[HN Gopher] On Being Indispensable
___________________________________________________________________
On Being Indispensable
Author : asyncscrum
Score : 489 points
Date : 2022-03-14 11:57 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.sofuckingagile.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.sofuckingagile.com)
| malermeister wrote:
| It feels like if the author was really that indespensable, they
| could've used that leverage to get pretty much anything they
| wanted out of the company. Doesn't sound like a bad position to
| be in to me if you're ready to have some aggressive negotiation
| jwsteigerwalt wrote:
| So much of this rings true and is familiar. When I was first part
| of an acquisition, being the technical owner of a bespoke sales
| stack brought a ton of security while I was also told about the
| opportunity in the larger organization. Fast forward 18 months
| and the opportunities were not available because I was on the
| hook to answer the same issues over and over despite
| documentation and process in place...
| jackblemming wrote:
| What else would they do if they weren't answering questions?
| Write some more CRUD code? I don't know what this person wants or
| what they expect their job to be. That's probably the underlying
| issue.
| anthuswilliams wrote:
| In the article they said
|
| > I had a hard time thinking strategically about product. I was
| too busy supporting the entire organization on all things
| related to the product.
|
| so that's a pretty clear indication of what was missing.
| Instead of being able to recognize broad industry trends and
| come up with broad product evolutions that meet those needs,
| this person is stuck answering quibbles about particular
| customers or particular implementations.
| siva7 wrote:
| How about his managerial duties? Being constantly dragged into
| unrelated meetings will make you soon burned out and i think
| most people with management experience can relate to his
| writing
| jedberg wrote:
| This is exactly why companies offer sabbaticals. It forces you to
| train people up on your five years of knowledge before you leave
| for 10 weeks.
|
| OP could have just taken a long vacation.
| asyncscrum wrote:
| I actually took 3 months off and completely disconnected. A
| large portion of my direct team churned while I was off, a long
| time engineer took his own life, and I came back to the same
| issues but magnified.
|
| Overall, it's not unreasonable to assume I'm a control freak
| and couldn't let projects go. However I'm a big proponent of
| letting fires burn and I delegate to no end. My particular type
| of stuck was exasperated by a corporate culture that has sales
| quotas pulled out of the air and implementation that was
| tracking time down to the minute because 90% had to be
| billable. In that culture there's no incentive or ability for
| individuals to learn.
| Casteil wrote:
| Maybe... but not all companies offer sabbaticals / extended
| leaves of absence with a way to come back.
| shapefrog wrote:
| In my experience companies offer may offer sabbaticals, HR
| may promote them, the documentation may be shiny; but it is
| career suicide for anoyone who hasnt already made it to the
| top.
| jedberg wrote:
| You must have worked for some awful companies. Everywhere
| I've worked the sabbatical was highly encouraged and the
| people came back refreshed and often got promoted soon
| afterwards.
| the_doctah wrote:
| Tech employees really do live in the most hilarious
| bubble.
|
| Anyway, at my company (F500), if you take over 30 days
| unpaid, you need to reapply for your job.
| Aeolun wrote:
| Unlike leaving for a competitor and coming back for a 25%
| higher salary?
| shapefrog wrote:
| That there is a driven go getter (although not featured
| in the employee handbook).
|
| The worker on sabatical is just a lazy bum who cant be
| bothered to go to work (or an hard working inspirational
| visionary C suite executive).
| jedberg wrote:
| No but if they don't then OP should have just put in for a
| long vacation to make themselves dispensable again.
| Casteil wrote:
| Many American companies only give 2-3 weeks of combined
| sick + vacation time, which isn't really enough for "a long
| vacation" - furthermore, many companies have a "use it or
| lose it" and don't let you roll over PTO.
|
| Long story short, it's impossible to take a long vacation
| while working for many companies.
| jnye131 wrote:
| 10 week sabbatical - dare dream bigger, imagine a 52 week
| sabbatical </snark>
| jatins wrote:
| The neediness of Sales folks is relatable. I worked at a company
| where Sales thought "@channel" was a person they should ping as
| often as possible.
|
| And no amount of documentation solves this because documentation
| is useless if it can't present itself at the time of need.
| Because rest assured, no once (including me) can find anything
| using the horrible Confluence search.
| xondono wrote:
| > The neediness of Sales folks is relatable.
|
| This is a symptom of bad communication.
|
| I faced some of these issues in a company, and the best
| solution we found was creating a massive "FAQ" single page
| where (browser) search could get you what you wanted, and a
| firm policy that any question asked should end with a
| modification to the document.
|
| All questions had to include the search terms used to find the
| answer, and if it was a "failure to find", those search terms
| would be included in the "related tags" section of the question
| for next time.
| bregma wrote:
| Search is great if you already know the answer (all search does
| is match answers to pages).
|
| Search is not a substitute for good documentation. Neither is
| "read the code" or "you should just know", which are the most
| common answers I get from developers.
| justin_oaks wrote:
| > I worked at a company where Sales thought "@channel" was a
| person they should ping as often as possible
|
| I find some people just don't know (or care about) the right
| way to use Slack. They need to be taught "Hey, don't bother 100
| people in this channel for your niche question." Some are
| oblivious, some don't care about other people. Either way
| someone needs to pull them aside and say "stop it".
|
| Having management that allows that to continue indicates an
| unhealthy organization.
| quesera wrote:
| Slack actually pops a dialog when you message @channel or
| @here.
|
| Message says, e.g.: Using @here pings
| everyone in the channel who's currently online. It's a
| bit noisy! Are you sure you want to send this?
| [Edit Message] [Send]
|
| Of course it doesn't always help!
| justin_oaks wrote:
| Good point. I use @channel or @here so infrequently that I
| didn't remember that.
| pferde wrote:
| Confluence search is alright. The problem with Confluence is
| the undisciplined people who mess up their spaces to the point
| where the search comes up with too many mostly duplicate
| results, where you can't be sure which one is the latest valid
| version.
|
| At my job, we use Confluence extensively, with dozens if not
| hundreds of spaces, and in some spaces, searching for something
| is a delight, while in others it is impossible to find anything
| without already knowing their byzantine structure.
|
| Usually, the "good" spaces are ones with one or three
| "custodians" who mercilessly impose a sane structure upon the
| space. The "bad" spaces are always those where dozens of people
| create articles and sections as they see fit, without any
| coordination.
| jatins wrote:
| > ... knowing their byzantine structure.
|
| If you need to know the structure to search, IMO the search
| experience is broken. Most searchers want to type topic
| related words and expect useful results.
| pferde wrote:
| Yes, but that's because the space contains so many
| duplicate or almost duplicate articles that search results
| have no chance of being good. I see the problem in the
| searched content, not in the search engine itself.
| baobabKoodaa wrote:
| The internet also contains "so mamy duplicate or almost
| duplicate" articles, and yet Google can provide a useful
| search for Internet articles. You're telling me it's
| somehow _impossible_ to achieve the same thing for a
| company 's intra - even though it has several orders of
| magnitude fewer articles to index?
|
| One quick and easy way to improve Confluence's search
| would be to rank often-visited articles higher than
| rarely-visited articles.
| OrderlyTiamat wrote:
| How did they make the Confluence search be so horrible? I once
| searched a page title without noticing I was already at that
| page, and it couldn't find it. I literally copied the title in
| and it still didn't find it. truly an awesome (as in awe and
| fear inspiring) piece of software.
| geodel wrote:
| It might be an effort to make Confluence truly enterprise
| grade.
| onion2k wrote:
| I treat the awfulness of Confluence's search as a feature. It
| forces me to organize and cross-reference documentation.
| sdoering wrote:
| Interesting take on it. I like it.
|
| But sadly this solves it for the people relying on your
| documentation. Not for you if you rely on anyone else's
| documentation if they don't act accordingly.
| acconrad wrote:
| This advice of being "so good they can't ignore you" is better
| applied to the industry as a whole than a particular company.
| Since employees are dispensable and the average tenure is a short
| two years, it's better to have indispensable skills for your
| industry so that you can easily find a new job at a higher salary
| or title.
| grecy wrote:
| Early career me thought that being indispensable was a good thing
| for career safety and leverage for promotions and whatever else,
| but that turned out to be far from the truth.
|
| In my experience if a company is so incompetent as to allow a
| single person to genuinely become indispensable, they're also so
| incompetent as to barely know it, and do nothing about that
| person leaving.
|
| Only after leaving will the fires really begin (or intensify),
| which is probably just a variation on business as usual anyway.
| dagw wrote:
| Another risk that I have seen play out more than once at large
| corporations is that people who are "indispensable" and tied
| heavily to a particular project will often get laid off rather
| than moved to new roles when that project is cancelled.
| bigpeopleareold wrote:
| I think this article resonates with me. I am coming from the
| perspective of being at the same company at least longer than
| three years.
|
| I had an opinion that being indispensable was a key to
| _something_ better, but it isn't. It started to be unsatisfying
| when I saw that I was being asked the same questions, doing the
| same set of tasks, getting the same requests (got to be on this
| call about a project I am not involved in because it touches
| something I know, "can you go on a call with the client with
| us?", etc. etc.) This was my burnout. My job description is not
| "account manager", "consultant", or anything that remotely
| resembles a customer-facing position, nor did I ever want to be.
| At least for me, this has mostly ended after taking action on it
| with my boss, but I still have to push back a little bit on
| things that take away from the focus I have now.
|
| I came to the opinion though, through this, in comparing multiple
| jobs, that when someone gets trapped into that position, it is a
| sign of an immature organization. Leadership needs to be
| constantly aware that if you are in crunch-mode, the
| organizational debt collects a lot. There needs to be a level of
| de-personalization around the tasks and projects involved and if
| it must be personal, people need to go out of their way, with
| full transparency, on how others helped them.
|
| One role I play is to work with others to understand, improve and
| discover what we do while making improvements. While we would
| grow into the position with knowledge of what to do in certain
| circumstances, its probably important to continue to emphasize
| that the end-goal is not to create more walking encyclopedias,
| but those competent to keep things going while pushing forward on
| new projects and working on new opportunities. For software
| development management, this has always been to me one of the
| harder things to do right (and no matter how much "agile" you
| dump into it, it is very important to create a motivation for a
| strong team ethic around knowledge.) Just getting through a queue
| of bugs is a hard thing to do that something as critical as that
| can get easily ignored.
|
| Many times, I wanted to walk away from where I work now because
| of this, but the grass isn't greener on the other side. It will
| never matter what organization you are in. When you open your
| mouth answering a question with what sounds like an intelligent
| answer, the next step has to manage the expectation that you are
| not working on someone else's project and that you are not owning
| someone else's problem. Being clear on that has helped my mental
| health a lot when boundaries are in place.
| higeorge13 wrote:
| We are not indispensable even to human relationships we assume we
| would be (forever and ever), how come we consider ourselves
| indispensable to legal entities like companies?
|
| This was a rhetorical question, i have done that mistake in both
| occasions. In the case of companies, it isn't even worth it.
| buro9 wrote:
| "It depends".
|
| Like so many things there's no hard and fast rule here. Sometimes
| you are best being dispensable, and sometimes it's best being
| indispensable.
|
| If you're a contractor and like the work... be indispensable as
| it will give you more power over your rates.
|
| If you're 12-18 months from an IPO... be indispensable as it will
| ensure the golden handcuff stock option / RSU shower that touches
| the top ~10% of engineering is extremely favourable to you.
|
| But otherwise, there's nearly always more value to you in being
| someone who is dispensable. You get more freedom and support to
| move roles, try different things, less lock-in to a specific
| team, role or part of an org. Your skills are likely more
| transferable to other places, etc.
|
| "It depends" is nearly always the dull answer, and the parameters
| for that are always specific to your circumstances.
| ravedave5 wrote:
| This is crazy how much this hits home. I created a slack channel
| 1.5 years ago with a similar title and purpose - stop DMing me
| directly, there are many people that know. I got a promotion 1.5
| years ago and finally was able to do the job 3 months ago. It
| took that long to disentangle, as soon as I would start some fire
| would occur or someone would quit and I'd be dragged back in.
| teknopaul wrote:
| I always try to de dispensable. We have weekly KT. And we take
| turns in doing Ops. We also do KT for others roles. As a rough
| example, we have DBAs, but we make sure devs know how to do the
| basics of their work too. Whenever you do something someone else
| can't, assign someone else for next time immediately. Never do
| the same job twice. It seems faster do just do it, but it's not
| as soon as the third time happens.
|
| But the real trick is test frameworks that give you rapid access
| to test all areas of the system with new code or inputs. So if
| the question is "what if?" The worst case answer, if I am not
| there, is "try it". N.B. You must be able to test performance
| impact. This is expensive, you need prod support systems you can
| hack at and put back to the original config quickly. The ability
| to restore any test system to a know state (even systems you
| don't know much about) is critical. So you can try stuff out and
| then leave it how it was.
|
| In emergcies when there is no time to test. Experience matters.
| If you are answering "what if?" with "try it" people get
| experience. It seems faster to answer "what if?" with "I am sure
| that" but long run that results in two problems, knowledge silos,
| and a delay in answering until you are at work or awake. That can
| kill you, especially if you are expert in more than one thing.
|
| If you want backup in a multinational company that runs 24/7 you
| need one person to answer any question in each timezone. If you
| can answer a question "immediately" but others can test the
| theory in 12 hours, that's often faster. You need sleep. In a
| small company you may not have 24 hours resources, but if the
| questions cost more than a wage in a foreign company, hire
| people. Even for day to day stuff this enables you to work around
| the clock. Get managers to do the math and presume answering any
| question or doing any task is never immediate, on average its >12
| hours, because sleep.
|
| It's also good to avoid doing what you know best (that's hard)
| but it's better to tell people how, than to do it. If you want to
| avoid questions, don't just tell them how, tell them why, and how
| you found out.
|
| There is a social problem to deal with too. Often people think
| something is "not my job" deal with that early with collective
| ownership of the whole solution.
|
| There is a problem of permission, sometime only DBAs can touch
| the database, work on that by giving confidence that others can
| do DBA work in test systems.
|
| There is a real problem that some people try to be indispensable
| for their own job security. Fire such people early, or move them
| to new roles in the company early.
|
| People are generally as smart. They will learn given learning
| opportunities. They will want to learn if the alternative is 12
| hours of testing!
| dangus wrote:
| I almost see this as a hiring screening problem.
|
| Companies need to stop hiring people that put work off on other
| people, and should have parts of their interview process that
| screen out people who are "leeches" who don't want to take
| initiative.
| at_a_remove wrote:
| In an age where loyalty between employer and employee is long in
| rear window (if it wasn't just a useful fable from the get-go),
| all you are left with are the grim permutations of game theory,
| all wary glances and knife edges barely concealed. Being
| indispensable is the closest thing you have to security, and as
| for "stopping learning," well, most companies want you to do that
| in your off-time, anyway.
|
| Throwing that away to become just another Pac-man gobbling
| tickets in a maze for the sake of being Agile or whatever reminds
| me of "...the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over
| himself. He loved Big Brother" in its joy at self-abnegation.
|
| Reams could be and have been written about estrangement in
| society, the reduction of human relationships to mere
| transactionality, but being The Person Who Is Expert At This
| Thing in your little Dunbar's Number sized company (give or take)
| beats being some plastic gear, designed to be replaced as a
| sacrificial component, if you are interested in stability,
| continuity, or even something as antiquated as pride in your
| work.
