"Odds are far better than good that your high performers are achieving what appears to be high levels of productivity by building technical debt into the applic

"Odds are far better than good that your high performers are achieving what appears to be high levels of productivity by building technical debt into the application by taking shortcuts whether intentionally or unintentionally" This is repeated over and over in almost every management book; managers are starting to believe it. In the book "The Phoenix Project", Brett, the most technical guy, was the high performer to fix almost everything. The moral in that story was that Brett was also the Fire Starter. No, management need to feel high performers below them actually belong there. Unfortunately technical skills fade and once good managers become bad and incompetent. Worse, most technical managers were never technical. Just this week I had to put out a fire most certainly not caused by me or my code. I inherited a mess from outsourced workers. Any requests to improve the code base were met with disapproval. Some of our custom code interfaces with an external system that has an API. When we upgraded to the latest version of the external system; it became more strict on what it allowed. To help with the migration, management paid many thousands to have three "experts" on the system come in and help make transition to the new version go smoothly. I was not on the migration project. However, when sh@t hit the fan I was called in. Testing was poor and they went live. The three experts could not find the cause of major problems and certainly no one else on the team was willing to step up. I had to spend the entire week becoming an expert on the external system and quickly fix the problem. Yes, I am a high performer and I did not cause the fire. It is because I roll up my sleeves, get to work and never give up. I'm sorry if that scares some management. That they actually need some people.