Jackie Chan Paradox

Today I had one of those days where you have to face so many different fronts at once—scheduled meetings, spontaneous meetings, analysis, incidents, questions, development, etc.—that even after handling at least a dozen of them, you end up surrounded by even more waiting for you, with the frustrating feeling that you got nothing done.

I came up with a name for it: The Jackie Chan Paradox (or the Beat’em up effect).

As you gain seniority and spend more time at a company, your area of influence expands. I’d dare say there’s a sweet spot where your capacity to respond matches the number of daily requests you get. But past a certain threshold, we run the risk of dying from success. When a developer becomes the go-to person for too many people, the amount of attention they can give to each request shrinks: they start ignoring most, responding too lightly to others, and eventually spend so much time putting out fires that they lose track of the important things that are happening.

I’ve seen this happen to engineers who, over time, reached the point where they had to "retire"—metaphorically—taking refuge in a new role where they could start from scratch, cutting off most communication channels just to reduce the noise.

For me, I see it as fate; if I keep working this way, I might end up just like them. I'm not the brightest, nor the top expert in anything—perhaps my real value lies in my willingness to help. But the very trait that makes me valuable might also be what finishes me.

Like the protagonist of an action comedy, knocking down enemies one after another only to immediately fall into a new, even tougher jam.

Like Camus’s Sisyphus, perhaps the only way forward is to accept the chaos — and imagine a happy Jackie Chan.

exit(0);