A while back, on March 2024, I read a post on LinkedIn starting with the words “Don’t be a hero. Your team will thank you.” It claimed that, as a team member, you should let systems break, so awareness and visibility can be raised about the underlying issue. 

I want to steelman the argument first. Perhaps the author meant that a person should avoid being a thankless hero, fixing problems silently, and muffling important messages from escalating upstream. Without awareness of an issue, the issue cannot be addressed.

That said, I fundamentally disagree with the attitude of abdication of responsibility.

If a search fails and doesn’t return any results, some users may be willing to tolerate it, given that this is an inconsequential and easily recoverable error. However, that is unacceptable when a customer is at a pharmacy trying to fulfill their prescription and can’t, because someone on the team just “let the system break.” The same holds true for many other critical or trivial situations such as air travel, catering lunch for a team meeting, checking-in for a medical appointment, dropping off your kid at daycare, and many more.

The way I see it, at a minimum, this attitude masks a deeper issue: inefficient or non-existent communications between individual contributors and leadership, and even among leaders themselves.

If a part of the system is broken, malfunctioning, or has incapacitating tech-debt, the people working on it have the responsibility to communicate effectively, explain the severity of the problem, and escalate the conversation to whichever level of leadership necessary.

Before this argument is taken out of context, here we are talking about unaddressed issues that can take systems down, cause outages, and severely affect customers. Building a laundry list of every conceivable improvement–just because there may be a better way of implementing them–is counterproductive and may reduce your credibility, as in Aesop’s fable “The Boy Who Cried Wolf.” The voices creating noise and chatter tend to be dismissed from conversations, however valid the argument du jour may be. Choose your problems and respective escalations carefully.

A hero, in this context, can be a person, or group of people who is there to fix the issues and keep systems going. But is it the right incentive?

Real problems do happen, and when they do, we should acknowledge and celebrate those who save the day, but avoidable problems may be a different story. Otherwise, we would be giving people the wrong encouragement. The right thing to do here is to address the root cause of the problem and prevent it from happening.

Letting systems break is abdication of responsibility, breaking of Xenial laws, and taking customers down with you. That is what villains do, not heroes.

On July 19, 2024, many companies around the world experienced a widespread outage of their systems due to a system that broke.

I don’t work for CrowdStrike, don’t know anyone who does, nor have any association with them. And I am certain that there are many capable people over there who worked tirelessly to remediate the issue and prevent it from happening again.

Yet questions remain unanswered: Did someone let systems break? Was it a case in point? Could this issue have been prevented? I suspect that none of the notes they received had a “thank you.”Don’t let things break, communicate effectively with peers and leaders, and do the right thing by working on addressing the root cause. Your customers and your company are the ones who will send you a thank you note.