|
| I sort of get it -- at an early job, we had a lot of clientele. I
| inadvertently memorized, well, everything about them: faces,
| names, various ID numbers, and so on, and instead of the handy
| lookups provided, employees would just call me and ask. This got
| annoying. But I was also twenty-four and managed to push back
| enough to say, "You have the ability to look all of this up."
| Being bothered with dumb questions if you have all of this
| documentation and a wiki or whatever, yes, that is not
| acceptable, but I think there's a middle ground at least between
| being the Turing-complaint helpbot and just bolting out of there
| so you don't have to be The Guy in the Know.
| goodpoint wrote:
| > loyalty between employer and employee is long in rear window
|
| "between"?
|
| Loyalty towards employees almost never existed in some
| societies.
| kubanczyk wrote:
| You do write beautiful prose here, at least comparing to an
| average HN comment.
| hinkley wrote:
| There is something to be said for being indispensible for
| _novel_ problems, instead of for known problems.
|
| Some of the worst behavior I've seen in both myself and others
| has come when you can hold your company hostage by refusing to
| do something. Even when you are using it for 'the greater
| good', that's not a good look and not a great feeling. You
| shouldn't have to go with the nuclear option to get something
| done, even if 5/8ths of your coworkers all feel it's the right
| thing to do. And many people use it because they can, through
| some mix of hubris and/or burnout.
|
| When people say things like, "first, fire all the heroes" it's
| situations like this that they are thinking of, among others.
| sdoering wrote:
| Maybe companies need some kind of "Chaos Monkey" system [0]
| in place for regular employees. Not in "terminating" random
| employee's contracts, but a culture were regular, maybe even
| some kind of random transferals onto other projects, or onto
| internal work regularly happens.
|
| Everybody knows this and everybody should be prepared to a
| situation that tomorrow they are not working on the same
| problem they work on today. How would they structure work?
| How would they share knowledge? What can the organization to
| to ensure there always are fallbacks to everybody? At least
| fallbacks that if not perform at 100% but still on 80 - 90%.
|
| Sadly in my org this would not work of the get go, as we
| often have personal access tokens to our clients' systems.
| This is sometimes even a contractual obligation as for
| specific clients we need to be vetted. But even in these
| cases we could be reassigned/reshuffled towards a slightly
| different proposition or at least be reassigned to an
| internal topic for a few days - just like we would not be
| able to work if we fell ill.
|
| [0]: https://github.com/Netflix/SimianArmy/wiki/Chaos-Monkey
| hanselot wrote:
| OGWhales wrote:
| I think this method talked about by another commenter here
| achieves a similar goal, but is more reasonable than chaos:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30697309
| sdoering wrote:
| Yeah. I see what you mean. This banking regulation to
| reduce and investigate fraud serves a similar purpose.
| With around 6 weeks of vacation time banks already have a
| great system in place as vacations tend to work like a
| force for handovers.
| BigJono wrote:
| Nah, this isn't a great idea. It's not that far off what
| most companies do anyway. I think most companies have a
| misunderstanding of what the problem is. The problem isn't
| that a particular piece of knowledge isn't distributed,
| it's that _all_ the knowledge isn 't distributed (because
| it resides with one person). You don't want to go crazy
| with duplicating knowledge amongst the team, you just want
| to split it up.
|
| One hero is bad. Zero heroes is worse. You want lots of
| heroes.
|
| Trying to create a structure where anyone can jump into
| anything at a moment's notice just leads to everyone having
| a superficial level of expertise in everything and no
| responsibility (or worse, responsibility that they can't
| possibly fulfill so they just get thrown under the bus if
| they don't hit impossible delivery targets).
|
| All that does is move you from one hero to zero without
| waiting for your one hero to quit. It's resigning yourself
| to the bad outcome just to get it over and done with.
|
| The tricky part is that the 'one hero' structure tends to
| form pretty naturally, so you have to actively take steps
| to prevent it. If you put a standard team in place and let
| it run wild, unless the devs understand this problem
| initially, then eventually you'll just end up with everyone
| deferring up the chain of command for both knowledge and
| responsibility over time until a few years down the track
| whoever was the technical lead on the project is now your
| hero.
|
| I much prefer to have an ad-hoc structure where important
| work is divided up amongst the team and each team member
| takes total responsibility for their part. More senior
| staff shouldn't be trying to own more code and more
| responsibility, they should be providing more support to
| others.
|
| EDIT: I don't think I actually explained how distributing
| responsibility solves the bus factor problem, whoops. The
| idea is that part of that responsibility is for managing
| the bus factor of your own work. This only works if the
| code you're responsible for is small enough that you can
| realistically bring another dev or two into the fold and
| get them ramped up properly with _real_ understanding of
| the code.
| hinkley wrote:
| You can get a good slice of this by encouraging people to
| actually use their vacation time.
| lliamander wrote:
| People who work in finance are often required to take a
| two-week vacation every year. It's a good "bus" test and
| also a good way to find fraud.
| robin_reala wrote:
| Genuinely the most weirded out I feel by the US is
| holiday culture. If a report took just two weeks I'd be
| asking them if they were sure they didn't want a proper
| three week holiday (and I'm legally obliged to OK a four-
| week stretch over summer if the employee has the days
| available to take).
| blitzar wrote:
| Finance is a mandatory continuous 2 week holiday with no
| access to company facilities or systems every year.
|
| Plus all the other holidays. Sadly for some mostly junior
| US employees the 10 days for compliance leave left few
| other holidays - for the rest of the world, you still
| have 20 more days to use.
| at_a_remove wrote:
| Oh, fire all the heroes, I have worked at one of those
| places. The people in the know were let go, as some kind of
| pre-emptive strike of just that nature. Heaven forfend that
| anyone but the organization have leverage. This was managed
| before I had a chance to get a Chesterson's Fence view of the
| processes.
|
| The result was not good: deciphering the _how_ of things was
| bad enough, but the _why_ , the contexts of the decisions was
| utterly gone. Nobody could say why things were done, and so
| it was either the old joke about the five monkeys or the
| Second System Effect. Glorious chaos, the confidence of our
| clients eroded, terror at making changes that might affect
| the way things had been, dread of _not_ making changes to
| cope with extant problems.
|
| Thanks, but I'll take the M.A.D. that results from the threat
| of the nuclear option over someone getting to yank out my
| heartplug ala Lynch's _Dune_.
| hinkley wrote:
| Yeah I'm not sure that's meant to be taken literally,
| anymore than I think "If you meet Buddha upon the road,
| kill him," is an incitement to homicide.
|
| The people who have _reverence_ for the heroes are as much
| or more of a problem as the actual heroes, and they need to
| be shaken severely. It 's going to be ugly any way you
| slice it because like so many things in software, you're in
| a position where someone should have yelled "stop" years
| before and instead things just kept going, far past
| unreasonable into a first-rate dystopia.
|
| If you fire one belligerent hero as an example to the
| others, you might be able to make it work. But if you have
| one 'database guy' or 'backend person', odds are very good
| that they're going to go exactly as fast as they want to go
| and smile and say 'no' when people ask for major changes
| that would break up a logjam. If they aren't particularly
| articulate about _why_ things are the way they are it 's
| easy to get the impression they are running things instead
| of the titular managers.
| at_a_remove wrote:
| Color me a little confused, but I think I kind of would
| lean toward letting the database person make the
| decisions about database rather than the titular
| managers. Haven't we all been through enough "management
| heard X technology is hot so we are gonna use that"
| fiascos?
|
| Management's job is _not_ to make decisions about
| databases for the database person, but to communicate
| about problems and priorities, and so on. Don 't get me
| wrong, the dark hilarity of malicious compliance can be
| great when someone commands you, like they are some
| bumpkin who just rubbed a lamp and acquired a genie, to
| do something that is gonna bring down production at noon,
| cutting off your about-to-be-voiced objection, but let
| the managers manage and let the experts be experts.
| lstamour wrote:
| That assumes the experts are indeed experts and not just
| saying no to an experienced consultant/contractor that
| management hired. Though I agree from the perspective
| that if the system goes down after the consultant leaves,
| it's not their problem.
|
| I've been around enough to know that these ultimately are
| political and cultural problems, and you either have to
| expect change to be slow in these situations or leave to
| find a different team...
|
| I've tried a bit of both, and gotten frustrated, and in
| the end, the stance I've settled on is to be helpful to
| change people's minds. It's hard though. Being persistent
| and pushy with help will fail. Having the person you're
| helping describe a problem or agree something is a
| problem, that is the first step to helping find a
| solution.
|
| I guess another way of putting it is management can
| suggest using technology X but there should be some kind
| of identifiable problem to solve. There is always the
| exception though. For example, the problem identified
| might be that there are too many technologies and X is
| the new standard. That's... sometimes the reason and ...
| what can you do? Having been on both sides of the fence
| here, you never know, X might not be so bad... or you'll
| need to fix a ton of bugs.
|
| As long as you stay happy and helpful, you can maybe
| nudge things in the right direction? For example: X has
| uptime issues. If X is already adopted, document the
| known issues for devs or DevOps, or identify consultants
| for X that can provide training and support. Figure out
| how to get data into and out of X if you want to refactor
| later to a different approach and political winds blow
| that way. Write cheat sheets that can map what you're
| using now to Technology X, and what might be unexpected.
|
| Who knows, maybe enough people will have heard or seen
| your materials on Technology X that they're not as
| impressed or share your viewpoint on it. And if you're
| really unlucky, you'll set yourself up to be the
| cheerleader for technology X. So... there are both risks
| and benefits to getting too involved in technology
| shifts/adoption.
| hn_version_0023 wrote:
| How do you handle the case where Technology X is being
| deployed because the C-suite was gifted Super Bowl
| tickets to deploy Technology X?
|
| I have been in this exact situation. I left the company
| as a result; kickbacks and graft aren't my thing.
| hinkley wrote:
| You can't have a dozen middle tier and front end people
| at the whims of one backend guy why isn't interested in
| ramping someone up to load shed. That was a terrible
| contract, and at the end I'm sure they went back to the
| status quo. Him holding the reins of the data and his job
| while the initiative ramped down and they waited for the
| next time they got the political will to spend a bunch of
| money.
| [deleted]
| throwaway4good wrote:
| In any job; you are not indispensible. You may think so, or
| others may tell you so. But you are not. You can easily be
| replaced. It is just a question of cost.
|
| And while it is fun to fantasize about snarky comebacks. Don't do
| it.
|
| In ten years time, no one will remember what sort of professional
| contribution you made. But they will remember whether you were
| nice or not.
|
| Be nice.
| justin_oaks wrote:
| I can relate to some of this because I like to understand how
| things work, like the article author said about himself.
|
| At every job I get hit up with questions because I put in the
| time to figure things out. I often get annoyed if the other
| person hasn't done their homework before coming to me, and that
| comes through in my communication. Because of that, I have a
| reputation as someone who is "prickly" and thus someone to
| contact as a last resort.
|
| Quite frankly, I like it that way. I'm still helpful to
| coworkers, but not so helpful that they'll ask me before finding
| other ways to get their question answered.
| Ansil849 wrote:
| The great swindle that capitalist ideology has pulled is
| simultaneously convincing workers that 1) they are completely
| dispensable ('we can replace you'), but 2) that they are also
| completely indispensable ('we need you'). The former keeps the
| worker scared that they can be fired at any second, the latter
| makes the worker feel guilty about quiting (or not answering
| their phone at 6am on a Sunday).
|
| The amazing thing is that, depending on what the corporation
| needs, the worker is made to feel either of these things.
|
| The post in the OP is the worker feeling the latter, with a
| twist: being made to feel indispensable to shove off as much work
| as possible on the worker.
| avalys wrote:
| What successful organizations have you built following your
| ideology?
| [deleted]
| dusted wrote:
| Early on, I did some infrastructure thing that caused me to
| become indispensable. My motivation for doing that was not to
| become indispensable, but to have some infrastructure that
| allowed me to a. make my own life easier, b. make others lives
| easier and c. show my new org that I was not entirely useless.
| After a while, I was moving on, I didn't want to maintain this
| thing anymore, it clearly did what I set out for it to do, and I
| grew less accommodating and started pushing back when people
| wanted more features.
|
| I was able to hand it off to "nobody in particular" and explain
| that yes, I build the thing to solve X and it does that fine, if
| it can incidentally be used to also solve Y, it's great but not
| something I want to know about. By slowly being more resistant to
| changing the thing FOR people, telling them to try to do it
| themselves, and less inclined to answer questions, and more
| inclined to ask them what they tried and suggest what they may
| investigate next to find an answer, people have stopped asking so
| often, and I no longer consider myself indispensable. I know they
| will have a hard time doing some changes if I'm not around, but
| not impossible, and if one day I leave, enough other people have
| touched the stuff that, even if it "was mine" it's now "ours".
|
| The strategic minus for me is of course that I'm not
| indispensable, but on the positive side, I can now actually do my
| job instead of babysitting my skunk-works projects.
| justin_oaks wrote:
| > By slowly being more resistant to changing the thing FOR
| people, telling them to try to do it themselves, and less
| inclined to answer questions, and more inclined to ask them
| what they tried and suggest what they may investigate next to
| find an answer, people have stopped asking so often
|
| The general principle here is that we teach people how to treat
| us. If we're always bending over backward to help someone
| without expecting them to put in the effort themselves then
| we're teaching them it's OK to behave that way.
|
| Just asking "What have you tried already?" teaches others that
| they're not allowed to put in zero effort. Saying, "No, I won't
| implement that feature." teaches others that you're not a
| pushover.
| cesaref wrote:
| I worked for a european investment bank for a number of years,
| and they had a policy that every year, every employee (without
| exception) was required to take 2 weeks holiday as a contiguous
| block, and during that time, their access to the company was
| removed, so no email access, no remote login, keycard access to
| the office removed etc. They basically ran the 'suspend this
| person from the organisation' script and restored you when you
| returned after your holiday.
|
| This was primarily in place to reduce the risk of fraud in the
| trading/operations side of the business, but it had the side
| effect that it made it very obvious if the business depended on
| someone being in the office, since managers would have to cope
| with people being off and unavailable for 2 weeks. It of course
| also covered people leaving, or being hit by a bus etc.
|
| Overall I thought it was a very simple mechanism to avoid the
| business risk of being exposed to one employee both from a
| business as usual, and also from a fraud point of view, and also
| made it much easier for people to free themselves from a
| particular role.
| galangalalgol wrote:
| That is brilliant! In the US it isn't that unusual to find
| companies that don't even offer 2 weeks vacation in total
| though.
| jaywalk wrote:
| Come on. Outside of the lowest-level hourly positions, you're
| not going to find any US company that doesn't offer at least
| two weeks vacation.
| hn_version_0023 wrote:
| You might get 10 business days of PTO, to be used as
| vacation, sick time, parental leave, etc.
|
| The thing is there are no laws enforcing any time off in
| the US.
|
| So what you get isn't standardized or available across the
| board. Generally I haven't found any that offer less than
| two weeks, but... I have absolutely worked places that give
| you the time off but penalize you socially or otherwise if
| you dare to take it.
