Lately I've been having a strange thought. The more chaotic a system became, the more valuable I looked inside it. The harder things were to understand, the more people depended on me. The more production pain existed, the more visibility I got. And eventually I caught myself wondering something uncomfortable: Was I actually incentivized to reduce any of this? At first that thought sounded ridiculous. Nobody wakes up thinking: "Today I will make the system worse." At least I hope not. But engineering organizations create strange games. And once you notice the incentives, it's hard to unsee them. You start noticing what actually gets rewarded. Fast fixes get rewarded. Heroic debugging sessions get rewarded. Late-night firefighting gets rewarded. Being the person who saves the release gets rewarded. Visibility gets rewarded. Urgency gets rewarded. Visible suffering gets rewarded. Meanwhile, a lot of other things become strangely invisible . Reducing future complexity.…