A manager once told me: "If you get the work done, they will want more." He meant it as advice (and was a little sarcastic too). He was wrong about what to do with it. He wasn't wrong about the dynamic.

This episode is about what happens when capable engineers become the workaround. The script you run once to fix prod becomes the script you're running for 300 users two weeks later. The emergency process becomes the permanent process. Eventually, the organization concludes that we don't need the system. We have you.

In this episode, I talk about scope creep at the individual level, not the project level. It's what happens because you're good at your job and you keep saying yes. But to escape, you need to know how to hold the line without just saying no. You have to build a "no" that sticks.

If you've ever walked out of a meeting wondering how you became someone's permanent workaround, this is for you.

Topics: engineering leadership, scope creep, technical debt, engineering culture, career advice, software engineering, setting boundaries, organizational debt, engineering management