| LanceH wrote:
| Sadly, there are too many companies that offer zero PTO in
| the first year.
| cindarin wrote:
| Oh how I envy the luxurious life you must have had to reach
| this conclusion
| TheRealDunkirk wrote:
| For 6 years, I've worked for a outsourcing firm which has
| given me 7 days of vacation, and only FOUR US holidays. It
| wasn't until this year that they expanded that to 10 days,
| and STILL won't give us Christmas Eve. (The company I'm
| placed in gets a week and a half at Christmas, full stop.)
| I'm a very senior person for the company, and I'm sure I'm
| one of the largest PO's they have. Please come talk to my
| management about how "any" company doesn't offer "at least"
| 2 weeks of vacation.
|
| EDIT: Don't get me wrong. This situation works for me very
| well, but the average vacation situation in the US is
| abysmal.
| tomcatfish wrote:
| The federal government gives 0.5 days leave per every 2
| weeks worked. Note that that implies 0.5*(52/2) = 13 days
| possible to accrue in a year.
|
| I think showing the feds do it should sway you pretty far
| away from your above position. If not, I'm curious what
| evidence could be provided that would.
| Jtsummers wrote:
| The 13 days off (2 weeks and 3 days, you don't spend it
| on weekends) is just the first 3 years. For years 3-15
| you get 4 weeks (20 days) per year. After that you get 26
| days/year. They also get 13 days of sick leave per year
| with no max accrual. Regular leave maxes at 30 days
| accrued, you have to have 30 days or less at the end of
| the calendar year, anything beyond that is lost (use it
| or lose it). And now they get 11 federal holidays,
| sometimes more depending on who is president and when
| Christmas Eve and Christmas fall. It's not uncommon for
| late-career (15+ years) folks to have max accrued leave
| every year, which means they can potentially take 56 days
| + 11 holidays off the next year if they want, sums up to
| 13 weeks depending on how they use the leave. Of course,
| you can only do that about every 2-4 years. 2 years if
| you spend one year without using any leave, which would
| be pretty miserable. If you're smart about that 26 days,
| it becomes 6 weeks off instead of just 5 by pairing it
| with holidays.
|
| They can also earn "credit hours", up to 24 hours of
| accrued time off by working ahead (an extra hour here and
| there, unpaid but becomes leave) and comp time (same, but
| no technical limit, becomes overtime pay if unused).
|
| And there's now 12 weeks of paid maternity and paternity
| leave, which is better than most companies in the US.
|
| Of course, the pay is lower which is why it's harder to
| keep technical talent. And as you move up the GS ranks
| it's a lot like moving up the officer ranks in the
| military, a shift from technical (at the lower levels) to
| managerial/leadership (at the higher levels). Which means
| there are effective caps on people who want to remain
| purely (or more purely) technical and avoid supervisory
| roles (outside of, perhaps, team or project leadership
| positions).
| matwood wrote:
| Using the federal gov. as an example of the lack of
| vacation was pretty funny when they tend to have very
| generous standard days off, and move up accrual rates
| pretty quickly.
| Jtsummers wrote:
| Indeed. Federal employee benefits are actually pretty
| good, it's the pay that's not so great.
| rmah wrote:
| The US financial industry has almost the exact same
| contiguous time off requirement for the same reasons.
| jlund-molfese wrote:
| Can you provide a source or examples? Asking out of
| ignorance--I've worked in insurance and currently work for
| a US-based financial services company, but haven't heard of
| this practice before.
| fluxode wrote:
| It is typically referred to as YAR (yearly absence
| requirement)
|
| https://www.newyorkfed.org/banking/circulars/10923.html
| chdoyle wrote:
| It happens at most major investment banks, although to my
| knowledge the mandatory "two weeker" is generally limited
| to employees who manage risk like traders. It forces
| another person on the trading desk to be responsible for
| their carried positions which should help identify any
| mismarking or other types of fraud.
|
| https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10000872396390444914904577
| 615...
| kjuulh wrote:
| This was me, given a variety of factors I ended up being lead on
| a big project right out of uni. We did end up shipping the
| product, in a state that could be discussed how well it went, but
| what do you expect from a fresh graduate.
|
| On one end I learned a ton, and probably the most important, how
| to deal with responsibility and pressure. But at the same time I
| can really see myself in this article, I ended up choosing
| another road, I was bored with the product, but the company
| didn't want me to switch to a different product or team, and my
| team itself was treated like dirt, so I ended up leaving.
|
| I really tried knowledge sharing and getting others to be
| independent on the product, but we didn't have the right people,
| and the culture of the company simply didn't value that trait in
| newer hires.
|
| I could have made so much more money if I stayed, but it is still
| far to early in my career to become an 'ivory tower' architect.
| willbudd wrote:
| > I could have made so much more money if I stayed
|
| Are you sure that isn't a bit of a "glass is half empty"
| perspective? There's no upper limit to how much money you can
| make by choosing your own path. (If, hypothetically speaking,
| you were inclined to pursue big $EURY=PS).
| kjuulh wrote:
| Definitely, my prioritized as mentioned in my post; lied with
| my well-being, and not just getting a pay raise, otherwise I
| would've stayed. It could be argued that I could get a raise
| somewhere else, and I also have gotten that, but not the
| amount I would've gotten if I stayed. I am still quite early
| in my career, and I am already in the upper bounds of what I
| can make as an employee given the length of my career (99th
| percentile). And when finding a new job, even when I've
| gotten recommendations been difficult for them to even match
| my old salary, simply because I haven't been out of
| university that long, but command a much higher salary than
| normal.
|
| Would you as a product owner / manager hire an engineer that
| has been out of university for two years with a bachelors,
| given that person says he wants a senior/lead engineer
| salary? Honestly, from my experience even when I've gotten
| recommendations, talked about previous projects, they still
| don't want to shell out what I cost.
|
| The plan is definitely to keep pursuing new experiences and
| at some point either begin consulting or start a startup. But
| for now I want to experience a few different companies. I
| also want a few projects under my belt before I begin doing
| that. That said I am already in the 99th percentile in my
| country given my length of career, so I have nothing to
| complain about, but I am definitely gonna keep pushing.
|
| And honestly right now my priority is not making the big
| bucks, I could pursue that, but I'd much rather work on
| awesome projects than slave away at some legacy code for the
| maximum amount of money.
| hackitup7 wrote:
| Nobody will defend your time if you don't do it yourself.
| Company's will take-take-take from your time not because they're
| malicious but just because they need to get stuff done and the
| monolith of a corporation doesn't pick up on nuance and feelings
| at a micro scale. I've seen this play out time and again,
| particularly with people who always want to be responsive or
| helpful. They burn themselves out.
|
| Fwiw the teammates whom I consider to be the most indispensable
| are not the ones who know the most details. They're the ones who
| are the most adaptable and able to take on more responsibility
| and lead with creativity and urgency. This typically means that
| they're good at defending their time - they often have the
| indispensable knowledge that the author writes about, but only
| pull it out when they really need it, because they know that
| their real value add is in scaling themselves and their teams.
|
| (Also fwiw, I've had a very similar career trajectory to the
| author based on the article's first paragraph so I feel like I
| understand the signals that they're writing about)
| justinlloyd wrote:
| I joined a company on a short-term contract, "for a month or
| two", to help out a friend and solve a few problems. Which became
| a four year engagement.
|
| I became "the go to guy" for anything and everything related to a
| particular project, and the DevOps for that project, and
| eventually the DevOps+CI/CD guy company wide. But I also had to
| work on an assigned project as Lead Programmer, but never got any
| other programmer assigned to work with me.
|
| I shipped two company critical products by myself, front-end, iOS
| & Android mobile app and backend infrastructure. I made
| significant contributions in the form of code to other teams, I
| ensured the company wide build-systems kept humming along and was
| 24/7 on-call DevOps for two years straight with no backup. At one
| point I literally had five separate managers that I reported
| directly too that each had their own competing needs.
|
| Every couple of months I had a conversation with a higher up, and
| every couple of months I was told "there's no budget, it's
| difficult to hire, you do it so well, and we don't trust anybody
| else to do it, and nobody else wants to do it."
|
| There was no promotion, no prospect of advancing, didn't receive
| a single pay increase in four years, "but you're so well paid
| already, there's just not the budget for that this year, we see
| you as more of a cost center than a profit center." And every
| time I was ready to quit, a few "friends" at the company talked
| me down off the ledge, who I later learned were being prompted to
| do that by upper management. It was a classic abusive
| relationship. I realize that now. And I fell for it.
|
| When I started to have issues with shipping a product as both the
| Lead Programmer (mobile apps, fron-end, admin interface, backend
| infrastructure and API) and also be project manager and interface
| directly with a demanding client, including doing on-call 24/7
| DevOps with no backup, and wrangling the company-wide CI/CD
| system, the project I was building, that should have been a five
| person team in reality, I was assigned a "tough manager" to set
| me straight and get me back on track. This was literally the
| conversation I had when the manager sat me down in a conference
| room, "I'm here to make sure you do what you need. I'm giving you
| some tough love. And I'm going to ride your arse until I see
| improvement." Now this manager was not the project manager, he
| was specifically assigned to manage my output, and after a month
| he went back to the execs and said "Justin isn't the problem."
|
| This manager put up signs at the end of the cubicle row that said
| "If you need to speak with Justin, talk to X first." And people
| would ignore the posted signs, ignore that I had headphones on,
| and still interrupt me, and then my Manager and whoever was
| interrupting would get into an argument, right at my desk, over
| how urgent their request was. I eventually got moved out of that
| area to a "quieter area" near the IT guy, which unfortunately
| meant then people would come by his desk and have loud
| conversations about an IT issue, and when the IT guy wasn't
| around, would interrupt me to ask if I knew about how to solve
| problem X on their computer.
|
| When the stress is so bad, and I have an outburst where I am
| screaming at my tech director to go fuck himself in the middle of
| the hallway, and they still won't fire me, an outburst I am not
| proud of and would never ordinarily do (I'm kind of a Mr Rogers &
| Ted Lasso until you hit the wrong button), you kind of get the
| idea of how indispensable they viewed my position. The outburst
| was over five people having a meeting directly at my desk, that
| didn't actually involve me, that was very loud and racous, and
| when I repeatedly and politely asked them to move their meeting
| elsewhere I was informed that I need to be more understanding and
| empathetic towards people's needs.
|
| Coronavirus came along, everbody gets to WFH, which gives me
| breathing room to think, I start looking for a new position, the
| company hits a financial tough spot and decides they can do
| without me, which is like a great weight that lifted from my
| shoulders. I took three months off and built a few side-projects
| and was so much more productive than I had ever been in the past
| four years. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/three-months-side-
| projects-ju...
|
| I was still getting messages and urgent emails from people at the
| company four to six months later, on an almost daily basis
| regarding the DevOps and CI/CD pipeline. Everything had been
| documented, nobody wanted to read, it was easier to send me an
| email even though I no longer worked at the company.
|
| I used to love being "the go to guy" but I've since learned,
| "don't ever be indispensable."
|
| Unfortunately, history repeated itself at the following company,
| and is starting to repeat again. Maybe I'm the problem.
| swayvil wrote:
| Does anybody else ever reflect on how, in our modern world, utter
| servility is assumed? I mean are we all serfs now? Are we
| discussing the best method for licking master's boot?
| weq wrote:
| I think its always been this way. Our parents told us democracy
| has won out, but in reality, its the same old story. People get
| fed ideas, of dreams, of one day, as an excuse, to serve. The
| lucky few are broadcaste around the clock to reinforce the
| general monenies stature. And dont give me no bull about
| "making it" from "nothing".
|
| The only way to truely make it, is to find someone else, and
| jump on that bandwagon. Whether that some else is a government
| contract, or seed funding, or an admissions board. You rub
| someone elses back and hope to get your just deserts in due
| time.
| Tabular-Iceberg wrote:
| What's "monenies stature"?
|
| I assume it's a typo for something, but I can't figure out
| what. If I google it I get results about money laundering,
| which doesn't sound right from the context.
| at_a_remove wrote:
| That's what offends me about this piece, really.
|
| And on top of it, Agile, which has always had the whiff of
| "Taylorism, but from the _inside_ " about it. Always
| _sprinting_ (huff huff huff); attention atomized by checking
| texts, emails, phones, voicemail, and of course iterating over
| an ever-increasing number of Slack channels (or Teams);
| everything in these bitty increments of moving the assembly
| line along. And this has to be accomplished through a kind of
| homogenization, which invariably leads to replacement. But
| sure, let 's hot desk on rows of laminate-topped folding tables
| for the greater glory.
| bigpeopleareold wrote:
| Agile might work for someone else, but I never saw it work. I
| saw this trying to be applied, amongst other methodologies,
| but the real sticking factor is whether a group of people
| feel like they are solving actual issues in the end. "Agile"
| or any methodology was a bit make-work, to fill a role that
| we can report on the specific progress of small things. At
| least for me, seeing people learning to handle issues, get
| through real features needed without the minute formalities
| has made them, and myself, more engaged in what I do. Being
| practical in the end gets you farther than having faith in a
| strict process.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > "Agile" or any methodology was a bit make-work, to fill a
| role that we can report on the specific progress of small
| things.
|
| Agile isn't a methodology, and most methodologies described
| as Agile eschew formal minutiae.
|
| The problem is, of course, that methodologies, of whatever
| origin, are, in practice, subject to top-down, non-Agile
| modification to suit the taste of managers who thrive of
| formalized minutiae, and, also, the starting point of
| methodologies for many shops isn't the original description
| by Agile practitioners who developed them while delivering
| superlative value but customized versions crafted by and
| marketed alongside consultants whose jobs are largely
| telling command-and-control-oriented managers what they
| want to hear.
| bigpeopleareold wrote:
| You're right and thank you for bringing this to light.
| Because my experience has been trying to use that thing
| to solve non-problems.
| sdoering wrote:
| > Agile, which has always had the whiff of "Taylorism, but
| from the inside" about it.
|
| Isn't 'lean manufacturing" a direct descendant of Taylor and
| agile a direct descendant from 'lm'?
| leoh wrote:
| This is so silly -- being useful should be enough, period.
| paxys wrote:
| The first thing to remember is - no one is indispensable. If you
| get hit by a bus tomorrow the company will go on without you.
| People may have a bit of trouble at first, but new processes will
| develop and new people will gain expertise just as you have now.
| Heck the company might be better off in the long run without
| knowledge bottlenecks.
|
| Second, being indispensable doesn't do a whole lot for job
| security. If the company is doing well, you need to perform
| exactly at average to stay employed, no more. And if the company
| is down in the dumps and there are mass layoffs, who is going to
| judge how much knowledge you have in your head? All the people
| who know how good you are are probably getting fired as well.
|
| Third, you are probably not as important as you think you are.
| Upper management isn't sitting around singing your praises in
| their weekly meeting. No, they are focused on the rising star who
| is executing new ideas and launching new product lines. You are
| meanwhile being taken for granted.
|
| Now, if you are in this position the author writes about, the
| time to get out of it is _now_. Realize that no one can help you
| but yourself. Start redirecting people, or ignore them
| altogether. Make noise up the management ladder. Play dumb if you
| have to. Eventually the rest of the company will find some new
| punching bag and leave you alone.
