Your best developer might be your biggest risk.
You know the pattern. One developer who knows everything. Who can fix anything. Who works faster than anyone else.
Leadership loves them. They’re the hero who saves the release.
On the surface, they’re your safety net. Underneath, something else is happening:
Knowledge is concentrating instead of spreading. Others stop learning because “Alex will fix it.” Documentation doesn’t happen because Alex just knows. Code becomes increasingly dependent on context only Alex has.
And then Alex leaves.
Suddenly you realize: Alex wasn’t accelerating your team. Alex was masking systemic problems while creating new ones.
The genius developer anti-pattern isn’t about the individual. It’s about the organizational dynamics that reward heroics over systems. That celebrate crisis response over crisis prevention. That mistake individual output for team capability.
High-performing organizations don’t need heroes. They need systems that make heroics unnecessary.
If you recognize this pattern, start here: pair Alex strategically, rotate ownership, and make documentation part of the job, not a nice-to-have.
The question isn’t “how do we keep Alex?” It’s “why does our system require an Alex to function?”
What systems would break if your best developer left tomorrow?