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This concept is dangerously close to the antipattern of information hoarding and hero culture. Yes, from your personal perspective building such moat can be adv

This concept is dangerously close to the antipattern of information hoarding and hero culture. Yes, from your personal perspective building such moat can be advantageous, but from the company perspective - or if you are a manager and see such behaviour, you should: - Document "Hard to learn and hard to do" processes. Make sure new hires can understand these processes easily. - Seek workarounds for "Impossible without rare and/or valuable skills" processes. Do not reward hero culture.

szhu 6y ago
As someone who agrees with the article and also agrees that the listed antipatterns you listed are bad, I've observed that following these two steps you suggested can help actually help build personal moats: 1. Writing documentation is helpful for everyone, but it is more helpful in building a moat for the writer than it is for the reader. When I document hard-to-learn processes, I drill the process into my memory in a way that the followers of the process are glad have avoided -- a win-win! And by seeing the results of people attempting to follow my documentation, I get valuable feedback on how adaptable my processes are to others, which helps me easily adapt the processes to new situations even for myself. 2. Avoiding processes that rely on a hero avoids building useless moats. It's good to avoid processes that rely on a hero. Teams should try to replace hero roles with repeatable processes as much as possible, but after doing this, often there are some hero roles left. These are roles are usually done by people with an ability to do critical but unforeseeable one-off tasks in a way that's very hard to train or hire others for. I'd need to hire a team to replace each of these people! As someone who wants to build a personal moat, I actually want to work on teams that do this kind of "hero role pruning", because in those teams, any hero role I happen to fall into is one with actual value that's hard to replace. --- If I were to mesh together the article, your response, and my responses here to create a more nuanced criticism about the article, it would be that the moat one builds should come from things that are naturally hard for other people to do, not by one artificially making things harder for other people.
benbennowben 6y ago
If it can be done by a process, then document it and do it by process. It is not hero work. But don't underestimate hero work. Your local fire department does the kind of work that most people who subscribe to mundane management philosophies denigrate. At about age 30, as a new junior employee at one of the worlds biggest companies, I got involved with hero work for more than a decade without originally planning to do that. You can't find too many people who are willing to crouch inside a quickly nailed together Farday cage for weeks and write software that detects unwanted EMI, find cache corruptions caused by unwanted isotopes in solder or write custom microcode for weird signal processing architectures. There is absolutely no information hoarding, because every real challenge occurs exactly once and needs to be solved the first time before it can be reduced to a repeatable process. In between those assignments, I had a really tough time living through the attitudes of some of the anti-hero culture warriors. Eventually some of those mangers got together, tried to eliminate the culture all together and reform the former fire-fighters. Who wants to work in an environment like that? Not anyone like me for sure. I found myself fired at age 40. The spoils of a decade of such work are good enough that I don't really need to work ever again. But I can't stop doing it - it changes you. Started a consulting company to help many others deal with problems that process oriented people can't solve. If you are young and so inclined, I highly recommend hero work as a career. It is rewarding mentally and financially.

szhu 6y ago

As someone who agrees with the article and also agrees that the listed antipatterns you listed are bad, I've observed that following these two steps you suggested can help actually help build personal moats: 1. Writing documentation is helpful for everyone, but it is more helpful in building a moat for the writer than it is for the reader. When I document hard-to-learn processes, I drill the process into my memory in a way that the followers of the process are glad have avoided -- a win-win! And by seeing the results of people attempting to follow my documentation, I get valuable feedback on how adaptable my processes are to others, which helps me easily adapt the processes to new situations even for myself. 2. Avoiding processes that rely on a hero avoids building useless moats. It's good to avoid processes that rely on a hero. Teams should try to replace hero roles with repeatable processes as much as possible, but after doing this, often there are some hero roles left. These are roles are usually done by people with an ability to do critical but unforeseeable one-off tasks in a way that's very hard to train or hire others for. I'd need to hire a team to replace each of these people! As someone who wants to build a personal moat, I actually want to work on teams that do this kind of "hero role pruning", because in those teams, any hero role I happen to fall into is one with actual value that's hard to replace. --- If I were to mesh together the article, your response, and my responses here to create a more nuanced criticism about the article, it would be that the moat one builds should come from things that are naturally hard for other people to do, not by one artificially making things harder for other people.

benbennowben 6y ago

If it can be done by a process, then document it and do it by process. It is not hero work. But don't underestimate hero work. Your local fire department does the kind of work that most people who subscribe to mundane management philosophies denigrate. At about age 30, as a new junior employee at one of the worlds biggest companies, I got involved with hero work for more than a decade without originally planning to do that. You can't find too many people who are willing to crouch inside a quickly nailed together Farday cage for weeks and write software that detects unwanted EMI, find cache corruptions caused by unwanted isotopes in solder or write custom microcode for weird signal processing architectures. There is absolutely no information hoarding, because every real challenge occurs exactly once and needs to be solved the first time before it can be reduced to a repeatable process. In between those assignments, I had a really tough time living through the attitudes of some of the anti-hero culture warriors. Eventually some of those mangers got together, tried to eliminate the culture all together and reform the former fire-fighters. Who wants to work in an environment like that? Not anyone like me for sure. I found myself fired at age 40. The spoils of a decade of such work are good enough that I don't really need to work ever again. But I can't stop doing it - it changes you. Started a consulting company to help many others deal with problems that process oriented people can't solve. If you are young and so inclined, I highly recommend hero work as a career. It is rewarding mentally and financially.