Your best firefighter might be your worst pyromaniac.
I’ve seen this pattern destroy data teams from the inside.
The engineer who writes brittle pipelines becomes the only one who can fix them when they break. They’re “indispensable.” They get the crisis bonuses. They’re always the hero on the incident call.
Meanwhile, the engineer who builds boring, reliable systems? Nobody notices. No drama means no visibility.
The incentive structure is backwards. We reward firefighting, not fire prevention. We celebrate the save, not the system that didn’t need saving.
Want to know if your team has this problem? Look at who gets promoted. If it’s always the person in the incident channel at 2am - you’re incentivizing the wrong behavior.
The best data engineers I’ve worked with are invisible. Their pipelines just work. Their work doesn’t create Slack threads or war rooms - so it goes unnoticed.
That’s exactly how it should be.
Who’s your invisible engineer? When did you last recognize them?