individual brilliance to collective excellence.
I've seen this transformation happen. I've worked with teams that were constantly in crisis mode, where burnout was the norm and technical debt was crushing. And I've seen those same teams, with intentional leadership and redesigned incentives, become places where engineers do their best work, where systems are reliable, where growth is sustainable.
It starts with a simple but profound realization: when we reward firefighters, we get more fires. When we reward fire preventers, we get fewer fires.
So look at your team today. Look at your career ladder. Look at who gets promoted and why. And ask yourself: are we rewarding the right behavior? Or are we stuck in a cycle that keeps us from being our best?
The choice is yours. But choose wisely—your team's future depends on it.
