When Being Too Good at Your Job Backfires

I was sitting in bed, staring at my phone, when a friend sent me a message that hit way too close to home:

"How do you deal with a boss who just doesn’t get it?"

They explained how they’d been handed an unreasonable workload—two or three times what anyone else had—simply because they were too good at their job. Fast, efficient, reliable. And now, they were trapped in a vicious cycle: the better they performed, the more they were given, until it became unsustainable.

I knew exactly how that felt.

The Bus Factor: A Cold Reality Check

First, let’s talk about the bus factor. If you haven’t heard of it, it’s the idea that your importance at a company can be measured by how screwed they’d be if you got hit by a bus tomorrow (or quit, or spontaneously decided to become a goat farmer).

Some people want to be essential—proof that they’re irreplaceable. Others want to fly under the radar. But the truth is, neither scenario is great.

If you’re not essential? Well, that means you’re replaceable. And in today’s job market, that’s a risky place to be.

But if you are essential? Now you’re stuck. The system depends on you. You can’t take vacation without chaos following. You can’t leave without feeling guilty. And worst of all—your growth stalls because they need you right where you are.

That’s the trap my friend was falling into. And if you’ve ever felt like the only person holding things together at your job, you know it too.

My Own Wake-Up Call

I remember the first time I realized I had become "too good" at my role. At first, it felt amazing—my work was sharp, my solutions efficient, and people noticed. But then, something shifted.

Instead of being rewarded, I was met with weird tension. The faster I worked, the more some people resented it. The more problems I solved, the more some questioned how I did it.

It all came to a head when I rebuilt an entire backend aws stack in a hackathon—something the official team had been "working on" for months. We won. But instead of celebration, I got pulled into an HR meeting. Because some people weren’t happy that I’d shown them up.

That’s when it clicked: Being the best doesn’t always mean you’ll succeed—sometimes, it just means you’ll piss people off.

The Unwritten Rules of Office Politics

I learned quickly that raw skill isn’t enough. Some workplaces reward compliance over innovation. Some teams would rather move slow than admit someone else is faster.

Take, for example, the infamous "self-scaling Kubernetes cluster."

Yes, that's a real thing.

Some "DevOps genius" thought it would be clever to configure the autoscaler to trigger based on CPU usage during deployments. No manual intervention needed! Just an elegant (read: catastrophic) little HPA setting that ignored memory constraints. So naturally, when CI/CD pipelines ran—BOOM—instant 200-node cluster.

This masterpiece burned through our entire AWS budget in 47 minutes during a routine Friday deploy. Thousands of dollars, wasted on idle nodes processing absolutely nothing.

And the architect behind it? Promoted—twice.

Meanwhile, I spent a weekend implementing proper scaling thresholds, only for my PR to be closed as "over-engineered." The cluster went nuclear again the following month, right after I left.

The Choice Every Overachiever Faces

So what’s the answer? Stop being good at your job? Of course not. But the blunt truth is: You need to be smart about where and how you excel.

Here’s what I’ve learned:

Find your allies. Every company has at least one person who gets it. Stick with them.
Know when to let go. Not every battle is worth fighting, as much as it pains me to admit.
Leave if you have to. If your growth is being stifled because others feel threatened, it’s not the right place for you.

Final Thought: Why I’d Do It All Again

Could I have played the game? Kept my head down, nodded along, and climbed the corporate ladder? Sure.

But I refuse to let bad engineering win.

If that means ruffling feathers, calling out nonsense, and occasionally being the "difficult" one?

So be it.

Just promise me one thing—if you’re in a place that punishes you for being great, leave. The right team is out there.