4 ms·

I have never seen an irreplaceable employee at any level, from the c-suite on down. I've seen lots who think they are.

• NikolaNovak 8y ago
  I think it may get philosophical/semantic very quickly, but let me put it this way: I have worked on projects, even with 50+ team member size, where I can identify a single person whose removal would cause us to miss KPI/SLAs. Thus, in practical ways, they are at least temporarily [for given value of "temporary", which may be days or years] "practically irreplaceable" and their absence hurts. They may not be "strictly/formally irreplaceable", but it would take 5 people 5 times as long to do certain aspects of their job poorly, and we'd blow our targets. Note that this was not usually due to specific skillset as such (which theoretically, for a price, you may be able to find on the market), but usually their personal, deep, historic knowledge of the specific project, client, requirements, and system. Things that are currently a 30 second question to this person, many many times a day, might become hours or days of reverse engineering either code, or requirements, or both, only to still not have complete answer, for each instance. Multiply by factor of 10-20 occurrences daily, and force multiply during active IRs. Typically, both this person and project recognize this SPOF but there's some reason why it takes a long time to remedy. (Occasionally though, but rarely, this is instead a particular type of contractor/consultant who believes withholding information is a job security method; depending on the market, this is a short gain as word spreads fast once project has finally routed around the problem)