Why You Can’t Hire Your Way Out of a Fire You Can’t See

Nobody designs it this way on purpose. But the people closest to the system rarely have the authority to change how it gets built. And the people with the authority are rarely close enough to the system to know what they’re missing. This is for the person who’s been in the trench and thought they were the only one who noticed.

I came in as a contractor alongside a functional expert. The real job from day one was making friends with the client’s own developers because they were the handover point. Everything pointed at them.

Those developers were the ones carrying it. Years inside the company’s processes, warehouse management, sales and distribution. Nobody designed that profile and nobody assigned it. The work demanded depth and they stepped into it. Comb-shaped, but not a neat uniform comb. More like paint dripping down a wall. Each drip starts from a different place, travels at its own pace, lands somewhere unexpected. Every drip corresponds to a fire that had to be fought.

Firewall rules, database tuning, web dispatcher behaviour. Not their job. But they knew what broken looked like and they knew how to talk to the person who could fix it. The depth followed the mess.

I was a T-shaped specialist, working in a silo. Then ownership across systems pulled me into depth I didn’t plan for. I became comb-shaped because the work gave me no choice. Which means comb-shape isn’t something you recruit on a whiteboard. It’s something that happens to people who stay long enough, own enough, and get pulled deep by necessity. But you can hire for it if you know what it looks like.

We Advertised for the Clean Version

Certifications are a useful signal. But when the horizon shrinks they become a substitute for scar tissue. Fast cheap good. Pick two. The real interview question nobody asks is which two did they give you and how did you find out about the third.

Ask questions AI can’t answer for them. Tell me about a transport that failed in production. Did you fix forward or roll back and why. Tell me about a time one SI was designing and the other was refusing to build it. How did you get it resolved.

Those questions come from people who lived the job. The ABAP developer. The BASIS lead. The functional SME. People who came up through cadetships. That voice is harder to find in the room than it used to be.

We Gave Away the Eyes

Some of them stayed. But without the standing to say what they know, knowing doesn’t change anything. And without them in the room nobody is asking the hard questions.

The cynic is harder to find now. The same person who asked the hard questions was often the person who blocked the right answers. You can’t separate the scar tissue from the damage and burnout it came from. But at least they were there long enough to hand something over.

The person who replaced them is wondering whether AI looks good on their CV.

We let them go because we mistook pattern recognition for negativity. But cynicism doesn’t halt progress. It questions why. And that question is the one nobody is asking anymore.

The SI says yes because yes wins the contract. The vendor says yes because yes closes the deal. AI says yes because you asked it to. The cynic said no because they’d seen where yes leads.

Before, the client had their own person who knew the job. They were the ones you had to impress. You couldn’t bluff them. That voice is getting harder to find in the rooms I walk into. And when that voice isn’t in the room, the tasks get done, but the decisions drift.

When hiring is focused on solving today’s problem that’s a rational response to real pressure. But the people who used to challenge that framing are gone. They’d seen enough cycles to know that a lift and shift is never just a lift and shift. Temporary always becomes permanent.

The two year fixed term employment agreement isn’t hiring. It’s renting a CV with an expiry date. The knowledge walks out the door dressed as a contract ending. That institutional memory is harder to replace than anyone admitted, and even harder to keep.

The Pub Test

“People don’t leave companies, they leave bosses.”

And they’re not leaving because of personality. Because the boss never understood the job well enough to have their back. They didn’t know what they were asking them to walk into. You can’t shelter someone from a fire you can’t see.

But you don’t have to have been in the trench to be a good boss. You just have to have been in a trench. The old boss used to say ‘I was an ABAP developer once’. That wasn’t a credential. That was empathy. They knew what it felt like to be the person in the mess. So they knew when to shield and when to step back. That’s the air cover. Not a management technique. Just someone who’d been there.

If you don’t know what they’re doing, trust that they do. And when the system is down and the business is screaming, stand between them and the noise. Don’t ask for a status update every hour.

The pub test isn’t would I have a beer with this person. It’s would I go to bat for them when I don’t fully understand the problem. And they’re asking the same question about you. That signal shows up fast. It’s the shape of someone who’s been close enough to the mess to recognise what you’re walking into.

The institutional knowledge didn’t leave because someone made a bad call. It left because nothing ever made staying worth it. By the time the transformation started, that depth was gone. Most places only notice when something breaks the way it did last time.

A temporary structure can only produce temporary depth. We’ve been here before. A pop-up team builds a pop-up system. Nobody stays long enough to grow the depth the work demands, and nobody is around long enough to remember why the last fire burned the way it did.

The fire is either burning now or it’s waiting. We sold clean core but brownfield is what we got, and that takes time. A different kind of time. Someone who can read the drips on the wall and understand why each one landed where it did.

Eighteen months after the last invoice, you’ll know which one you had.