| c0l0 wrote:
| According to my ~15 years of work experience in IT/the tech
| sector, this ought to be pretty accurate.
| spangry wrote:
| This is something I wish I'd understood earlier in my career.
| Your company doesn't care about you, nor should you expect them
| to. You might give 110% and be a well-regarded model employee.
| But I guarantee the day after you leave they'll advertise your
| position and replace you.
| kayodelycaon wrote:
| I've gotten laid off twice despite department VPs two levels
| up trying to keep me.
|
| The second time I realized that there is no point in trusting
| in anything related to my relationship with the company.
|
| It doesn't matter how good you are when the people making
| decisions either don't know or don't care. Eventually you
| become inconvenient in some way and you get removed.
| jacobyoder wrote:
| reversedly, I was at a company where I kept focusing on
| 'stuff', trying to respond on time, hit deadlines, etc.
| Went to lunch with someone and he kept saying "chill out,
| don't sweat it". We were late back from lunch. It bothered
| me, but not him. I found out a few months later he was
| dating the niece of the dept manager. The two of them were
| friends with another lead on the floor. This is why he was
| always 'chill' about stuff. He never hit deadlines or
| delivered great stuff... it didn't matter. He was 'in'.
| pcthrowaway wrote:
| There are people who are indispensable to the point that entire
| products, teams, or companies rely on them (for better or
| worse). The company very well may not go on running if they are
| hit by a bus. At the very least a product (or products) may be
| cut and teams made vestigial or laid off.
| hobs wrote:
| The indispensable head of QA at my company died of a heart
| attack after working 100 hour weeks for years, they did not
| replace him.
| willcipriano wrote:
| A one sentence horror story. How much of his life was missed
| for things the company could do without?
| hobs wrote:
| Probably about ~8% of his life.
| mooreds wrote:
| > A one sentence horror story.
|
| Too true. My favorite quote on this topic is that "work
| will never love you back". It's easy to get wrapped up in
| what we are doing (sometimes the less important it is to
| the world, the more I need to get wrapped up in it to be
| motivated), but work pales in comparison to:
|
| * a good conversation with a friend
|
| * time outside, contemplating nature and purpose
|
| * a hug from a family member
|
| But we don't treat it like that, unfortunately.
|
| Of course, we all need to eat and I realize I'm speaking
| from a position of privilege (not worried about where my
| next meal is coming from).
|
| Once you get to an income of X (where X varies by location,
| needs, but is definitely a finite number), time is so much
| more valuable than money.
| matwood wrote:
| > but work pales in comparison to:
|
| I just want to note that this is a poor generalization.
| Much like how people wonder how I have the discipline to
| get up early and workout, it's because I enjoy it. I also
| enjoy my job the vast majority of the time, and I suspect
| many others do also. My dad always comments "I'm amazed
| you get paid to play on the computer all day...", "Me too
| dad, me too".
| BeetleB wrote:
| As a generalization, it's a good one. That there are
| exceptions doesn't make it a poor generalization.
|
| If you enjoy your work more than other things, that's
| great. For me, even within the domain of tech, there are
| much more interesting things I'd like to do with tech
| than what I do for my job - and most of the things on my
| list will not be supported by the market - they're
| confined to hobbies.
| mooreds wrote:
| What would you say is a good generalization when it comes
| to work life balance? There's sure a spectrum, from the
| folks who love to work (or even workaholics) to slackers
| who don't want to.
| antognini wrote:
| "The cemeteries are full of indispensable men."
| iJohnDoe wrote:
| 100% this. A lot of wisdom here.
| martin_a wrote:
| Corporate firewall blocked this for me (thanks, URL! :-D),
| archiv.org to the rescue:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20220316044015/https://www.sofuc...
| fhrow4484 wrote:
| > [...] I had to stop understanding [...] This was huge. I could
| legit say 'I don't know' to all questions, and redirect people to
| the correct resource. If that resource didn't exist, it was
| escalated to someone other than me.
|
| This is called learning how to delegate. It's great that the
| author discovered it.
|
| An alternative tactic people follow when they still like to know
| the details is to apply "strategic incompetence":
| https://www.google.com/search?q=strategic+incompetence
| codingdave wrote:
| I lived the same life as described - ran with one product for a
| decade, from initial thought to acquisition, and was the center
| of knowledge. I had a different tactic to get out of it -
| documentation. Not just written, but I made a series of videos to
| take someone from having never heard about the problem space all
| the way up to how we solved, why we made our choices, how the
| current system works, and what our long-term vision is both for
| features as well as lessons learned.
|
| When we finally did get a new acquisition and a new product
| leader came in, I was told that those videos made the onboarding
| to the product so easy. No meetings, no schedules, no weeks of
| questions... just sit down and watch and they were up to speed
| enough to engage with the product. I still had detailed knowledge
| they needed to ask about, but I was not "indispensable".
| civilized wrote:
| Ugh, videos.
|
| You were probably right to make them though. A lot of people
| seem to be as bad at reading as I am at listening to meetings.
| pSYoniK wrote:
| I used to work in sales and I remember one of my coworkers who
| was a really good salesperson, but they wanted to get off the
| sales floor. They had enough and just wanted to move on to a
| managerial position. The pay was about the same, but the hours
| were better and it was easier to get time off.
|
| He had applied to openings twice and each time one of the
| "lesser" salespersons got the job. When I was leaving I asked one
| of the managers why this person wasn't getting the job - they had
| experience, they had loads of knowledge, they had solid people
| skills and excellent sales figures. The answer was - "we can't
| lose him as a salesperson".
|
| It kind of stuck with me - what happens if you're too good for
| the job you have. What happens if you've "overfitted" yourself to
| the current role... It's one of the reasons for which every year
| or so I start getting an itch to try something new. A new
| company, a whole new role within the same company, just something
| else. In the last 8 years I had 9 jobs at 7 companies and each
| time I got a raise, I got more interesting projects, I managed to
| do more interesting work and met a bunch of new people. I know
| this isn't for everyone, but I know I'd never want to be
| indispensable. I want to be replaceable as that's the same rule I
| apply to my roles. Really good read and I'm afraid I'm seeing
| another person like that in my current role...
| steve_gh wrote:
| It's called the Technical Ghetto.
|
| The basic problem is technical folks who are too good at being
| technical to be allowed to do any management or less technical
| stuff.
|
| I've seen it time and time again in my career. I've discussed it
| at length with colleagues and peers. I've seen very few people
| escape it. Only once have I seen someone escape it without moving
| jobs (new company, not in-company). And that one time was due to
| a succession crisis which meant the person in question had to be
| promoted into a more senior management role.
|
| The absolute classic was a guy I worked with at a major
| international telco. He was promoted into country CEO role. 3
| months later and he was moved to be CTO in another country
| because they couldn't find anyone else competent to take the CTO
| role during a major rollout. He called me a couple of years later
| - he is now CEO of his own SAAS business, and very successful.
| lloydatkinson wrote:
| What is his saas business out of curiosity? Seems like it could
| indeed be very successful with this experience
| rkagerer wrote:
| I run my own consulting business and have fallen into this trap,
| even with all the right efforts to document, cross-train and
| build out expertise.
|
| I've learned billing hourly and gradually nudging up the rate
| helps incentivize clients to backfill faster.
| rhplus wrote:
| This is why teams should run people game days to test their
| resiliency to organizational outages. Unavailability: force team
| members to completely disconnect for a day. Consistency: if a
| team member ask a question about a process that should be
| documented in a runbook/TSG, instruct them to sometimes answer it
| incorrectly. Latency: delay responses to email/IM questions about
| live-site processes by 24 hours.
| andi999 wrote:
| Isnt this called paid time off.
| sdoering wrote:
| Yes in part. But I like the more random aspect to it as well
| as the additional dimensions.
|
| It trains people to not rely on @xxxx in slack (or any other
| tool for comm). It trains people to write better
| documentation as they will receive unhappy messages from
| coworkers if it wasn't clear. And it trains people to RTFM
| first.
|
| At least - there is a chance it can do all of this.
| brianliou91 wrote:
| There is a difference between having power and being
| indispensable.
|
| Power enables you to delegate whereas if you are indispensable
| but leadership has no idea what you do, you are powerless and
| stuck.
|
| It's not fair that power is determined subjectively and largely
| politically, but it's the reality we live in.
| brabel wrote:
| My company's CEO recently called me and told me I am
| indispensable and gave me a 20% pay rise on the spot! Should I be
| worried ;)?
| ourmandave wrote:
| That sounds like you either know where the bodies are buried,
| or you helped bury them. D=
| ge96 wrote:
| Recently as the only dev there was a bug/outage and I was asleep.
| I dream of having more than one me so I can one day sleep
| whenever. We don't have money so yeah... Just me.
|
| I'm working on better back testing (some dep version went out and
| it broke it our stuff).
| wildmanx wrote:
| The people most common to enter this state are people who don't
| trust their co-workers to do the right thing and instead get
| involved so heavily that in the end they are pulling all the
| strings. You may call them "control freaks". Sometimes branding
| themselves as "perfectionists".
|
| When reading his story it became apparent that that's likely his
| problem. Unless literally everybody in his org was completely
| lazy (which, honestly, is unlikely), he clearly drowned other
| people's requests for help with "oh just get out of my way, I'll
| just do it myself" and there you go, next dependency on himself
| is introduced. Note that I'm not insinuating that it was on
| purpose. It's just the natural result of somebody not letting
| others do things, and fail and learn on their own on the way.
|
| Kudos for realizing that it's a problem and for pulling out of
| the process. But we only see his side of the story here.
| xondono wrote:
| I think this isn't justified. There's people who are control
| freaks, but it's not necessarily OPs case.
|
| In a product I delivered (I do hardware design), I helped the
| "firmware team" (one guy at that point) to get started because
| I was more experienced, and stuck helping with some small
| modules to get things ready for demos and things of that
| nature.
|
| Later the team expanded, so I let go of firmware development
| and went back to my work, and the code slowly changed to the
| point that I wasn't really aware of _what_ the device did in
| scenario X, much less _how_ it did that.
|
| I still was the go-to guy when it came to questions about the
| device behavior for months, even if all my replies where "I
| have no idea, ask this people".
|
| All it takes is for someone to say "that guy has been working
| on this since the beginning", and a lot of questions will find
| your inbox when others are unsure about the answer.
| Aeolun wrote:
| > It's just the natural result of somebody not letting others
| do things, and fail and learn on their own on the way.
|
| How is this supposed to work though? You can do it yourself and
| succeed, or you can allow others to fail. If others are
| constantly failing where you (feel like you) could have
| succeeded, that's it's own form of exhausting.
| wildmanx wrote:
| That's right. That's a problem for management to solve
| though, not for the guy in the center who could have
| succeeded all over the place where everybody else keeps
| failing all the time.
|
| _If_ that 's really the case. It could also be the case that
| there are sometimes just different opinions, and one side of
| the argument is just more persistent and dominant and "just
| does it themselves", instead of accepting that a different
| solution would also have brought the org to a good result.
| Then that lone superstar gets frustrated (because they think
| they have to do things themselves), their colleagues get
| frustrated (because there is that guy that just does things
| on their own and better be quiet than pick a fight) and it's
| overall not sustainable for the org. Again, a problem for
| management to solve.
| codingdave wrote:
| Yes, sometimes helping people learn means letting them make
| mistakes. Watching someone do something slowly and poorly can
| test your patience. But they'll be faster and better the next
| time. Have patience for them to learn, while being available
| to guide them when needed or when their mistakes would impact
| the customer.
| tokamak-teapot wrote:
| I would say your assumption here is unkind and itself lazy.
|
| I have often seen this kind of situation and the cause has
| always been the same: The most senior in the organisation are
| ridiculously poor at building their org.
|
| They have hired someone who is pretty great at stuff and they
| got them by accident, for cheap due to some circumstance, and
| now attempt to grow without realising they got lucky.
|
| They hire net negative contributors and making it more
| difficult to deliver, not less. They cannot comprehend that
| there won't be some magic that turns these people into
| productive and driven employees without their own growth in
| skills, attitude, and care in direction. They are likely
| incapable of such things.
|
| The person or people at the center of this are stuck, yes. They
| can't spread their knowledge because others will actively avoid
| admitting the docs exist, or refuse to ask Google or another
| employee. They certainly can't spread their attitude and skills
| because no-one else cares or has the incentive or ability to
| skill up.
|
| There is only one eventual route for the capable and driven:
| leave and go somewhere where there are better people in senior
| roles.
| wildmanx wrote:
| If everybody around is relatively incompetent, then the
| superstar at the center can't fix that. The overall result
| that the org produces is based on everybody and eventually
| "regresses to the mean" of what everybody contributes.
| Management and also the superstar need to accept that.
|
| I write "relative" because it's a matter of perspective.
| Maybe from the superstars perfectionist perspective, the
| others are incompetent, but from the outside they are "good
| enough". Or maybe they are not, but the point is that there
| is a mismatch and the superstar needs to either accept that
| or leave. The third alternative, trying to lift things to the
| superstars (real or perceived) standard by "I'll just do it
| myself" is not sustainable and results in situations as in
| the discussed article.
| tokamak-teapot wrote:
| Yes, your conclusion that this person / people should leave
| is the same as mine. I'm also saying, however, that the
| person / people you're describing as 'superstar' don't have
| to be that at all. There doesn't need to be a 10x
| contributor and lots of average people. Just a 1x
| contributor and lots of 0.01x or -10x people.
|
| Too many owners / managers believe that to grow your
| business you just need to add people, that they are great
| at hiring people, and everyone will just sort themselves
| out and work together. They are then surprised that this
| doesn't happen, despite their faith in their own competence
| at making this happen.
|
| I'm not saying there aren't perfectionists out there with
| an inability to share or unwillingness to let go. Just that
| the situation being described could be exactly as described
| and not just one side of a story.
| sguav wrote:
| > _One of the biggest problems with being indispensable and
| announcing that you feel stuck, is that the business will take
| steps to get you even more stuck, through more money, shinier
| titles and stock options._
|
| This worries me, as I'm experiencing it right at this time. No
| idea how to get unstuck either.
| nicolas_t wrote:
| In the past, I became indispensable for my employers, like the OP
| I had been there for a long time, had made a significant number
| of important technical decisions and was the go to person for any
| questions. On the positive side, it served me well when
| negotiating since everyone knew that I couldn't just walk away on
| the other hand, I got severely burned out but couldn't just stop
| since I felt some responsibility to everyone and it took quite a
| while to do everything to make myself not indispensable.
| someelephant wrote:
| Desire to be indispensable is a manifestation of imposter
| syndrome which is a manifestation of anxiety. If it doesn't fade
| after a few months you've got underlying issues you need to
| solve.
| hinkley wrote:
| In the spirit of the old saying, "the two happiest days of a boat
| owner's life are the day they buy a boat, and the day they sell
| it."
|
| The best advice I got starting out was, "be indispensable."
|
| The best advice I got four years later was, "don't be
| indispensable."
|
| In a growing company, the indispensable people may find
| themselves being left holding the bag while new initiatives are
| undertaken. I very quickly learned the meaning of 'working your
| way out of a job' after the first time this happened to me.
