It’s annual review season and I received my usual slightly puzzling feedback that I work too hard and care too much. Only this time, something finally shifted when I had ChatGPT analyse my review and recommend this year’s personal development goals.
Instead of the ‘try to slow down’, ‘don’t take on too much’, ‘it isn’t all on you’ advice I was expecting, GPT informed me that I was in fact optimising for entirely the wrong thing:
In many workplaces, there’s an unspoken rule: if you’re constantly solving high-stakes problems under pressure, you’re seen as indispensable. You’re the hero. The firefighter. The fixer. Your value is obvious because it’s visible — people see the problem and they see you fix it.
But if you’re the kind of person who prevents fires — who quietly holds things together, anticipates issues before they arise and creates systems that keep everything running smoothly — your impact is often invisible.
And because there’s no dramatic “save,” people might not notice that anything needed saving in the first place.
I had never had anybody explain it to me that clearly before. In my whole career I’ve never understood why it’s the noisy, chaotic, careless people who are seen as indispensable to a company while those more oriented towards calm efficiency are overlooked.
I have always seen fire prevention as an important part of my role because in a world of finite resources, any time spent dealing with preventable problems is time taken away from driving the Product forward. Similarly, problems tend to impact morale and low morale amongst frustrated engineers impacts Product outcomes which ultimately means lower value for customers.
Driven by this motivation I devote a significant amount of time to understanding complexity, anticipating friction and covering gaps before they emerge. This is no easy task in a large business with so many potential points of failure that may impact my team, but until now I’ve seen it as a necessary component to doing my job effectively.
As it turns out, we are often simply not set up to consider this a skill and in rigidly attaching my value to the absence of calamity I have inadvertently supported the narrative that the true heroes are the ones who visibly navigated avoidable disaster, publicly renegotiated entirely reasonable deadlines and tirelessly ‘held the floor’ during the only time attention is guaranteed: a crisis.
At this point in my career, such a discovery presents a real challenge: am I simply in the wrong place or am I perhaps in the wrong field or even the wrong industry? Would I be willing to play the avoidable disaster game and what would it cost me to succeed? When being thoughtful and responsible is no longer an asset, where do I go from here?
Digital Becca 