1. Introduction
Organisations like to believe they reward outcomes. In reality, they reward visibility. This is the essence of the Last Mile Fallacy: the mistaken belief that the final visible step in a chain of work is where most of the value was created. We tip the waiter rather than the chef, praise the presenter rather than the people who built the system, and congratulate the messenger rather than the makers. The last mile feels real because it has a face, a voice, and a narrative that fits neatly into a meeting. The earlier miles are quieter, messier, and far harder to explain, so they are systematically undervalued.
2. Why the Last Mile Feels Like the Work
In a restaurant, tipping the waiter makes emotional sense. The waiter is the person we interact with, the person who absorbs our frustration and responds to our gratitude. But this social convention quietly becomes a value model inside organisations. The kitchen created the asset through skill, preparation, and repeated invisible decisions, yet the reward follows the interaction rather than the creation. Over time, companies internalise this logic and begin to believe that delivery, reporting, and presence are the work, rather than the final expression of it.
3. How This Manifests in Technology Organisations
In technology teams, the “waiter” is often the person reporting progress. They attend the meetings, translate uncertainty into status updates, and turn complex engineering realities into something consumable. When detailed questions arise, the response is often that they are not close to the detail and will check with the team, yet the recognition and perceived ownership remain firmly with them. This is rarely malicious. It is structural. The system rewards those who can package work, not those who quietly do it.
4. Where Engineering Value Is Actually Created
Most engineering value is created long before anything becomes visible. It appears in design tradeoffs that avoid future failure, in performance headroom that only matters on the worst day, and in risks retired early enough that no one ever knows they existed. Great engineering is often deliberately invisible. When systems work, there is nothing to point at. This creates a fundamental mismatch: great engineering does not naturally market itself, and engineers are rarely motivated to try.
5. Great Engineering Is Not Great Marketing
Engineers are intrinsically poor at being seen and heard, not because they lack confidence or capability, but because their incentives are different. Precision matters more than persuasion. Acknowledging uncertainty is a strength, not a weakness. Over claiming feels dishonest, and time spent talking is time not spent fixing the problem. What looks like poor communication from the outside is often professional integrity on the inside. Expecting engineers to compensate for this by becoming self marketers misunderstands both the role and the culture.
6. Psychological Safety and the Broker Layer
Because it is often unsafe to speak openly, information rarely flows directly from engineers to senior leadership. Saying that a deadline is fictional, that a design is fragile, or that a system is one person away from failure carries real career risk. As a result, organisations evolve a broker layer that filters, softens, and sanitises reality before it travels upward. Leadership frequently mistakes this calm, polished narrative for control, when in fact it is distance. The truth still exists, but it has been made comfortable.
7. A Legitimate Counter Argument: When Work Really Is a Commodity
There are domains where the Last Mile Fallacy is less of a fallacy and more of an economic reality. Construction is a useful example. Laying bricks is physically demanding, highly skilled work, yet bricklayers are often interchangeable. The intellectual property of the building exists before the first brick is laid. The architect, engineer, and planner have already made the critical decisions. The bricklayer is executing a predefined plan, acting on instructions rather than solving open ended problems. In this context, replacing the individual doing the work does not meaningfully alter the outcome, because the value was created upstream and encoded into the design.
8. Why Software Engineering Is Fundamentally Different
Software engineering does not work this way. The value does not sit fully formed before execution begins. Engineers are not simply following instructions; they are continuously solving problems, making trade offs, and adapting to constraints in real time. You are not paying for keystrokes or lines of code. You are paying for judgment, efficiency, and the ability to reach a desired outcome under uncertainty. Two engineers given the same requirements will produce radically different systems in terms of performance, resilience, cost, and long term maintainability. The intellectual property is created during the work, not before it.
9. Presence Without Proximity
This distinction makes the organisational behaviour even more ironic. Many organisations demand a return to the office in the name of proximity, collaboration, and culture, yet senior leaders rarely leave their own rooms, floors, or meeting cycles to engage directly with the teams doing this problem solving work. Call centres remain unvisited, engineering floors remain symbolic, and frontline reality is discussed rather than observed. The distance remains intact, even as the optics change.
10. Key Man Risk Is Consistently Misplaced
Ask where key man risk sits and many organisations will point to programme leads or senior managers. In reality, the risk sits with the engineer who understands the legacy edge case, the operator who knows which alert lies, or the developer who fixed the outage at two in the morning. These people are not interchangeable because the intellectual property lives in their decisions and experience. When they leave, knowledge evaporates. When brokers leave, slides are rewritten.
11. Leadership’s Actual Responsibility
In an engineering led organisation, leadership is not there to extract updates or admire dashboards. Leadership exists to go to the work, to create enough psychological safety that people can speak honestly, and to translate engineering reality into organisational decisions. Engineers should not be forced to become marketers in order to be heard. Leaders must do the harder work of listening, observing, and engaging deeply enough that truth can surface without fear.
12. Escaping the Last Mile Fallacy
Organisations that escape the Last Mile Fallacy do not do so with better reporting or more metrics. They do it by collapsing the distance between value creation and decision making. Leaders spend time with teams without an agenda, reward early bad news rather than late surprises, and recognise impact rather than airtime. They understand that visibility is not the same as value, and that presence is not the same as leadership.
13. Conclusion
The waiter matters, brick layers mater, and in some industries the kitchen can be commoditised. But software engineering is not bricklaying. When organisations treat it as such, they misunderstand where value is created and where risk truly lives. The Last Mile Fallacy is not a communication problem or a leadership choice. And like most choices, it can be changed.
If you genuinely believe that software engineers are merely following orders from you middle management, then you should outsource your technology to vendors and grind the costs downwards. Good luck with this strategy 🙂