|
| I'm sure there's some min-max game I'm not playing with regards
| to how easy I am to lay off, but once I learned there are worse
| fates that being laid off, I stopped looking for them. Being
| "stuck" with responsibilities is unpleasant when things are going
| well, but it's miserable when things are going badly. If you
| aren't the one who got laid off, then someone you used to trade
| off with doing onerous tasks certainly was, and now you're stuck
| doing it every single time.
|
| If given the choice between "my company would be just fine
| without me" and "everything would fall apart if I didn't show up
| to work," the latter feels very good for a brief period when
| you're young, until the weight of that responsibility sinks in.
| "My company would be just fine without me," can mean "my work
| here is done," and you can ride off into the sunset with a clear
| conscience.
| gautamdivgi wrote:
| Being indispensable to a team or a manager in a large company
| can actually be self-destructive to your career. I realized
| this the hard way a long time ago when my managers refused to
| let me move for a promotion because I was "indispensable" and
| "critical to the project". I've always made it a point to know
| who my back-ups are and have my supervisors assign them
| formally.
|
| In short, make it a point to share knowledge anyway. Keep a
| wiki, well written notes or documents, README.md's, whatever.
| Make it a point that people who are backing you up acknowledge
| and understand what you have and most importantly ask them to
| grow that body of knowledge.
| jacobolus wrote:
| > _refused to let me move for a promotion because I was
| "indispensable" and "critical to the project"._
|
| So would they rather have you quit? If not they should be
| willing to give you whatever title, pay bump, time off, etc.
| is necessary to keep you long enough for a replacement
| solution to be found. Otherwise if you just quit they're
| stuck negotiating from a position of weakness to hire you
| back as a much higher paid contractor, or if you decide to
| take an extended vacation or work somewhere else they are
| left high and dry.
|
| If you are truly "indispensable", that makes you the one with
| all of the leverage. If they can jerk you around without
| pushback, then "indispensable" sounds more like a rhetorical
| device / excuse.
| xlii wrote:
| I would argue that exercising such leverage is not only for
| benefit of the indispensable but also for the organizations
| which are often inert unless enough initiative is given.
|
| Indispensability (true or perceived) hurts not only person
| but organization as a whole. It creates tension between
| them, which might break at any point for any reason (a bus,
| reaching point of no return, dragging organization down)
| and create difficult to fill void once that happens.
|
| I think it should, however, be considered from the true
| indispensability and not the perceived one. Perceived one
| is bullying employees, accidentally or on purpose.
| Sometimes it's bullying ourselves by creating overly
| controlled environment that solidified over years.
|
| In perfect life scenario utilizing leverage would work as
| following: The Indispensable ask for a minor raise (1-5%)
| -> Company agrees, because The Indispensable is truly
| indispensable -> 1 month passes -> Repeat
|
| After couple iterations there would be a break point
| because company will start to weight options and might
| decide to compensate instead of waiting for next month and
| another raise request. In this scenario The Indispensable
| stops being one, so their quality of work improves (less
| stress) and they get additional income. Company retains The
| Indispensable since they signaled and through adequate
| pressure achieved the goal. Fragile process with single
| point of failure is resolved with more stable solution.
|
| Unfortunately it doesn't work in real life often. Some
| companies simply can't afford matching expectations, no
| matter how warranted they are. Indispensability there is
| simply a tax imposed on worker. Some people aren't
| confident and courageous enough to bring issues out and try
| to act on them (as business can be intimidating). Last and
| not least - true indispensability isn't black or white.
| There's a mixture of politics, perceived indispensability,
| true indispensability and controlling behavior by The
| Indispensable one.
| hinkley wrote:
| It is very clear that bosses have had good luck bluffing or
| calling other people's bluffs and many just do it as a
| matter of course. I bet you won't quit over a 5%
| discrepancy in pay, and I'll just ratchet that up every
| review period, and hope you don't notice when that climbs
| to 10% under market.
|
| It's kind of the same game landlords play. I always find it
| somewhat amusing when a landlord forces a business out of a
| storefront and then the storefront sits empty for six
| months or a year. How long is it going to take you to break
| even on that?
| ljm wrote:
| For storefronts specifically, and depending on the
| country you're talking about, there's more likely than
| not an attempt to evade or avoid tax. For example, this
| is exactly why tourist attractions like Oxford Street in
| London are full of American Candy stores now. They'll be
| there for a few months and then be gone: the landlord
| saves on business rates because they'd found a tenant,
| and the actual company vanishes without having paid the
| rates they were responsible for.
|
| In that case, it's beneficial to the landlord to have
| some scam shop in because even if they're not being paid
| rent, the money they're saving from an occupied
| storefront easily outweighs every other alternative.
| [deleted]
| crispyambulance wrote:
| > So would they rather have you quit? If not they should be
| willing to [...]
|
| I know that many folks here work in elite organizations, so
| maybe it's hard to fathom, but THE NORM for big companies
| is to be dumb as a box of rocks when it comes to
| organizational stuff and technical operations.
|
| Talented people who are intrinsically cross-functional,
| curious, and who always to do what it takes to "help the
| team" often get hammered flat from years of the daily
| grind-stone and then just quit, like the OP.
|
| In most places no one is even thinking about "retaining
| talent" until it's far too late.
| hinkley wrote:
| Retaining talent conversations feel much like people who
| show up to AA after the liver disease diagnosis. They
| didn't think it would happen to them, they didn't look at
| it, and their sudden conversion is a rear-guard action,
| closing the barn door after the horses have gotten out.
|
| If your bosses are saying "retention" out loud you are
| probably already fucked, even if your division seems to
| be doing okay.
| dagw wrote:
| _So would they rather have you quit? If not they should be
| willing to give you whatever title, pay bump, time off,
| etc._
|
| For large enough companies the 'company' is not a single
| unit making unified decisions. I might be "indispensable"
| to my boss, perhaps his boss, the project, and my
| department. However they don't have the power to give me a
| pay rise or extra time off outside the normal bounds set by
| their bosses. Me, my boss or even my department however
| aren't indispensable to the whole global multinational
| company we all work for.
|
| If I quit and the project fails, then my boss and several
| people on that project might lose their jobs, and the
| remnants of that department might end up folded into some
| other department. My bosses boss might not get a nice bonus
| that year due to the fact that the project he was
| overseeing was a massive failure. However "The Company" and
| it's tens of thousands of other employees all around the
| world will keep on trucking as if nothing had happened.
| scarface74 wrote:
| To add on, it is a lot better story to tell during
| behavioral interviews:
|
| "I was hired by the Director to solve $x problem. I led
| the project. I put processes in place. I led training for
| the team and they went public a year later. I met my
| former director for lunch a year later and most of my
| processes are still there in a slightly evolved form."
|
| About the same as above from my job after that. But
| change "Director" to "CTO" and change "went public" to
| "got acquired for 10x revenue".
|
| (Yes I can draw a direct line from the architectural
| changes that let them pivot to selling access to micro
| services to their value proposition when acquired)
| einpoklum wrote:
| > However they don't have the power to give me a pay rise
| or extra time off outside the normal bounds set by their
| bosses.
|
| Maybe. But - maybe they just follow the path of least
| resistance, which is to lean on you rather than go up to
| their bosses and say "John Smith is quitting, and when he
| does, this project will crash and burn. We must stop this
| or the company will lose $$$."
| hinkley wrote:
| > my department however aren't indispensable to the whole
| global multinational company we all work for.
|
| Some of that is wishful thinking on their part. They
| can't acknowledge that the riffraff keep the wheels on
| and may swing the other way as a form of denial. They
| probably treat waiters like shit too.
| ljm wrote:
| There's the risk of heroism too... you're indispensible
| because you're that one person who goes above and beyond and
| everyone sees you as the go-to when shit goes wrong.
|
| I've been there a lot, not on purpose but in some
| organisations it's either that you get your hands dirty or
| you spend 10x as much time watching the buck being passed.
| It's definitely one of those things as a developer where you
| need to learn some management skills or end up burned out of
| the job.
| fxtentacle wrote:
| That sounds to me like an invitation to negotiate ;)
|
| Option A) You truly are indispensable and critical to the
| project, and soon you're going to be their best-paid
| employee.
|
| Option B) They will now find ways to make you dispensable.
| And then you'll qualify for that promotion.
| scarface74 wrote:
| It's not about "I'm indispensable pay me more". It's about
| "I don't want to have 1 year of experience 10 times". I
| always want to have the optionality to change jobs . Things
| change. Culture changes.
| Syntonicles wrote:
| I've heard this "one year of experience 10 times" phrase
| before. It seems to mean different things in different
| contexts to different people. Can you explain what it
| means to you and the implications?
| scarface74 wrote:
| Real world example:
|
| I started my second job in 1999 it was for a bill
| processing/printing company. Companies would send us data
| files via ftp, we would merge the files and create files
| in a format used by industrial printers and mail them
| out. Later on we were one of the early integrators with
| CheckFree that was the backend for most online bill
| payment services.
|
| I wrote mostly processing programs in VB6, Perl and C++.
| I did some GUI programming with C++/MFC/COM (ask your
| parents).
|
| Fast forward to 2008, the world had moved on. But I was
| still using VB6 (discontinued in 2001) and C++/MFC. My
| compensation was only $7K more in 2008 than it was in
| 2000. There were other people doing the new shiny while I
| maintained the old systems.
|
| I learned my lesson. Over the next 10 years, I changed
| jobs 5 times and doubled my income - nothing to brag
| about. It was still about what entry level developers get
| as return offers in BigTech. I was laser focused on
| keeping my skillset in sync with the market.
|
| By 2017 though, I realized my market value as an
| enterprise dev was going to plateau in 3 years and my
| youngest was graduating from college. I started pivoting
| to "cloud" and got into "application modernization"
| consulting - basically a fancy term for cloud app
| development and deployments.
|
| I got my current job in consulting in about two years
| ago.
| mattgreenrocks wrote:
| Good lessons here on tracking the market, keeping skills
| up to date, and skating to where the puck is going. I
| imagine the modernization niche pays pretty well. :)
| scarface74 wrote:
| Ironically, "application modernization" seems to be the
| worse paying cloud specialty in the industry. At most
| consulting companies, "implementations" pays the least
| and is outsourced to cheaper labor and junior
| consultants.
|
| I work at the one company that pays decently well for AWS
| + enterprise dev + consulting. It's not hard to guess
| which one it is..
| plutonorm wrote:
| That would be an instant resignation as a matter of principle
| for me.
| CapitalistCartr wrote:
| Principles are a luxury not afforded the poor masses.
| hinkley wrote:
| I'll take "people who haven't bought a house or have
| kids" for 500, Alex
|
| There's a thread right now in r/experiencedDevs about a
| guy who is trying to buy a house while his employer is
| cratering around him. Stuff like that happens and tends
| to stick with you forever.
| wpietri wrote:
| Or even a lot of the middling ones. In the US something
| like a trillion dollars a year is spent on making people
| want to buy stuff. Not to mention all the social forces
| that encourage spending. Relatively few people manage to
| live far enough beneath their means that they can just
| quit a job on principle.
|
| I happen to be one of the people who can (and has!) quit
| a job on principle. But it's very much a luxury good that
| I work hard to afford. And it's easier for me: no kids,
| no parents to care for, no mortgage to worry about. I
| would rather more people quit their jobs on principle (or
| risked it through efforts like unionization). But I
| mostly don't blame them if they feel like they can't.
| kaba0 wrote:
| If you are indispensable, then surely you have quite a
| leverage.
| teknopaul wrote:
| That argument does not solve the problem. You will stay
| or go from one project that fails to the next like that.
| Better to have worked on projects that are still good on
| your CV.
| pc86 wrote:
| No.
|
| Scenario: There is a project your boss is wholly
| responsible for. You, from a technical perspective, are
| absolutely indispensable to the success of said project.
| Maybe it's a small team, or everyone is overloaded, but
| you can draw a direct line between you quitting (or doing
| a bad job) and your boss getting called out or
| potentially fired.
|
| Your boss, however, is not indispensable to their boss,
| nor is this project indispensable to the larger
| department. You ask for your raise because of your
| leverage. Your boss might be worried and try to get it
| for you. Their boss, not caring about this project that
| much in the broader context of their work, laughs and
| says no.
|
| You can absolutely be critical to the success of a
| project, and even important to your boss's future, but
| have no real leverage over your situation. That's
| absolutely a reason to leave but it doesn't mean you'll
| be able to squeeze any more money out of the place before
| you do.
| geodel wrote:
| Such a great point to make. Specially since I see myself
| in similar situation. Maintaining a legacy system on
| which all the devs except me who worked in past have
| left. It is critical system or so I heard but as far as
| promotion/raise go, almost nothing for last 3 years.
|
| However instead of getting angry I get that I may be
| important to direct boss or one level above. But as far
| as company goes they are all in cloud, next generation
| and what not. So my criticality is inconsequential in
| larger context.
| plutonorm wrote:
| Obviously you find another job first. That will take a
| few weeks in this market.
| sdoering wrote:
| I think one of the problems from "being indispensable" is the
| direction it takes. Being indispensable in regards to people
| "being left holding the bag while new initiatives are
| undertaken" means they are/were indispensable in regards to
| specific tasks/processes/skills or knowledge.
|
| Personally I feel being indispensable can also be seen as being
| able to be thrown at (nearly) any problem and finding a
| solution. Catching the ball and creating the basis for a stable
| project for others to take over/maintain. I am working at an
| agency and more often than not there is a first small
| initiative at a client where we just do not know what is
| expected/needed in terms of skills and in what direction this
| initiative might go/grow.
|
| So we often throw two people at the "problem". One more senior
| "jack of all trades" kind of person that can understand a lot
| of problems and knows how far they themselves can work towards
| a solution (and when to call in the subject matter experts).
| And one more junior person to support and learn by swimming in
| cold water together with said "senior" (can actually -
| depending on the problem be a junior/intermediate themselves -
| it depends).
|
| These "jack of all trades" persons, thinking on their feet,
| being able to improvise and get things done, able to understand
| and dig into problems ans find solutions - these kinds of
| persons are indispensable - but they don't get stuck in one
| specific problem/project.
|
| The processes around them are built in a way so that we free
| them for the next thing to come our way. And we do everything
| we can to create new people of that kind.
|
| I'm not really familiar with the military context, but it's
| almost how I envision an advance/special forces unit operating
| in front of the actual lines and first creating a beachhead
| that the regular troops can then build on and bring their
| strengths to bear.
|
| These types of individuals are indispensable - but ideally not
| each of the individuals on their own.
| gowld wrote:
| TL;DR: Be indispensable for the role you want to be in. This
| may change over time.
| [deleted]
| marcosdumay wrote:
| There is actually no contradiction there. You want to be
| indispensable for the position you wish you have, and
| dispensable for any position you don't wish.
|
| If your interests change, your dispensability should change
| with it. But this is very hard to achieve, so you get a complex
| goal of optimizing for many things at the same time.
| vikaveri wrote:
| Starting in a new role, or new company, often means that there
| is a period when I'm hard to replace, but since I try to
| automate everything I can and make the rest simple enough for
| anyone to do, I'm actively trying to make myself useless and
| out of a job. Funnily enough, it doesn't seem world is running
| out of undone work anytime soon and there are always more
| interesting problems to solve.
