7 ms·

This reminds me of advice I got from the VP of Eng at my first real full time tech job. This was back around late 1999 / early 2000. Peak of the dot com era. H

• Kagerjay 6y ago
  I'm in this boat right now-ish. I don't want to be the person who only knows somemthing. I'd rather delegate it and then if I get sick I know someone else can cover the work needed to get the job done. I just recently had my first junior developer assigned to me. Learning how to mentor, teach, as opposed to just getting a task done is harder than I imagined
  • kelp 6y ago
    Yeah, and it's particularly hard when you're still ultimately responsible for the result, but others are doing the work. That certainly brings some amount of stress. But also the money gets bigger and bigger.
  • alsetmusic 6y ago
    > Learning how to mentor, teach, as opposed to just getting a task done is harder than I imagined I've had the good fortune to inhabit a mentoring position twice in my professional career. Both have afforded me opportunities to teach new people as each business expands. I find mentoring incredibly rewarding. But I also naturally enjoy spreading knowledge (I considered a career change to teach history at the university level, but didn't want to pursue the academic credentials). It's not just teaching the tech that's rewarding. I also enjoy sharing time management techniques, tips for writing solid documentation, and pointing out how to avoid gotchas that I've run into in my personal experience. What I absolutely don't want is to join the ranks of management. A buddy recently moved up and he now spends almost all of his time in meetings. When he isn't in meetings, he's responding to the many people who need his attention for one thing or another. I wouldn't find that the least bit fulfilling. This is what strikes me as tone-deaf about the grandparent comment with regard to "loving your job." I love my job because it pays well enough, I like the people I work with, and it doesn't intrude into my "real life." I hated my former employment, where ambition was a thing, because it dominated my life. It paid far better, but I was unhappy overall. What I have strikes the right balance, and that's rare enough that I treasure it.
• mandeepj 6y ago
  > If you're the only person who knows something, you become a liability. Sorry, this is just wrong. You are a liability if someone thinks about you that way. Fortunately, not that many people are like that. In Contrary, if you are the only one to know something then you are regarded very highly and almost untouchable.
  • raincom 6y ago
    Exactly, that's the reality at majority of companies.
  • kbenson 6y ago
    It depends quite a bit on what it is you know, and what it pertains to, and how problematic it is. If you guard the knowledge to the core application for how the company makes it's money, you're not going anywhere. If you guard the knowledge to a component used in that core application, which while it's problematic to replace could be swapped out with a lot of effort, you are going to be walking a tightrope. As soon as it becomes more beneficial to replace that component than keep dealing with the problem of it being hard to deal with (because if it wasn't your knowledge would have little value), you're faced with the fact that a large chunk of your value to the company has just been obsoleted with it. So when taking the hoarding info approach, just how irreplaceable is the thing you're guarding knowledge of? Often it's far more replaceable than people think, and often becomes more so as people hoard knowledge of how to deal with it. Unless you're that guy that's on call 24/7 to immediately deal with a problem, the fact that it all relies on you which is unsustainable will eventually come to light.
  • sam_bristow 6y ago
    If you're the only person who knows something it can also mean you end up in a rut. You can't tackle interesting new stuff because you're stuck looking after the old stuff that no-one else understands.
  • Viliam1234 6y ago
    If you know something no one else does... sometimes the management is kinda aware that it's a problem, but they are too busy doing something else, so you can keep your job for decades with minimum work. And sometimes you know something no one else does, and you want to share the knowledge, but management says no, because having you talk to someone else feels like a loss of time when both of you could be developing a new functionality instead... and then one day you leave, no one reads the documentation you wrote, and your successor ends up reimplementing from scratch everything you already did. Sometimes it seems to me that the perception of your importance is proportional to the number of bugs in your code. If things keep breaking and you keep fixing them, you are a hero, and the company wants to keep you. If things work flawlessly, company assumes that it is easy and that you could be replaced at any moment by a random person who walks in.
• chad_strategic 6y ago
  "If you're the only person who knows something, you become a liability." So I had that philosophy when I was in the Marine Corps, well because I wanted my Marines and myself to survive and carry out the mission. Sharing knowledge in the business world, never. That's a great way to lose a job.
  • fsloth 6y ago
    "Sharing knowledge in the business world, never. That's a great way to lose a job." I think that depends on the role and the organization. Generally organizations do not like to loose valued individual contributors unless the organization is somehow pathological (I know those exists). A programmer that delivers value is always worth more than his or her paycheck. If you can dump his load to a more junior dev then that's great, there are other, more important things always that need doing. That is, if the business is growing.
    • chad_strategic 6y ago
      I agreed with some of what your saying. The delta comes from my incredible work experiences / organization management in the Marines and then working for selfish and incompetent bosses in the civilian side. (I have had bad luck on the civilian side in the past.)
      • fsloth 6y ago
        I agree if an employee needs to fight for leverage over their manager then hiding your notes is as good way to do that as any. But if you need to use this tactic it's a clear sign the workplace is not healthy. So, instead of as general advice "never show your notes" - I would rise to a level above - first in good faith, but in a defensive posture observe if your employer rewards co-operation or selfishness - and then choose your tactic accordingly. Falling under incompetent management is a double injury - the incompetence is both professionally reprehensive and being managed incompetently just hurts.
