Hero engineers can be deadly to team culture, it's time to retire those capes
This article annoyed the hell out of me.. &quot;Kill your heroes?&quot;, &quot;Heroes can be deadly to team culture?&quot; First off all, there can be many reasons why a project is late: bad time estimations, bad resource capability estimations, feature creep, to name a few. There can also be a whole list of things you can do about that: Revisit those time estimations, cue in time for training and education to better tacke the problems at hand, better scoping, and of course: the choice to work harder.<p>The last option above should in all cases be a choice, not something that&#x27;s forced on anyone, but if it&#x27;s a choice, something that makes the individual happy, a challenge to tackle, then by all means, go for it and the team should be the better + happy for it. Of course this also means that one can not expect&#x2F;force it on anyone. If I have a 6 person team and two people decide it&#x27;s a good challenge to try and make the deadline, that does not mean the rest of the team are slackers; it also doesn&#x27;t mean that those two are &quot;heroes that need to retire their capes&quot;.<p>When an individual decides to work harder, to reach a goal (or when the default pace of the individual happens to be higher in the first place), does that suddenly make the person or the practice toxic to the team (or &quot;deadly&quot; as the headline calls it)?<p>What the article implies is that when a person tries (intentionally or not) to stand out from the group, it&#x27;s bad for the group and bad for the person. This implication is highly alarming to anyone who would want to do his best to stand out, to be a better programmer than you were last week.<p>A team is not a box that demands the average from each individual and punishes the one that stands out but a group of dynamic and different individuals that, through their differences achieve greatness.