Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by Enk1du 612 days ago
The best advice I've seen on the issue is "Don't scar on the first cut", as in you shouldn't try to add a new rule every time you have an outage.

That being said, I absolutely hate heroes.

I've worked with a couple that get their thrills from the adrenaline buzz of swooping in and fixing the big problem ... and walking away. They don't put the work into documentation or making systems resilient because that's boring. I like boring. Boring means I can clock off at the regular time and not think about work until the next day.

2 comments

> I absolutely hate heroes

I dislike the heroes' bosses. They're to blame for the situation. Managing a team of engineers is not like being a dungeon master.

You don’t know what heroism is. Read the literature of heroism before you decide you hate your fellow humans. Each one of us is capable of heroism.
And a system that requires it if it’s employees to function is fundamentally abusive
The article is not about real heroism though. It’s about workplace “heroes” in the sense of diligent, creative, productive workers who have to take personal responsibility for the success of the business despite lacking support from said business.
Ah, now the Natural Born Heroes heroism and the virtue of Xenia (ξενία) I can get behind.

It's the ego-inflating ""heroes" in scare quotes" that crave validation that I find so exasperating.