      • kelp 6y ago
        I'm sorry you've had this experience on the corporate side. I see in one of your other comments that you work for yourself now, so this unsolicited advice probably doesn't apply to you. But I'll leave it here anyway. I've had plenty of candidates ask me how I or the company help employees grow, and what it takes to advance. I typically see this as a good sign and I explain the career ladder, explain how promotions work. Explain how I would help in their growth. If they don't have good answers for this, it's quite a red flag. You can also ask about collaboration and what kind of work is rewarded.
• tw04 6y ago
  >He told me what most people think of as job security is totally wrong. If you're the only person who knows something, you become a liability. But if you're constantly teaching and sharing that knowledge you become incredibly valuable to the organization. That's when you have job security. Sounds like the VP of engineering was doing his job quite well. Set up new hires to share everything so when their salary becomes a burden you can "sadly let them go" when "necessary downsizing" occurs because they've given away the farm. Don't get me wrong, I spend a ton of time mentoring those around me, but there's no planet on which I would give a document dump of my personal notes, ever.
  • syntheticnature 6y ago
    That's not necessarily the case. Any personal notes are, by their very nature, shorn of the full context you have. They are always data, sometimes information, but never knowledge. I once left a job where I had taken pains to document everything, to regularly teach what I'd worked on, and to help everyone, even beyond strict software functions, familiarize themselves with the systems in play as needed. Were they glad I was relieving them of the cost of my salary? No, they were mournful. I would not be there to continue to draw connections between disparate items and serve as a voice of organizational experience. No amount of notes would replace my ability to, mid-meeting, say "That won't work" and explain why. Someone who had invested real time in internalizing those notes might -- might -- get there, but it would be difficult.
  • datavirtue 6y ago
    Aviation engineers guard their shit and embed themselves like ticks. Access databases, spreadsheets, Fortran (like old ass fortran spaghetti code), servers under the desk. All this was common at GE. They know what happens when you don't hold the company hostage. Nearly all of them retire and then "consult."
• CTmystery 6y ago
  Agree! Bringing up those around you is the real way to be seen as a 10Xer. The alternative story of one hacker solving all of the business's problems on their own is a fairy tale.
• raincom 6y ago
  At one of my old gigs, I asked my then-colleague a bunch of questions about the codebase for a task I was assigned. He was always like "you are a senior resource, you should not ask such questions; if you want to find answers, look into the code itself." This is how he keeps his status and job at that company, and he is still there now. When I enquired around about how he got that tribal knowledge of that codebase, I got a fascinating answer: he asked his ex-colleagues at the same company, the same kind of questions I asked. Unless one joins as an intern at some company, there are gatekeepers in most of the companies, who don't want to train you at all. Instead, they criticize any attempt to find answers as "hand-holding, fake, inexperienced, etc."
  • throw14082020 6y ago
    > there are gatekeepers in most of the companies, who don't want to train you at all. This is fear mongering for the juniors. Most people don't help because they don't get asked. Juniors, reach out and I will help. I'm the kind of person that is sociable and helpful anyway though.
    • phlipski 6y ago
      There are plenty of people who have "closed the drawbridge behind them once inside." They don't want to help, or think that you should figure it out yourself or should already know the answer etc.... They forget that they were newbs once too.
    • cosmodisk 6y ago
      It goes both ways,I suppose. I'm more than willing to teach anyone who is willing to listed what I know, but some mutual respect is needed. I remember a meeting, where I got asked to get someone up to speed with some core concepts. I thought,OK, that's fantastic.I prepped the plan, go to him and tell it'd take him about 20h of his own time to go through the stuff.. 'Oh no, I thought we'd be done in 2 hours'.. Sure, I can teach you in 2 hours what took me 5 years to learn..
    • oblio 6y ago
      It varies widely by company and by person. The unhelpful senior trope is not a myth.
• vendiddy 6y ago
  If you're a leader at an organization, it's important to make people feel like it's a positive thing to make the company need you less for a particular task. At our company, we've had situations where employees automated themselves away or found somebody else to replace themselves. In response, gave them raises and helped fill their extra time with more interesting higher impact work.
• cloudedcordial 6y ago
  I've encountered a totally different school of thought on job security in the early 2000s after the fall of the dot com era. Many jobs were cut. "Outsourcing" became a dirty word. My good friend got a year-long internship in banking industry in early 2000s. When I asked him how the real world worked, he was taught to hoard as much knowledge as he possibly could and not share it. Sharing knowledge means someone could do his exact job. He had no desire to learn new skills. He worked with folks who had been with the organization for 20+ years and that's how the workplace worked. He and his colleagues were so afraid that their job would be outsourced. We are not friends anymore. I bet he still works for the same organization. He may not be wrong about hoarding the knowledge and working in a slower pace industry: Doing so could be an easy ticket to gain job security for life.
• citizenpaul 5y ago
  The very words "job security" are a lie and have been for decades. Unless you have a contract that grantees you pay for a number of years. Which 99.99999999999999% of W-2 do not have.