| nvarsj wrote:
| This happened in the first company I worked for. It was a big,
| well known engineering company, and when things started going
| south they had to negotiate with the state labor department to
| do large layoffs, which required giving financial cushions to
| let go employees. I was a star employee - so while everyone
| else was being laid off with nice, big compensation packages
| (like 6-12 months of salary), I was stuck in a company on fire
| that obviously had no future. I was, in effect, punished for
| being "indispensable".
| kqr wrote:
| Deming sometimes used bus drivers as an example. Some of them
| might think it's not their job to smile and be nice to
| passengers. They're hired to drive the bus, and perhaps help
| out in emergencies, but not much beyond that.
|
| However, being nice to passengers (performing "caring labour"
| as Graeber would have put it) increases the chances that people
| choose the bus over e.g. the metro or something else. Deming
| concluded that it's always your job to do whatever increases
| the chances of the company you're working for staying in
| business.
|
| I still haven't found a good way to phrase it, but I'm starting
| to think that for knowledge/creative work, this can be
| specialised to something like, "it's your job to teach others
| to do what you think your job is."
|
| For knowledge/creative organisations to stay in business over
| the long term, they need to continuously innovate, and for
| innnovation you want people to be strong generalists. Not just
| because it lets them spot opportunities they otherwise might
| not, but also because it lets the organisation run more
| efficiently with less paperwork, and because it gives people
| the autonomy they need to think clearly about things.
| [deleted]
| heavenlyblue wrote:
| > However, being nice to passengers (performing "caring
| labour" as Graeber would have put it) increases the chances
| that people choose the bus over e.g. the metro or something
| else.
|
| Increases is a relative measure. It may be 10% or it may be
| 0.0001%. At very small values it becomes basically a zero
| because humans are non-divisible unit at which point your
| theory is basically in the rabbit's hole of magic and
| wizardry.
| wanderingmind wrote:
| If the bus drivers were paid by the number of people who take
| the bus sure, but when are paid by the travel route distance,
| they have no obligation to do what they are not paid to do.
| mtsr wrote:
| What a nihilistic view. Not every aspect that's part of
| your job needs to be included in your variable compensation
| in order to be done, does it?
| iamacyborg wrote:
| They're employed to do a specific job, if they're not
| rewarded for bringing the company more money, why should
| they care?
| gowld wrote:
| The specific job includes customer service. It's what
| they are being paid for. Employees who do the job poorly
| are at greater risk for replacement by replacement hires.
| This is why many companies ask customers to rate
| individual service providers.
| goodpoint wrote:
| Because human beings are not coin operated robots?
| iamacyborg wrote:
| So they should do unpaid emotional labour for free?
| pc86 wrote:
| If you equate smiling at someone, or just being generally
| courteous, with "emotional labor," you need to make an
| emergency appointment with your therapist.
|
| Being a good human being more often than not (occasional
| bad moods notwithstanding) should be a non-functional
| requirement for any job where you interact with other
| people. I have no problem with anyone, in any role,
| getting fired simply for being an asshole. The world
| would be a happier and better place for it.
| xboxnolifes wrote:
| > If you equate smiling at someone, or just being
| generally courteous, with "emotional labor," you need to
| make an emergency appointment with your therapist.
|
| This entire conversation started based on an example that
| smiling brought economic benefits, not that you should do
| it because of socializing benefits. Answering in economic
| terms only makes sense.
| goodpoint wrote:
| Many types of emotional interaction are meaningful and
| true only when they are unpaid. Some big examples:
| friendship and love.
|
| For employees not to be rude to customers as part of
| basic work requirements.
|
| But putting on a false smile and feigning warmth to get a
| tip is a very different thing.
|
| It's quite common and accepted in the US. But also seen
| as soulless and emotionally manipulative in many other
| cultures.
| alichapman wrote:
| Yes but if the number of people on the bus dropped to zero
| do you think their employers would keep running the route?
| krisoft wrote:
| The passenger count is so heavily influenced by factors
| outside of the bus driver's influence that this example
| doesn't make sense.
|
| Passengers don't abandon bus routes because the bus
| driver didn't smile at them. They abandon routes when the
| schedule is inconvenient, there are better alternatives
| to the bus, the fare is too high etc etc. None of these
| are in the control of the bus driver.
| FeepingCreature wrote:
| Ah, this must be why bus drivers are commonly paid in company
| shares. Incentive alignment! Makes sense.
|
| Wait, they're not? So why should they care, when their bosses
| don't care even enough to set up a direct reward to bus
| performance and some way for them to have agency over that
| reward?
|
| Though it would be cool if there was a bus service that had
| direct, fine-grained association between curteous behavior
| and reward in the form of immediate payment and future
| business, possibly mediated via ratings - I was making a
| joking reference to Uber here, but "Uber for busses" is
| genuinely something that I want to exist. Ie. not "Uber Bus",
| but the standard Uber model of engaging a driver directly,
| only this time applied to longer timespans to allow better
| schedule coordination. For instance, some way to say "Hey, I
| need a bus from X to Y some time between 6 and 7 every
| workday for the next six months, which time and pickup
| location is cheapest?" would allow for some pretty cool
| optimizations in routing. Possibly combined with a
| Kickstarter-like model where a bunch of people can express
| prospective interest.
| scarface74 wrote:
| If I'm working for a private company. Guess how much I care
| about "equity" that will statistically be meaningless?
|
| On the other hand, I did implementations as a Senior
| Develop/de facto "cloud architect" that moved the needle
| meaningfully at a company with $5 million in revenue. Those
| same types of implementations happen multiple times daily
| at a company worth over $1 trillion. Nothing I'm going to
| ever do will ever have a meaningful affect on the stock
| price of the company I work at now.
| FeepingCreature wrote:
| Kind of sounds like the company share price is too
| coarse-grained. That sort of thing might work better if
| the company was split into separately traded sub-units,
| of which the parent company owns some controlling
| fraction of voting shares. Admittedly the bureaucratic
| overhead starts being awkward.
| scarface74 wrote:
| There are four companies worth over 1 trillion. How could
| you split any of them in a way that my small
| implementations by their standards would make a
| difference? I purposefully focus on the "nose of the
| camel in the tent" type work.
|
| I like smaller proof of concept + training type projects.
| FeepingCreature wrote:
| I agree there is not necessarily a good way to do this in
| any given company structure. However, if a company can
| figure out how to do it, other things being equal I would
| expect it to eat its competitors' lunch. (As with how
| Uber doesn't need to mandate that drivers should be nice;
| it just falls naturally out of the incentive structure.)
| hinkley wrote:
| BTW, this sort of smugness is why Detroit is a shattered
| husk of what it used to be.
|
| When Deming still had all of his hair, he had trouble
| getting traction in the states. Japan, on the other hand,
| was intrigued by his ideas and wanted some quality time
| from him. If you look at the history of the Toyota
| Production System, they usually credit Taiichi Ohno and
| Toyoda, with the origin story sometime in the 80's, after
| Detroit was already in flames, but before that was Deming,
| and for some reason he is usually not mentioned.
| amelius wrote:
| > "Hey, I need a bus from X to Y some time between 6 and 7
| every workday for the next six months, which time and
| pickup location is cheapest?"
|
| They could even make it so that the people who actually
| take the bus negotiate the time and place.
|
| This would be great for events outside the city.
| MagnumOpus wrote:
| This is what Citymapper's Smartbus tried to do in 2017 -
| regulations don't make it easy, so negotiations with the
| municipal authority and Transport for London are still
| ongoing...
| jodrellblank wrote:
| "Imagine if you could hire a bus"?
|
| You can; groups of people hire a mini bus or coach and
| negotiate where and when it travels all the time for
| social events, work parties, school trips, etc.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| > "My company would be just fine without me," can mean "my work
| here is done," and you can ride off into the sunset with a
| clear conscience
|
| It also makes it way easier to take your vacation time.
|
| If your employer is harmed by you taking vacation, they _will_
| find ways to make you miserable for it.
| cik2e wrote:
| I have been in this situation myself, but my former boss has
| a conscience, as it turned out. My wife and I were on a
| vacation that was timed to celebrate an important birthday. I
| had spend days during the preceeding week training up two
| people on my team, and maybe one or two others, on various
| processes and contingencies. Yet still, when push came to
| shove, I was asked to get online to put out a fire. Luckily
| it only took an hour or two. A few days later I was surprised
| to find $1000 bucks deposited into my account from my boss as
| a thank you.
|
| This system that I had hacked together, built out and
| maintained, kept on growing in size, complexity, attributable
| revenue and potential compliance liabilities. Within the
| year, I had to call the execs into a meeting to drive home
| the point that this wasn't a tenable way for us to operate.
| Everyone had known as much but it was still a tough pill to
| swallow. I let them get too spoiled at a huge cost to my own
| mental health.
|
| I had to paint a dire picture to make my case that the system
| had to be rebuilt from scratch in order to be integrated into
| the main infrastructure. I ended up leaving a few months
| later as the rebuild was nearing completion. A couple of
| months down the road I was surprised to learn that they were
| still using a part of my system alongside the rebuild.
| Apparently their architecture couldn't support an algorithm
| that this component had relied on.
|
| What a mess!
| [deleted]
| gumby wrote:
| > If your employer is harmed by you taking vacation, they
| will find ways to make you miserable for it.
|
| Ouch, I know this one well and it almost cost me my marriage.
| pjc50 wrote:
| Your marriage wasn't enhancing shareholder value, citizen.
| mstipetic wrote:
| s/citizen/human resource/
| beebmam wrote:
| Sounds like this story is yet another reason people should
| regularly be moving to different companies
| brtkdotse wrote:
| > If given the choice between "my company would be just fine
| without me" and "everything would fall apart if I didn't show
| up to work,
|
| I found the problem. It's not "your company", it's "the
| purchaser of your time and attention". Act accordingly.
| wildmanx wrote:
| Unless you are a co-founder or otherwise heavily invested.
| sdoering wrote:
| I remember reading "Anything you want" by Derek Sivers. There
| he describes, that he actually went towards "my company would
| just be fine without me" with his own company.
|
| So regardless of being an employee doing bodyleasing towards
| their employer, being an employee that identifies with
| "their" company or being a boss/founder/owner/manager these
| two sides of the axis exist and one needs to find the spot
| that fits for them within that range.
|
| I don't think there are "one size fits all" easy answers. Or
| at least if they are given imho and by my experience they are
| wrong more often than not.
| Boritanian wrote:
| i think the indispensable idea is from an era where job
| stability is important and you might be at one company for
| decades.
|
| The methode en vogue of the current era is to jump ship every 2
| years because that's the best way to get a raise/promotion.
| With that strategy being indispensable isn't that important
| because you will self-dispense in 2 years anyway.
| NikolaNovak wrote:
| "My Company would be fine without me" also means you can take
| vacation, medical appointments, heck even weekend (crazy
| concept!).
|
| "Being Indispensable" can also mean two years of no physical or
| mental time off; it was not fun!
|
| I am currently lucky that all my layers of higher management
| understand that if my team can function effectively without me
| for a period of time, that means I'm doing my job _well_ . I
| was able to take 2 months of paternity without things falling
| completely apart, and it was a proud moment for me and the team
| (plus great chance to bond with family). Sure there were things
| to catch up on and new initiatives and some bad habits to work
| through, but it was overall a success.
|
| (In addition to "be indispensable" vs "don't be indispensable",
| one of the best pieces of advice I got and share is _" The
| moment you get a new job/role/position, start looking for your
| replacement"_. I did not understand the value of that the first
| few years, but I now 100% do. I know a lot of HN SME/IC's
| believe "it's my boss's job to replace me / I'm in & out in a
| year or two", but if you are even remotely looking for a
| sustainable career in a company or small market/industry, it
| will speak VOLUMEs to your foresight, care and team&business
| responsibility if you have a trained, capable backup identified
| and positioned, for your times off as much as for your eventual
| ambitions).
| wpietri wrote:
| > "My Company would be fine without me" also means you can
| take vacation, medical appointments, heck even weekend (crazy
| concept!).
|
| This is so worth it! A decade ago, I was the technical
| cofounder of a still-small startup. For a while, it was just
| me and my co-founder. But when we got signs of product-market
| fit, I hired a team of developers. We set it up so the
| default was pair programming with frequent pair rotation,
| with a lot of other tweaks to make it very collaborative.
|
| This paid off in a lot of ways, but for me the biggest came
| when my mom got sick. I had to fly across the country and
| stay for weeks at a time to help her and coordinate her care.
| I was worried things might grind to a halt. But because every
| commit to the code base involved at least two people, it was
| fine. There were things I understood better than others, but
| there was nothing that was a scary mystery that nobody had
| touched.
|
| When I left the company, it was the same deal. We were on
| good terms, so they were welcome to call. But they rarely if
| ever did! It was great to pop in now and again and see them
| just chugging ahead.
| Terry_Roll wrote:
| The security services do Karma online and offline, so do
| other people. You might be excellent at what you do but if
| your personality or face doesnt fit, people will still find
| ways to get rid of someone.
| NikolaNovak wrote:
| I'm not sure how that directly relates to my or original
| post; but let me try to engage:
|
| I don't understand first sentence; but based on second
| sentence, my interpretation of your key point is that you
| may have excellent technical or functional skills, but if
| your personality / behaviour / look don't fit, people may
| still find way to get rid of you.
|
| I believe that is true; and I believe that can be true in
| both positive and nefarious ways.
|
| I've been a hands-on pure techie for 15 years; I've been in
| leadership/managerial positions lately; and I cannot
| believe how positively _ignorant_ I was to ever think my
| technical skills were the only or even primary
| consideration.
|
| A person knowing a technology is great. But a person then
| needs to:
|
| * Understand client's top down business goals and
| priorities (as opposed to bottom-up technical priorities)
| to prioritize their tasks and recommendations. E.g. As a
| DBA, you _want_ to spend your time optimizing tables and
| indexes and access paths that you have; but business may
| well prioritize new functionality that will gain them
| market advantage or reduce cost more than optimizing a
| technical parameter will. And this tension goes forever in
| every facet of technology.
|
| * Be able to gather true requirements, eek them out of
| client and product owner and functional & business team. A
| person who builds exactly and only what a clueless
| functional person tells them to, is... OK. A fine junior
| resource. A person who's been around the block and cares
| enough about business to ask keen questions to identify
| needs client/functional wasn't fully aware, identify edge
| cases, danger zones, risks and discuss them in
| understandable language, is a worthy senior developer
|
| * Work with the team. Coach junior team members; at least
| consider feedback from everybody - junior, senior, client,
| management, functional, business, and integrate it
| appropriately to make yourself more valuable to them. Make
| their day better - through your work, yes, but also your
| attitude. Do you help inspire and motivate and get team
| members excited, or do you drag them down? Do you help move
| things along or do you get people stuck in some detail
| forever?
|
| * Communicate well. Strive to understand and be understood.
| Ensure your team mates and management know what you're
| doing, how you're doing, how well you're doing, the
| thoughts and plans, and risks/barriers/issues/constraints
| you're encountering (as much as they need/desire to). Be
| self-guided when you can; Ask for help when you reach your
| limits. (those two goals are a LIFEtime's work to improve
| and hone and fine tune:). Ensure everybody understands the
| plan and agrees to plan. Be at all times aware other
| people's
| context/background/assumptions/knowledge/perspective may be
| completely, wildly different than yours; avoid unspoken
| assumptions and ambiguities.
