“The guy who sucks, is somehow the hero, because it takes time,” writes Michael Stahnke, a community manager at Puppet Labs. “The guy who doesn’t look busy, because he did it right the first time, is overlooked, upset, and eventually changes jobs; which really only validates the hero.”

That’s Stahnke’s take on what he calls “hero culture” and along with the pro-stupid attitude of many IT managers, it’s one of the worst problems in IT teams. ” One place I worked at went from fire-fighting to very proactive in about 2 years,” Stahnke writes. “In the end that team was more or less ignored when it came to higher ratings, promotions, and other types of rewards.”

Hero culture is part of what makes developers rock stars while the ops team that keeps the servers up 99.99% of the time only get attention during that .01% of downtime. It rewards the wrong people and disenfranchises good workers.

It’s also an issue that drives women out of IT. Kathleen Melymuka wrote for Computerworld in 2008:

The fourth thing is the risky behavior patterns that are rewarded. We found, particularly in the tech firms, that the way to get promoted is to do a diving catch: Some system is crashing in Bulgaria, so you get on the plane in the middle of the night and dash off and spend the weekend wrestling with routers and come back a hero, and there’s a ticker-tape parade, and you get two promotions — you can actually leap a whole grade if you rescue a big enough system.

But what does that have to do with gender? Women have a hard time taking on those assignments because you can dive and fail to catch. If a man fails, his buddies dust him off and say, “It’s not your fault; try again next time.” A women fails and is never seen again. A woman cannot survive a failure. So they become risk-averse in a culture where risk is rewarded. Women would rather build a system that didn’t crash in the first place, but men enjoy that diving catch and have a system of support that allows them to go out on a limb.

The real question though is what to do about it. Stahnke writes “If somebody likes heroes, especially your management teams, just move along. Nothing to see…” I don’t think that’s really an acceptable solution. But apart from raising awareness of the issue, which Stahnke and Melymuka have done, I’m not sure what the answer is.

I’d like to think that DevOps practices can at least reduce this issue, by getting developers on the call rotation and helping them see the issues that ops faces on a day to day basis, and by implementing saner approaches to agile development.

What specific sorts of management reforms can be put in place to better recognize the real heroes – the people who do it right the first (or even second) – time from the people who solve crises that they started themselves?

Photo by Hanna b