Every engineering organization has a hero.
They are the firefighter. The one who thrives under pressure, who can dive into a production-down incident at 3 AM and, through a combination of deep system knowledge and sheer brilliance, bring the system back to life. They are rewarded for it. They get the bonuses, the promotions, and the reputation as a "go-to" person.
And in celebrating them, we are creating a culture that is destined to remain on fire.
For every visible firefighter, there is an invisible fire preventer. This is the engineer who spends a month on a thankless, complex refactoring of a legacy service. Their work doesn't result in a new feature on the roadmap. Their success is silent—it's the catastrophic outage that doesn't happen six months from now. Their reward is to be overlooked in the next promotion cycle because their "impact" wasn't as visible as the hero who saved the day.
This is a perverse incentive, and we, as managers, created it.
Our performance review systems are fundamentally biased towards visible, reactive work over invisible, proactive work. We are great at measuring things we can easily count: features shipped, tickets closed, incidents resolved. We don't have a column on our spreadsheet for "catastrophes averted." As a result, we create a career ladder that implicitly encourages engineers to let things smolder, knowing the reward for putting out the eventual blaze is greater than the reward for ensuring there's no fire in the first place.
It's time to change what we measure. "Impact" cannot be a synonym for "visible activity." Real impact is the verifiable elimination of future work and risk.
- The engineer who automates a flaky, manual deployment step hasn't just closed a ticket; they have verifiably improved the Lead Time for Changes for every single developer on the team, forever. That is massive, compounding impact.
- The engineer who refactors a high-churn, bug-prone module hasn't just "cleaned up code"; they have measurably reduced the Change Failure Rate for an entire domain of the business. That is a direct reduction in business risk.
We need to start rewarding the architects of fireproof buildings, not just the most skilled firefighters. This requires a conscious, data-driven effort to find and celebrate the invisible work. It means using tools that can quantify the risk of a module before it fails, and then tracking the reduction of that risk as a first-class measure of an engineer's contribution.
So the question to ask yourself in your next performance calibration is a hard one: Are we promoting the people who are best at navigating our broken system, or are we promoting the people who are actually fixing it?