The heat was palpable, a phantom warmth emanating from the glass of my screen. It was 2:09 AM. Alex was hammering away at the command line, every line of esoteric code a prayer whispered into the digital void. Slack channels, usually a ceaseless river of chatter, had settled into an anxious, terrifying silence, broken only by the sporadic, grateful bursts of green checkmarks confirming that the database rollback was finally, agonizingly, working.
Everyone, from the VP who didn’t understand SQL to the intern who had only been with us for 49 days, was emailing praise. “Alex saved us.” “Alex, the legend.” “We’ll get you that $979 bonus immediately.” They celebrated the victory, but nobody-and I mean nobody who actually mattered in terms of resource allocation-asked the essential question: Why was the system so fragile that it required a 2 AM emergency resurrection in the first place?
This is the pernicious, soul-crushing myth of the Rockstar Employee.
We love them. We glorify them. We pay them a multiple of the average wage, the mythical “10x engineer” becoming perhaps the most destructive concept in modern knowledge work. But if you look closely, the so-called rockstar isn’t primarily defined by their capacity for innovation; they are defined by their capacity for crisis management. They thrive on chaos. In fact, in many sick systems, they unconsciously-or consciously-become co-creators of that chaos, because chaos is the engine of their recognition.
I should know. I was one of them. For years, I chased that organizational high, that toxic, addictive blast of gratitude when the system broke and only my specific, undocumented knowledge could fix it. I remember the rush, the feeling of indispensable superiority. I used to call that job security. Now, looking back, I realize it was just hoarding risk and validating organizational negligence. I was paid handsomely to be a system dependency, not an asset.
The Contradiction: Rewarding Crisis, Punishing Resilience
This is the core contradiction we refuse to face: By glorifying the fixer, we punish the preventer. We allocate time, budget, and institutional memory to the spectacular save, while the mundane, disciplined work of resilience-documentation, testing, simplifying architecture, maintaining protocol-is relegated to ‘technical debt’ and perpetually postponed.
Warnings Raised vs. Warnings Addressed
When the system failed this time, the real story wasn’t the 9 hours Alex spent coding; the real story was the 99 days leading up to it, during which the quality assurance team-the quiet ones who never got the celebratory emails-had raised 19 distinct warnings about undocumented single points of failure. Those warnings were considered low priority. Why? Because they didn’t offer the immediate, visible, dopamine-rich reward of a heroic save. They were just prevention.
We need to build organizations that flatten the curve of crisis, organizations that make heroism unnecessary. When a critical system fails, you don’t want a lone genius improvising a fix based on esoteric knowledge they keep locked in their head; you want a disciplined team following a standardized protocol. This principle holds true whether you’re debugging a network issue or dealing with a far more critical biological failure. When seconds truly count, you rely on the system, not the solo act. That’s why training focuses entirely on replicable, predictable team behavior under extreme stress. When you are performing
Hjärt-lungräddning.se, you don’t want a maverick deciding to try a new technique; you want the proven process executed perfectly, every time.
I’ve been trying to embody that level of protocol and predictability lately, which explains why I spent 7 hours organizing my personal archives by color last weekend-a deeply structural, perhaps slightly obsessive, attempt to impose order on inherent chaos. This obsessive focus on process brought to mind Hugo M.-L., a museum education coordinator I met briefly at a conference a few years ago.
Hugo wasn’t glamorous. He wasn’t a disruptor. His job was ensuring that the museum’s educational materials-ancient maps, delicate notes, instructional guides-were categorized, tagged, and accessible. He described his system to me, detailing how the 149 steps of the accession process were critical not because they guaranteed discovery, but because they guaranteed recovery. If a piece of history went missing, they didn’t call in a detective to swoop in and save the day; they followed the filing protocol back 149 steps to the last recorded location. He wasn’t archiving for the immediate viewer; he was archiving for the unknown researcher 99 years in the future.
“I was still in my ‘Alex the fixer’ phase, preferring a last-minute sprint to a disciplined marathon. But Hugo was right. His system was resilient. Ours was brittle.”
I remember criticizing him in my head at the time-it felt so slow, so bureaucratic. Where was the excitement? Where was the innovation? I was still in my ‘Alex the fixer’ phase, preferring a last-minute sprint to a disciplined marathon. But Hugo was right. His system was resilient. Ours was brittle.
The Hero Tax: Cultural Incentives and Brittleness
This tax isn’t just the inflated salary we pay the rockstar, nor is it the extra 29 hours of overtime we log during the inevitable meltdown. The Hero Tax is the cultural incentive structure that tells everyone else-the documenters, the testers, the gradual improvers, the people who show up every day and maintain the steady state-that their work is second-class. They are the background hum; Alex is the aria. When Alex leaves, the system collapses, because all the critical knowledge was internalized, intentionally or accidentally, by the one indispensable person.
Genius is often indistinguishable from a single point of failure.
Organizations that celebrate individual heroics are often organizations that are afraid of accountability. It is much easier to praise Alex the savior than to confront the VP who cut corners on infrastructure budget 69 months ago. It’s easier to give out spot bonuses than to implement the painful, messy, expensive protocols that remove the opportunity for heroics entirely.
Moving Beyond the Hero Narrative
I have seen my own teams struggle with this transition. It’s hard to tell an engineer who just pulled an all-nighter that their performance, while momentarily impressive, was a failure of the surrounding process. It’s an uncomfortable truth: The moment the system requires a hero, the system has already lost. We must create environments where 3:09 AM server fixes are not the defining story, but the documented, anticipated outcome of a deep, structural rot that we simply failed to prevent.
Transition to Resilience
78% Complete
We must move from worshipping the spectacular save to revering the mundane, meticulous discipline that prevents the crisis from ever occurring. If you want a truly resilient future, stop looking for your next Alex. Start looking for the quiet process engineer-the Hugo M.-L. of your organization-who spends their days documenting the 49 distinct steps required for a safe, predictable rollback, ensuring that when things go sideways, the process takes over and no single person ever has to be indispensable.
49 Steps
The Cost of Indispensability
What indispensable system are you failing to build today, simply because you are waiting for a hero to swoop in tomorrow? That is the real cost of chasing legends.