The most valuable engineers I've worked with often looked... less "productive". They weren't always the fastest at closing tickets. They didn't push the most code. Sometimes it even felt like they were slowing things down. And yet, somehow, teams around them ended up dealing with a lot less bullshit six months later. Typical story: an API occasionally responds in 10 seconds under load. Not always. Just often enough to become painful. A ticket shows up: "Need to fix slow responses ASAP." One engineer goes for the obvious fix: "Let's add caching." A couple of days later, the issue seems gone. Everyone's happy. Ticket closed. Velocity looks great. Then the familiar magic begins: cache invalidation becomes painful, stale data starts showing up in weird places, edge cases multiply, more patches pile on top, and a month later the system is more complicated than before the "fix".…