Summary

  • Tobias Fiebig and Franziska Lichtblau used their RIPE 93 opening talk to describe an engineer who champions a new technology, becomes its sole expert and then fights attempts to improve or replace it. The official abstract takes that path to a bus factor approaching one and burnout.
  • The RIPE NCC meeting account records their practical advice: let colleagues speak, revisit old assumptions, seek feedback and learn to admit a mistake. For a network team, those habits decide whether expertise can be shared before the pager finds its permanent owner.

The phrase “ask Tobias” sounds efficient until Tobias takes a holiday. At RIPE 93 on 26 October, Tobias Fiebig and Franziska Lichtblau put that familiar operations joke on the main stage. Their talk abstract begins with an engineer who correctly backs a new technology. Years pass. That person becomes the authority on every strange failure, defends the once-new design against replacement and keeps putting out its fires. The team’s bus factor slides toward one. The expert burns out; younger operators stop volunteering ideas. A good decision has acquired a dreadful maintenance contract.

The RIPE 93 programme gave the two speakers a 30-minute Opening Plenary slot. The RIPE NCC meeting report caught their less theatrical prescription: allow others room to speak and grow, revisit axioms, invite feedback, accept the possibility of being wrong. These are daily operating practices. A colleague who can challenge a configuration can also learn it. A team that documents why a change was made can later decide when that reason has expired.

Fiebig is unusually well placed to make the human point. TU Wien identifies him as its professor of Computer Networks since March 2026 and head of the Internet Infrastructures research unit. The official biography explicitly includes the organizational and human side of reliable infrastructure operation alongside DNS, SMTP and BGP research. The person asking engineers to loosen their grip studies the machinery too.

An irreplaceable engineer is often praised as an asset. Fiebig and Lichtblau show the other side of the balance sheet. Every undocumented exception, unreviewed fix and veto on a junior colleague’s proposal adds another dependency on one human being. When the original technology ages, the person who saved the service can become the reason nobody dares touch it. The cure begins while that person is still in the room: let someone else explain the system, question the design and carry the next change.