In too many organizations, it's the smoke jumpers who get promoted. Those of us who anticipate problems, and plan around them, so there are no fires to put out, are pretty much ignored, as part of the woodwork. Organization with a smokejumper mentality need to focus on Uptime, and preventing forest fires!

Very good piece and apt term!

I worked as a seasonal fire fighter for the US Forest Service during college in Southern California. I worked on a very busy district. This location provided many fires and the accompanying overtime coveted by poor college students.

The job provided the opportunity for people to learn how to keep their head about them during a crisis. One of the first rules of brush fire fighting is always maintain a safe exit path. Those folks who were adrenaline junkies often neglected this rule. Those of us with strong survival instincts recognized when the others needed correction and did so - thus, we provided a safety factor for the entire team.

In the IT world, management must be able to provide this correcting guidance. Root cause analysis should eliminate crisis recurrence. If the crisis junkie is the cause, managers must redirect them in positive ways. Otherwise, they will find themselves making the tough call on whether the firm is better off without the crisis junkie.

BTW, riding at Code 3 should be enough of an adrenaline rush. We used to say "half the fun of a fire is getting there!"

For adrenaline addiction, try drag racing!

The CMM (capability maturity model) says that crises (fires) and heroes (firefighters) are indicative of the lowest level of organizational capability.

I agree with Fred - those of us who anticipate and try to head off problems before they happen are ignored - until the crisis arrives. "Smoke Jumpers" is a great term - here's the one I use - "SLOP" - Simple Lack of Planning!

Avg Joe

Perhaps we need an "SMA" Smoke Jumpers Anonymous.

I definitely fit the description. Two things come to mind:

1. Sometimes, it ain't smoke jumping, it's a predisposition towards action. One of my favorite stories on the point is from the civil war. Union General George McClellan was standing at the bank of a river, debating with members of his staff how to determine the depth. George Custer rode up to the group on horseback, and asked what the holdup was. When he was told, he plunged his horse into the river and rode to the other side, the water never getting much above the soles of his boots.

He rode back to the group on shore and said, "That's how deep it is, general!"

Like Custer, I have no patience while people churn plans trying to anticipate every possible outcome. (And yes, I know what happened to General Custer!)

2. It was noted that management needs to redirect these people in positive ways. I'd like to know exactly what those ways might be. To us "smokies", if work is to be endless planning and testing sessions, we're likely to go looking elsewhere.

Before you say, "good, go somewhere else and cause trouble", think about the experience you're prepared to throw out the door. If a smokie is bored, it means the creative portion of his/her mind has additional capacity that needs to be put to use.

I don't have the solution. I hope somebody does -Fighting a fire seems much more interesting than doing one more revision to the project plans on my desk!

The consulting firm where I previously worked had both smoke jumpers and clean up crew. If you manage your people well, you can benefit greatly. My team had a brilliant, but easily bored, programmer; a GREAT, but slow, document-centered programmer; a GREAT, but plodding tester. Prior to my management, all members were expected to program/test/document and all of them were failing in one aspect or another. After I began managing them, I had the brilliant programmer write the framework of each project, I was good at finishing projects, the tester would be very creative at breaking the project and the documenter would write documentation that, after 3 years, you could read and understand WHY we did something.

Use the skills where they are effective and try to train in the missing skills, but don't try to "square peg" them. If you don't need smoke jumpers, you're not thinking very creatively.

I have had the misfortune of working with the more insidious.... Smoke Jumper turned Arsonist.

Too long between action, they begin to withhold information that would prevent the fires and then jumping in at the last moment to save the day.

Praise, confetti, bonuses and then the cycle begins again.

Wow I am deeply hurt by the things that I just read here, and I am glad that I found this. You are partly right, when you said that we are used to get to fires quickly and catch them while they are small, and when you said that there are some poor managment practices, and yes I guess you could catagorize us as adrenaline junkies, but only kinda of. However I challenge you to find me a "smokejumper" that is an arsonist, and the greater majority of us DO NOT like any sort of praise. The best fires that I go to are the ones that no one ever heres of. As for being an adrenaline junkie, yes I love riding roller coaster and other ammusment park rides and who doesnt, but frankly there are far more things that get the adrenaline pumping than jumping out of an airplane with a parachute on.

This has been a great discussion. As a person whose boss uses the phrase "firefighter" to describe my job, I think we do need some "smoke jumpers" in IT, but they need to be like Jerry Spence. As he describes them, these are guys that react appropriately at the first sign of a problem by taking responsibility and ending the impending crisis before it gets out of hand. They do, as rpawliko says, have a predisposition to action, but I'll bet that real smoke jumpers pride themselves on knowing what they're doing, that they test (train) plenty, that they have a plan before they go in, and that they learn from mistakes to get better the next time. Also, I'm guessing a smoke jumper is none too happy to risk his life fighting a fire that should have been prevented.

The Custer example is exactly what you don't want, a guy who rides into the river knowing nothing about its depth or currents. Eventually that guy gets himself and his horse killed.

We need well-thought-out processes, with appropriate measures in place so that we can detect problems when they're small. We need to be able to react quickly to those problems, from a position of thorough understanding of the system, and then to take the knowledge we've gained and modify our processes to prevent that error from occurring again. We know we're going to make mistakes and encounter unanticipated problems, it's reacting quickly and appropriately to those problems and preventing their reoccurrence that takes real technical and managerial skill.