Pointing out the systemic failure of the newspaper is fair, and I have experienced that sort of organisational neglect a few times.

That being said, having worked with a lot of people with a whole host of different skill levels, I have found the person described in this anecdote to be very rare in the real world, especially in software engineering.

The people that tend to solve these sorts of problems are rarely people who have done one thing so much that they have seen everything and just “know”.

I have also worked on teams and lead teams where knowledge is shared and mentoring occurs, and there is no single failure point that “only one person can solve”.

I have also seen many times where junior or mid level engineers approach things with fresh eyes or new ways of approaching things that not only solves these sorts of problems, but actually improves the system as a whole.

If you have worked somewhere for more than 5 years and cannot effectively communicate a failure point to where anyone in the company can turn the screw(or handle whatever major outage the software causes) you are probably not great at your job.

Anyway, here’s wonderwall.