Jumping on Grenades 💣
In war, when a grenade lands in the middle of the group, someone runs, someone just watches, and someone jumps on it. The same scene repeats every day in tech — and choosing to be the one who jumps is what accelerates a career the most.
Ever heard that expression before? If not, let me illustrate: imagine you’re part of a squad at war. You’ve been sent to lead a group of soldiers to the front line, and in the middle of the fight, the enemy throws a grenade that lands right in the center of your group. Are you the one who just watches? The one who runs? Or the one who jumps on it?
That war scene is a good illustration of what happens every day in the tech world.
💣 The everyday grenades
Grenades get thrown all the time: a production incident, a critical bug, an angry customer, a blown deadline. And if you pay attention, whenever a critical topic comes up in some forum or channel with a decent number of people, it’s always the same few who proactively raise their hand to fix it.
The real question is: why?
🙋 “That’s not my problem”
Most people — I’d dare say the vast majority — see grenades as “that’s not my problem,” “that’s not in my scope,” “that’s not my team’s job,” and so on.
Companies today are starving for proactive professionals who look at problems and solve them, regardless of where they came from. Quick parenthesis here: too much proactivity is also bad. Balance is necessary.
🔥 Two meetings, two different endings
In a status meeting for an important project, the team realizes the integration with an external partner has been broken for days — quietly, without anyone noticing — and it’s about to delay a launch already announced to leadership. The manager asks: “who can look into this today?” Silence. Someone says “that’s more on the integration team,” another adds “I’m in the middle of a delivery, can’t right now,” a third just nods and types “good luck” in the chat. The meeting ends with no owner for the problem.
Result: three more days pass before someone, pressured from above, finally takes it on. The launch slips two weeks, the external partner loses trust in the team, and leadership starts publicly questioning the project’s execution. The grenade didn’t disappear because nobody claimed it — it just kept exploding, a little louder, every day that passed.
Now a different scenario, but a similar setup. In another team’s weekly meeting, someone points out that the nightly job generating the financial report has been silently failing for two days — and nobody really knows why, nor is clearly the “owner” of that part of the system. Before the silence sets in, someone on the team says: “I’ve never touched that job, but I can look into it this afternoon and report back tomorrow morning.”
She wasn’t formally responsible for that system. But she spent the afternoon understanding the code, found a recent schema change that had broken a dependency, fixed it, and validated it with the finance team before the next cycle. Result: the report went out on time again, the finance team never even noticed there’d been a problem, and she became known, in future conversations, as the person who “gets things done.” Months later, she was the one recommended to lead a critical cross-team project — precisely because of the reputation built that day.
🎯 What you gain by jumping
Being the person who jumps on grenades, beyond the obvious fact of solving the problem, generates some positive side effects: you get seen, you get remembered, you learn about other areas of the business, you get exposure to new technologies, you learn more business rules, and you contribute more broadly. In short: it’s also a learning experience.
🌱 Grenades outside of work
Zooming out a bit — not just looking at work, but at life as a whole — there’s a good chance you’re a problem-solver in your personal life if you’re that way at work, and vice versa.
But we can think of grenades not just as problems: they can also be initiatives. A night course, learning something new, an undergraduate degree, a postgrad, a master’s, a specialization, a certification.
🧭 The takeaway
Standing still, generally speaking, makes your career stand still too. If that’s a conscious choice of yours, great. If it isn’t, it’s worth reconsidering — and asking yourself whether you’re the person who jumps on grenades.
If you’re looking to level up your career, instead of running, start looking for grenades. Both at work and outside of it.