|
| * Understand your management's goals and help them succeed.
| It is stunning to me how few technical people (myself
| historically included!!:) didn't know, and did not _want_
| to know, what the management /business goals are. We have
| this duality of "Just tell me what to do, I don't want to
| deal with politics and business crap" and "I'm angry that
| we are not doing what _I_ think we should be doing, how I
| think we should be doing it ".
|
| etc etc etc.
|
| This is not to say that teams and companies don't abuse the
| "cultural fit" notion; or that north america isn't _way_
| too prescriptive about "being a team player to the point
| of being a yes-person"; or that there isn't
| racism/nationalism/personal preferences and bias in
| recruiting and other decisions. There 100% is negative and
| unproductive ways to people manager, and I see it all the
| time. But I think many of us would benefit from awareness
| that our technical/functional skills are a) not the only
| thing we are judged on and b) they are not the only thing
| we need/should be judged on, on vast majority of real world
| non-theoretical projects and teams.
| Terry_Roll wrote:
| > I don't understand first sentence; but based on second
| sentence, my interpretation of your key point is that you
| may have excellent technical or functional skills, but if
| your personality / behaviour / look don't fit, people may
| still find way to get rid of you.:
|
| So if you get vocal (online) the security services get
| involved, its as simple as that, they will keep you busy,
| and so will other people, whether you like it or not, but
| not everyone gets to spot when the spooks are getting
| involved, which is partly their job ie to have
| deniability of their actions, but thats the way it is.
|
| 2nd point, spot on, correct.
|
| The rest of your post is what you have experienced but
| you dont mention office/team politics, that also plays a
| part, plus customers who despite all the training are
| fixated on something else and wont accept a superior
| solutions until perhaps years later.
|
| Some management are just as bad at conveying their needs
| as staff at the other end of the hierarchy. People dont
| always know what they want until its gone.
|
| You can get buried under communication, effective
| communication is generally better, but everyone is
| different.
|
| Everyone has a different opinion on the best approach.
| matwood wrote:
| "You can't be promoted if you can't be replaced."
| ivraatiems wrote:
| What's your goal, though? I'd like my company to not absolutely
| 100% need my constant presence, and I don't want to be in the
| author's position where he is not doing what he could be most
| valuable doing. But I do want my company to think "wow, that
| ivraatiems, we're sure lucky to have him." I would want them to
| think twice about firing me or laying me off if layoffs were
| happening. I definitely would not like to have to go look for a
| new job unexpectedly.
|
| So, I want to be personally valuable to the company - maybe
| more valuable than the average engineer - but I don't want to
| have indispensable knowledge that locks me in place. Surely
| there's a middle ground here?
| ip26 wrote:
| Presumably the goal is to be nominally replaceable, but just
| so all-around awesome they'd be sore to lose you.
|
| Easy, right?
| gowld wrote:
| Be the best at two things, and train someone to do the less
| rewarding thing while you learn a new thing.
| scarface74 wrote:
| I worked at 3 companies between 2014-2020. My goal going in
| was to solve the set of problems I was hired to solve by
| the then new manager and "put myself out of job".
|
| Today working in a consulting department, I refuse to take
| on any work that may look like "staff augmentation". I just
| do project based implementations with a definition of done
| and set aside time for training the customer.
| bartvk wrote:
| I think the middle ground is to have a huge stash of savings.
| That way, the original proposition isn't really relevant
| anymore. (That proposition being, I need to be valuable so I
| don't get fired).
| gnz11 wrote:
| After about 20 or so years now, one of the main things I've
| learned is that you aren't as indispensable as you think you
| are. You might think the company will go under or otherwise
| degrade when you leave, but that never happens. The company
| will trudge along without you. That being said though, if you
| do believe yourself to be "indispensable" to a degree in which
| the burden of you leaving is large, then by all means, use that
| to your advantage in obtaining raises/promotions/etc.
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| Or you are indespensible, and the company could go under, but
| you can charge them huge afternoon-consulting fees while
| working a new, better day-job elsewhere.
| pklausler wrote:
| > you can ride off into the sunset with a clear conscience
|
| You can _always_ do that.
| senectus1 wrote:
| wow... this is so familiar.
|
| not surprising really.. I've been with this company for approx 17
| years now.
| travisgriggs wrote:
| > I was a sentient wiki
|
| Busted up at this point.
|
| But seriously, this is me, though to a lesser degree (this guy
| sounds much awesomer then me).
|
| 10 years ago, I exited a shrinking technology community. I loved
| it, but the signs were on the wall. I knew I'd be one of the last
| ones to turn out the lights. I was just past 41. The prospect of
| looking for work at 50+ with guru expertise in a Cobol like
| technology terrified me.
|
| There seemed to be two basic paths at the time. Embedded or web.
| It seemed like web development was getting commoditized,
| community college grads earning $17/hr to hammer out a web site
| for the local pet store. Embedded seemed more lucrative, and I
| had a decent level of C competency.
|
| I made a choice to become a polyglot as well. I would embrace the
| "best tool for the job" mantra, and avoid being pigeonholed by
| any single technology.
|
| An opportunity in our small community opened up to be somewhat
| entrepreneurial for a medium size company and I jumped in. Our
| number of participants is no where near as large as the article.
| 10 at most. But 10 years later, I'm indispensable. I own the
| embedded C code that runs the 3 different node types on a
| proprietary LoRa network. The protocol that communicates with the
| edge device that runs embedded Linux, running multiple systemd
| services, the uboot configuration, the cooperating Python
| programs, our own BLE driver from said Linux board, the MQTT and
| BLE communications schemes and binary json like protocol that
| communicates to apps. The Kotlin code that runs the two apps. The
| horror that is working with BLE on Android. The objective-C then
| Swift code that runs the same two iOS apps. The elixir service
| that transforms MQTT traffic to swaggerified API. The ansible
| scripts that configure our servers. Etc. I try to document
| things, write good code, unit tests, but there's still a huge
| amount of "how it all fits together" and "we tired that, don't
| want to go there" knowledge in my head.
|
| I have enjoyed learning all these things and more. But I regret I
| never get the time to get really good at any of them. I regularly
| experience tuple dysphoria ("how do we do tuples in this language
| again?") and other similar "why do all of these languages need to
| do the same thing differently?" And feel like I always probably
| need to go figure out how docker works or some other new thing so
| that I can keep pushing our product offering into new and
| exciting places.
|
| And like the fine article, I am well remunerated, I am
| indispensable, I don't know if I can keep this up til retirement,
| and it's kinda lonely. I don't see a way out. People want to pay
| $120K for a dedicated Elixir developer, not 180 for "does a lot
| of fricking things kinda."
|
| A couple years ago, we hired someone to "help Travis" but it
| didn't work out so well. I'm still trying to figure out why.
|
| (I should add that there's still interest in hiring another body
| to participate in this madness of polyglot indispensable-ness, if
| such a thing sounded appealing, email's in the profile)
| sdoering wrote:
| To me stuff like this sounds lovely. But sadly I am neither
| proficient enough to be anywhere near the level of what you
| need as a "help Travis" person.
|
| I am my own kind of JOAT (jack of all trades) thing. I do
| mostly data work. Mostly web stuff. Nowadays a lot of strategy,
| architecture but also still implementation, JS work, python,
| ETL. Currently building an internal system next to client work
| for our team to have a play ground. So setting up a fake online
| shop with fake traffic (selenium) so that the web analysts can
| try out new tools with somewhat realistic levels of traffic and
| see if these tools might be something that helps clients solve
| their problems.
|
| I love the fact that I have colleagues who do parts of that
| stuff and from whom I can still learn a lot. And I like the
| diversity of it.
|
| But I agree - regarding the technologies I use there is a
| longing for "the time to get really good at any of them".
| drewzero1 wrote:
| That sounds a lot like my current situation (though awesomer in
| turn than me). I'm doing everything from servers to
| microcontrollers, Android barcode scanners to power tools,
| running network cable to restoring antique lamps (really!).
| Trying to keep syntax, data types and structures straight in
| Python, PHP/HTML/JS, and Arduino/C++. Maintaining the network
| of security cameras. Sometimes database stuff too.
|
| This is a dream job for me but I wonder where I can possibly
| advance from here. I know they don't (can't? won't.) pay enough
| for me to be able to afford to stay here forever. And I'd
| really like to work with a team instead of being the only
| person who can do a bunch of things.
|
| I had a helper too for a while and it was awesome. But they
| moved away and I've been struggling to keep up. I tried
| training a few other people to help and they weren't really
| into it. It did at least force me to come up with some better
| documentation.
| tw20212021 wrote:
| I wonder if this is where most developers end up getting. You
| can stick to being good at one language/ecosystem, but the more
| you age the more things you learn and unlearn, the more
| components and scope the company adds.
| Justsignedup wrote:
| My experience has been:
|
| 1- redirect to another engineer.
|
| 2- keep track of the convo. If it is going off the rails help the
| engineer get back on the rails
|
| 3- if the engineer cannot help, jump on a call and explain to the
| engineer how to help. Then let them help.
|
| This is how teams grow. This also let's you, the technical
| leader, inject yourself and assist the team without being the
| only source of truth. And also you become trusted.
|
| Win. Win. Win.
| lloydatkinson wrote:
| I used this exact tactic with a developer that refuses to use
| google recently - there's only so much time you can
| individually give one person...
| SideburnsOfDoom wrote:
| "The Phoenix Project" featured this guy, of course, and called
| him "Brent"
| otar wrote:
| This also happened to me.
|
| I was leading the large project, it was a core system for a
| financial organization.
|
| Because of a fast pace and because of the fast growth and because
| of the unexperienced management, it was impossible to quickly
| train and delegate things to the appropriate people.
|
| I was often getting a call from the devs, asking for help, and I
| was like "it works so and so, check the X file and find the Y
| method, that's where you should apply changes. When you do that
| don't forget to do Z."
|
| I was also getting calls from the top or middle level management.
| They were asking me things about the product specifications,
| marketing metrics, etc...
|
| Literally everything "that guy" that knew everything.
|
| The pace didn't slow down, the opposite, company wanted to grow
| like crazy. I couldn't keep up with everything. I remember I had
| a honeymoon in Thailand and I was literally hanging on a phone to
| dictate people how things worked and what they should have to do.
|
| Things ended up miserably. The new CEO came and we agreed that I
| needed help with the delegation: I needed suitable people on-
| board and time to teach them. The process started. But it was
| going slow. We still had a fast pace of growth and I was trying
| to hire and delegate along the way.
|
| After some time, I was accused to be a " corporate parasite",
| keeping all the knowledge to myself to be indispensable and
| irreplaceable. I left the company soon. Did my best to transfer
| the knowledge before that.
|
| In the end, it's been one of the best experiences I had. I grew
| professionally and mentally, nowadays I easily spot the problems
| while they become big, know who is who in a glance and so on... I
| learned a lot along the way.
|
| Several advices someone might find useful:
|
| 1) If you cant align with the decision makers you either have to
| get used to it or move on. Mostly you have no control on the
| other peoples' thoughts. If it's broken, it's broken. Period.
| Don't prolong your decision.
|
| 2) Always under-commit and sometimes try to over-deliver.
| Depended on the quality of your management or organization you
| might want to over over-deliver and be respected. If you're in a
| situation like this then good for you.
|
| 3) If you want to grow your organization and the team, you must
| learn how to delegate tasks and get deliverables, without micro-
| managing people.
|
| 4) In the end, its more about people and less about technologies.
| Your job is to understand, manage and delight people and solve
| all the problems along the way.
| quattrofan wrote:
| smokey_circles wrote:
| Alternate title: How it took OP years to realise their teammates
| and colleagues deserve agency.
|
| No such thing as "indispensable". Very few companies and projects
| die to a singular departure, you're just not that special kiddo.
|
| What's actually happened here is a selfish desire to know things
| without sharing them. If you learn something new, share it
| somewhere.
|
| "People came to ask the Oracle questions only the Oracle could
| answer for the Oracle refused to share knowledge by any other
| means".
|
| Confluence is pretty good if you use it properly. Weekly
| knowledge share sessions are also handy.
|
| Learning a thing and sitting on it makes you an asshat, not an
| asset. Seems OP learned the hardway, but they still need to
| remove their ego from the equation.
|
| You're not good at knowing things (basic human capability that),
| you're terrible at sharing them.
| Casteil wrote:
| You make a pretty grand assumption here - that OP had
| time/capacity in all the madness to be able to document things
| and simply opted not to.
|
| You also gloss over the fact that he addressed this in the
| article (things were documented, people just kept coming to him
| anyway).
| unityByFreedom wrote:
| Kinda seems like the author found a working solution- public
| email, aka a forum:
|
| > One thing I instituted that helped was a specific Teams
| channel called Knowledge Transfer. Any questions that would
| normally have been DM'd to me could be posted there, publicly
| for all to see. In theory, others could step up to answer
| these. I could also forward DMs there to respond to publicly
| or refuse to answer in DM and require them to retype their
| question in the Knowledge Transfer channel. Rarely did others
| step up to answer, but it became more like a SoFuckingAgile
| office hours, which was still a big improvement.
| drewzero1 wrote:
| You can lead a colleague to documentation, but you can't make
| them think.
|
| It doesn't sound to me like knowledge is being hoarded here;
| it's all there for the taking, but OP's colleagues have
| discovered it's more convenient for them to ask OP rather than
| seeking it out for themselves.
|
| Maybe that's an issue with discoverability, or maybe OP has a
| history of being too available for questions. Sounds to me like
| OP might in fact be sharing _too_ freely, thus making
| documentation /experimentation less attractive.
| unityByFreedom wrote:
| > You can lead a colleague to documentation, but you can't
| make them think.
|
| You can point them to the docs that answer their repeat
| questions rather than spending time to write a unique
| response every time. Author writes that this worked when the
| questions and answers were made available to others,
|
| > One thing I instituted that helped was a specific Teams
| channel called Knowledge Transfer. Any questions that would
| normally have been DM'd to me could be posted there, publicly
| for all to see. In theory, others could step up to answer
| these. I could also forward DMs there to respond to publicly
| or refuse to answer in DM and require them to retype their
| question in the Knowledge Transfer channel. Rarely did others
| step up to answer, but it became more like a SoFuckingAgile
| office hours, which was still a big improvement.
| dagw wrote:
| _Very few companies and projects die to a singular departure_
|
| While I've never seen a company die due to a single departure,
| I've seen plenty of projects die due to a single departure.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I write at a fairly "advanced" level. My code is well-structured,
| incredibly well-documented, and a blue-assed bitch to grok. It's
| not "lowest common denominator" code for junior devs. It's
| usually a hideous bouillabaisse of techniques, ranging from
| patterns that were around before I started (over 30 years ago),
| to ones that the language just began supporting, a few months
| ago.
|
| It also works pretty well.
|
| I'm putting the finishing touches on a fairly ambitious app, that
| has been in the works for eighteen months (frontend native app),
| and an additional seven months (backend server). It also
| leverages another server that I wrote, that has matured over a
| decade (and is now in the hands of a pretty capable team of high-
| functioning engineers). That server is a worldwide infrastructure
| that Serves thousands.
|
| This means that, if anyone will take over my code, they need to
| be fairly experienced and capable.
