Hero Culture means your systems are broken

We like to celebrate heroes in software. There are always those engineers who save the day - the person who is the only one who knows how a build system works, or the person who grinds long hours in response to a security panic, fixing all the bugs by hand. We like to celebrate them. How many times have we heard an executive praise that kind of “hero” behavior?

But it’s actually a really bad sign if your organization has heroes. Tomas Keller was once asked why his kitchen looked so calm, and he said “because we are prepared. If you have to rush, you’re already lost”. It’s true here as well. Hero culture means something is amiss with your systems or incentives. You wouldn’t need the hero to rescue you if you had built a healthy system - good infrastructure, readable documentation, repeatable processes, and so on.

This isn’t just true for individuals, though usually they’re the ones most motivated. Sometimes teams or divisions of companies can act in this role, and that can point to similar issues with business models, culture and more. I heard a story once about a team at Apple whose feature was cut from a release because it missed the deadline - so they worked all weekend to get it done. The manager coming in in the morning was annoyed - they broke the process; the decision had been made. That feature didn’t make it into the release - that’s a great example of being disciplined about system and process and not letting hero culture take hold.

It’s natural and nice to be grateful when someone saves us, and we should be. But we need to separate that natural feeling from the understanding that we shouldn’t have needed that effort to begin with. The right way to respond to a hero is “thanks, that was really helpful, now let’s all work together to make sure it never happens again”.