Managing the indispensable engineer
Having a strong engineer who owns a critical system feels like an advantage, but it hurts their career and your team's resilience.
👋 Hey, it’s Stephane. I help engineers become great engineering managers - whether you want to become one or are already leading a team.
To accelerate your growth see:
Get Hired as an EM (CV & job search to actually get interviews)
AI Behavioral Interview Coach (the best prep for your interviews)
Paid subscribers get 50 Notion Templates, The EM’s Field Guide, and access to the complete archive.
Having a strong engineer who owns a critical system feels like an advantage, but it hurts their career and your team’s resilience.
Most teams I’ve inherited has had one. The engineer who knows the payment system end to end, or the legacy ingestion pipeline, or the gnarly auth flow nobody else has touched in three years. They answer every question about it on Slack within minutes. They’re on every related incident. When a stakeholder asks how long a change will take, you ask them, because nobody else can give you a useful answer.
It feels like a strength. I think that it isn…