|
| You know, expen$ive. Also, they might be ... _old_ ... Gah!
|
| It's fairly likely that a new dev would toss out the app I've
| been developing, wholesale, and replace it (and the two backends)
| with dependency-laden garbage. They would probably do it fairly
| quickly. It's also likely that their code could be maintained by
| a staff of fairly low-skilled, inexperienced, coders.
|
| Which is good, because it would probably need a lot of
| maintenance.
|
| Now, a short-sighted, next-quarter-is-the-end-of-time manager
| might find the "new way" attractive. "The programmers are cheap,
| and we can fire them, as soon as they turn thirty!", they might
| say. But each of those programmers probably makes a decent chunk
| of change, and a lot of them, is a lot of change.
|
| One cranky old prima donna is quite likely to be a lot cheaper,
| and you won't suffer brand damage, from shipping crap.
|
| Brand damage/reinforcement is _incredibly_ expensive /valuable,
| and many short-sighted folks don't appreciate that. It can make
| or break your company.
|
| Keep your good engineers happy. It's OK, if they are
| indispensable. If they are happy, paid well, and -now, this is
| important- _treated with respect_ , they can be more valuable to
| the corporation, than a whole bullpen full of n00bs. I ran a team
| like that for 25 years.
| jameshart wrote:
| If you're going to practice coding like some master craftsman,
| employing techniques that took years to hone and where every
| carefully selected pattern, though inscrutable to an untrained
| eye, carries the thumbprint of an artist at the height of his
| power...
|
| Well, number one congratulations to you on finding a patron
| willing to fund such fine and intricate work. I hope they
| appreciate their good fortune in having lucked into getting
| such an artist to work on their project.
|
| But number two, how _do_ you plan on this model being sustained
| into the future? Have you taken on an apprentice to whom you
| can pass on the ancient wisdom to which you are privy and which
| only another equally enlightened 'cranky old prima donna' could
| possibly be expected to grok?
|
| Where are the next generation of 'experienced and capable'
| developers going to come from if you are off working solo in
| your cave for... twenty-five months at a time on your
| masterpieces?
|
| And where did you acquire these unique and precious skills that
| are not available to young developers who are, you surmise as
| you peer out of the cave at everybody else, only capable of
| producing dependency-laden garbage? Did you trek to the top of
| a mountain and study at the feet of the ancient wise ones?
|
| Or did you just write a whole bunch of code, and pick some
| stuff up along the way?
|
| As you sit in the corner and whittle away at your masterwork,
| combining thirty year old patterns with the latest language
| features, I wonder what gives you such supreme certainty that
| your mastery of your craft is such that you are creating
| something far above the standard others could achieve?
|
| Because, speaking as someone who works on large team
| development projects, I can tell you there is nothing in the
| world of development that scares me more than a developer who
| says 'I know this code's hard to grok but trust me it's really
| beautifully engineered'.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Well, I don't really like thinking of myself as some kind of
| "elite atrteest," or whatever. There's _lots_ of people that
| are better than I am. I 've met them, and worked with them. I
| spent most of my career, as the dumbest guy in the room, and
| I'm smarter than the average bear. It just seems that the bar
| for "average" is pretty damn low, these days, so what used to
| be considered "average," is now considered "too complicated
| to understand."
|
| I'm a pretty normal chap, and I work _very_ well, on a team.
| I spent my entire career, doing just that. If you want to
| assume that I 'm a jerk, I guess that's your prerogative; but
| I'm not. I'm a really decent person. In another world, we
| might actually find a lot in common, and have a great
| relationship, but in InternetWorld(tm), we have to be
| enemies. Not sure what that buys you, but it's a free
| country, I guess.
|
| I don't have a "patron." I'm working for free, for a
| 501(c)(3), doing an app for a nonprofit. It's pretty much my
| show. I spent thirty years, working on other people's code,
| and watching them destroy it, so I like working on my own
| code, and having it done right.
|
| Oh, and that server that I wrote? It took about ten years, to
| find a team that was capable of managing it properly. When
| they did, it became a world standard, and I was happy to step
| away from it; pretty much completely. It's used by thousands
| of people; every day. That advanced technique that I used is
| _exactly_ why it lasted so long, and was able to be localized
| and extended. The core code is still the ancient code that I
| wrote in 2008. It works great, and folks haven 't found a
| need to change it. The fact that I can hook it into the
| modern app that I'm writing now, is testament to its Quality.
|
| Also, it's free code, for altruistic purposes. I donated ten
| years of my life to it. It is not hyperbole to say that it
| has saved many lives.
|
| If you feel that's not something to be encouraged, then I
| don't know what to say.
| jameshart wrote:
| Well no, please let's not be enemies.
|
| So let me start by saying I have a ton of admiration for
| the work you've done based on that resume - I agree it's a
| worthy contribution and you should be proud.
|
| But please don't mistake my original reaction as being to
| your _actual body of work_ , but rather to your initial
| _characterization of a method of delivering software_.
|
| In particular you were characterizing a development
| approach of 'one hard-to-replace cranky old guy' versus 'a
| team of cheap easily replaced inexperienced devs' - as
| being alternatives a manager could choose between in order
| to get a project done. And casting your vote in favor of,
| it seems, the solo craftsman.
|
| If you are going to really recommend that people who want
| software developed should, in general look for a highly
| skilled individual developer to solo the project and leave
| it in a state where it will take a lengthy dedicated search
| to find anyone capable of modifying the resulting code,
| then I'm sorry if my reaction to that was to (perhaps with
| more sarcasm than is strictly constructive, but we are all
| performing for a crowd when we post on the Internet) try to
| suggest that that might not be a particularly universal or
| sustainable model.
|
| If that isn't actually how your project operates - with a
| business funding the development and having the power to
| choose between those approaches - then my critique doesn't
| even apply to your project, so you have no reason at all to
| take the criticism personally. I am not my code, and I am
| also not the examples I use in discussions on the Internet.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Well, I'll admit that "the cranky old man" trope was a
| bit of a deliberate goad, on my part, but that's mostly
| because this is pretty much how I am always perceived.
| It's really sad, because it's very far from the truth,
| and, if people spend more than thirty seconds, skimming
| what I write (and I know that I'm prolix), they can
| figure out that's not me. If you check my LinkedIn,
| you'll see a ton of testimonials, from folks I've worked
| with, over the years, saying how rewarding our
| relationship was.
|
| I will admit, 100%, that I'm a "Quality nut." I consider
| my work to be a craft, and I take tremendous personal
| pride in it. If it requires advanced techniques, to
| achieve the ends, then that is what it takes. I generally
| don't even bother setting up a bug tracking system for my
| work, as there are so few issues. GH Issues is generally
| fine.
|
| I will also admit, 100%, that I'm pretty appalled at what
| passes for "quality code," these days. I won't go ripping
| into the works of others; especially if it earns them
| money, and people are willing to pay for it, but just
| because everyone else does it, is no reason for me to do
| it; even if it means that I do it alone.
|
| The project that I'm working on now, I describe as
| "ambitious." That means that it is "ambitious" _for me_
| [0]. To many folks, they wouldn't even dream of a single
| person, writing something of this magnitude, but I do
| stuff like that, on a regular. I've been shipping stuff,
| for my entire adult life. Because it was written by one
| single person, from napkin sketch, to shrinkwrap, it has
| great integrity, and extremely high Quality.
|
| There's good people out there. There always have been.
| They do great work; usually orders of magnitude better
| than "average" work. It's worth it to track them down,
| and to hang onto them.
|
| I managed a guy that is "on the spectrum." He could be
| difficult to manage, but we worked together for almost 27
| years; 25 of which, I was his boss. He was better than I
| will ever be, and still is (just not working for me). It
| was a privilege and an honor to work with him, and to
| have him as an employee. He had a high school diploma,
| and regularly stunned the Ph.Ds in Japan, with his work.
|
| It, too, was pretty inscrutable code, but it was also
| often 100X faster and more accurate than stuff done the
| "average" way.
|
| [0] https://littlegreenviper.com/miscellany/thats-not-
| what-ships...
| m4tthumphrey wrote:
| Commenting to say that I relate to this so much and finally
| resigned after 9 years, a few months ago. 4 weeks left to go on
| my 6 month notice period and I couldn't be happier! When I
| resigned I felt like such a huge weight had been lifted. I was
| stuck, lost and like I was worthless. Nearly all the points in
| this article ring true for me.
| thewebcount wrote:
| Chris Espinosa at Apple gave a talk at MacHack years ago where he
| gave this sage advice for staying employed there:
|
| > Be indispensable but obscure.
|
| In other words do a necessary job nobody else can, but not the
| job that is the bottleneck for everyone else.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| noisy_boy wrote:
| Way too much specific knowledge about code/processes doesn't
| translate well across firms. If you view being indispensable as a
| formula for job security, rather than doing that for
| code/processes, do it for business knowledge. You'll still be
| considered very valuable, you'll get a lot more
| exposure/recognition to/from the decision makers, your deep
| knowledge will translate across firms and you'll be considered
| more valuable the older you get which, instead of having to deal
| with ageism, will open up more avenues like switching to being an
| expert consultant while having the freedom to be choosy about the
| kind of projects you do.
|
| Of course, this hinges on the requirement that you actually
| care/like knowing about the business side of things and are
| willing to spend the time/effort towards learning (which isn't
| super common among techies). Sometimes, the opportunity simply
| isn't there or not encouraged.
| JimBlackwood wrote:
| How would you go about learning the business side? Coming from
| a more business oriented team, it's something I definitely
| struggle with.
| chii wrote:
| and this job you describe is the CEO (or CTO, or whatever CxO
| level people).
|
| It is indeed indispensable - a firm shows a poor signal if they
| have to switch CEOs, or one gets fired, or resigns without a
| good replacement.
|
| The problem is that there's usually only 1 CEO to a firm, and
| not everybody can get to that level.
| civilized wrote:
| Where is this company where the C-suite has the only people
| who Know The Business and everyone else is just a coding
| monkey?
|
| Maybe at a tiny startup, but outside of that, I wouldn't
| expect to see it.
| jyrkesh wrote:
| This is too real for me. I worked as a college hire PM for almost
| 8 years at $BigTech company on a single product that got re-orged
| around divisions as it evolved to a mature product that would
| likely never grow nor disappear. I wasn't there for its
| inception, but a major threshold point that was enough to give me
| the context to maintain it with raises every two years in
| perpetuity.
|
| I just got the hell out back in September. I went from the
| IT/cloud/DevOps automation space to running the backend for a
| "make everything easy" web dev -> hosting company. I'm not sure
| that it's better, but it's different. And it's given me enough
| perspective to know for sure now that I probably should've gotten
| out two years ago. Pandemic perspective and all that.
|
| Something something this XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1768/
|
| I cited it as I stayed....
| devinnsomnath wrote:
| Hotel Dev Inn, a luxury hotel in Somnath with sea view is well
| known as a great destination for the tourists as well as devotees
| visiting Somnath and seeking for a comfortable accommodation with
| a sense of luxuriousness!!
| badrabbit wrote:
| Quite interesting. I have learned to make myself useful by making
| myself redundant, as in the team won't be on fire if I leave. I
| think it is good to be valuable because you do good work but not
| so much that if you want to leave for a different company you
| would leave your old team in a bad shape or if you want to move
| to a different team the move would get blocked because you are
| indispensible.
| thrawy876 wrote:
| I made myself indispensable because I did not trust the company
| (a small-ish games company). In the end I was left holding their
| bag while the rest of the company went off todo other things
| where the grass was greener.
|
| In the end, I left and the lucrative project I was involved with
| crashed and burned...they didn't seem to care. It was very
| strange. The company has gone on just fine without me, though
| every project they have started has met a similar fate. It was a
| good move to leave as the company doesn't care about making
| product but rather fund raising. But hey, I got paid.
| twelvechairs wrote:
| If you are indispensable - the most productive thing you can do
| for wherever your work and for yourself is probably to train
| others to do your job.
| bsdz wrote:
| Many banks, and perhaps other organisations, check for
| indispensability by means of a mandatory vacation policy. If one
| is indispensable then it should become apparent when they are
| forced not to work, log-in or reply to emails for this short
| period. This policy might also pick up other issues such as some
| types of fraud that might require constant attention (e.g. hiding
| evidence as it appears).
| ihateolives wrote:
| I had an eye-opener when at one of my previous jobs I was on
| scehduled vacation, but just dropped by in the office to pick
| up some things I left there. My boss was sitting at his desk,
| saw me, and instead of giving me a work related chit-chat
| immediately proceeded to tell me: "What are you doing here? Go
| away, you're on vacation so go and have some fun and rest, we
| can handle this. I don't want you to hang around in the office
| when you should be vacationing instead. Go!"
|
| After that I've always judged all my superiors to according on
| how they handle situations like that and I've been trying to
| act the same, respecting the time off of others.
| Aeolun wrote:
| Hah, I had the same. It's now my mark of a great boss, but
| unfortunately I haven't found anyone similar yet.
|
| I've now emigrated, but if I ever move back I'd happily work
| there again.
| ihateolives wrote:
| He was a great boss indeed. We didn't click on personal
| level, but he was good leader and I respect him even more
| because he didn't need to be buddies with people in order
| to have great work relationship.
| giantg2 wrote:
| "There was no career path. Sure my title changed, pay went up,
| but my day-to-day never changed."
|
| Sounds like a career to me. At least that's how most of them
| work.
| wccrawford wrote:
| Agreed. A lot of people seem to think that infinite growth is
| sustainable, even by a single person.
|
| When I was last interviewing, I kept getting asked, "Where do
| you want to be in 5/10 years?"
|
| When I answered that I wanted to be programming (the thing I
| was applying for) they all asked if I had no ambition.
|
| I told them that I've already met my ambition. I've got the job
| I want, and I intend to keep it. I didn't want to be a manager,
| and I didn't want to do things other than programming.
|
| Of course, it's impossible to do only that, but over 10 years
| later I'm still mainly programming as my day job. I'm not at a
| "dead end" in my career. I'm exactly where I wanted to be from
| the start.
| giantg2 wrote:
| "A lot of people seem to think that infinite growth is
| sustainable, even by a single person."
|
| Including my managers/company. Always pushing for personal
| improvement in the form of the next level. Of course personal
| improvement can be continuous excluding the levels, like in
| learning new programming related stuff (designs, tech,
| algorithms, etc) or business/product related stuff that
| you're implementing.
|
| "asked if I had no ambition"
|
| I was (still am) a midlevel dev. I was performing the work of
| a tech lead for a year, followed by a year of filling a
| senior dev role. I had a skip level with the department head.
| When they asked me my 5 year plan I said I just wanted to be
| a midlevel dev. I mean, that's the best I can hope for if
| they simply won't promote me after years of performing above
| my level. Huge mistake. They labeled me as having no
| ambition. I had to switch to a different team/department so
| they wouldn't fire me.
| unityByFreedom wrote:
| Am I the only one wondering what product they worked on for so
| long? Surely this would be helpful context but it doesn't seem to
| be mentioned anywhere in the article or site.
| civilized wrote:
| > One thing I instituted that helped was a specific Teams channel
| called Knowledge Transfer.
|
| Oh, that helps explain the predicament. Teams is where Knowledge
| goes to die.
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