Absolutely. Some people are born firefighters. Nothing wrong with that.
I once worked with a senior engineer who loved running incidents. He felt it was real engineering. He loved debugging thorny problems on a strict timeline, getting every engineer in a room and ordering them about, while also communicating widely to the company. Then, there's the rush of the all-clear and the kudos from stakeholders.
Specific to his situation, I think he enjoyed the inflated ownership that the sudden urgency demanded. The system we owned was largely taken for granted by the org; a dead-end for a career. Calling incidents was a good way to get visibility at low-cost, i.e., no one would follow-up on our postmortem action items.
It eventually became a problem, though, when the system we owned was essentially put into maintenance mode, aka zero development velocity. Then I estimate (balancing for other variables) the rate the senior engineer called an incident for not-incidents went up by 3x...
I agree that enjoying firefighting is not inherently harmful. However, the situation you describe afterward irks me in some way I can't quite put my finger on. A lot of words (toxic, dishonest, marketing, counterproductive, bus factor) come to mind, but none of them quite fit.
I once worked with a senior engineer who loved running incidents. He felt it was real engineering. He loved debugging thorny problems on a strict timeline, getting every engineer in a room and ordering them about, while also communicating widely to the company. Then, there's the rush of the all-clear and the kudos from stakeholders.
Specific to his situation, I think he enjoyed the inflated ownership that the sudden urgency demanded. The system we owned was largely taken for granted by the org; a dead-end for a career. Calling incidents was a good way to get visibility at low-cost, i.e., no one would follow-up on our postmortem action items.
It eventually became a problem, though, when the system we owned was essentially put into maintenance mode, aka zero development velocity. Then I estimate (balancing for other variables) the rate the senior engineer called an incident for not-incidents went up by 3x...