there's a superposition where you can be both a very valuable engineer and a very terrible engineer, and that superposition is being extremely fast at figuring out how to do something, very badly.
in an emergency you're indispensable. After the emergency, you're despised by coworkers for the next decade
it's like getting stranded on a deserted island and instead of writing HELP with rocks you disassemble everything on your person to make a spark gap transmitter, and then end up really bored until it occurs to you that no one heard and you have to write HELP on the beach
I was once described as the "break glass in case of fire" guy but fortunately I've gotten better in the intervening 20 years


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