I'm what happened when you can't choose a single career path

In the event of war, you would be the type that hides away and makes the bombs.

mostly building weird stuff no one uses, but occasionally getting it right, such as with UTF-8 and Go

The newly hired manager of some subsection of DuPont (or some other gigantic chemical company) came into the office, and found a chemical engineer, completely drunk in the middle of the day.

Outraged, the manager searched for this colleagues who explained.

Ah, don't mind John (or some other name), the guy invented Teflon (or some other substance) which accounted for 20% of our revenue last year. Even if he does not do anything else in his entire career, his salary won't make any difference compared to those gains, and we take the chance that he might invent something else later.

If Ciro spent as much effort on his job as he does on side projects, he'd be the most amazing worker.

Like movies, software projects have parts that require high variance and parts that don't. For most projects, the logging system can be off-the-shelf and predictable. But core parts of the product that require novel design should be as good as they can be.