6 ms·

Paradoxically, by being disposable, you free yourself. No, you just make yourself disposable. War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength. Don’t

Paradoxically, by being disposable, you free yourself. No, you just make yourself disposable. War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength. Don’t listen to this article. It sounds like something overseers would tell their underlings. And when you’re quitting, that’s the company’s problem, not yours.

unishark 5y ago
Is your goal to be indispensable as in the only person still able to maintain some ancient legacy project that is still continuing? Or as in the person who gets things done? Highly-paid professions have cookie-cutter skill-sets taught from the same textbooks at professional schools with the same basic curricula. They are valuable because those skills are valued, not because they trap their clients in some kind of infinite treatment plan.
- hughrr 5y ago
  From detailed experience on this you want to be both the first person to be asked to take on a complex problem and the last person out of the door when things get tough. Make yourself indispensable through being the person running towards danger, being helpful to your colleagues, being knowledgable and treating people with respect but only write stuff down when asked lest someone think you're replaceable by a few confluence pages.
- pydry 5y ago
  My goal is to be the latter but I've worked with plenty of people who made it a goal to be the former. I don't think it's necessarily irrational. If you're self aware enough to know that you're on the wrong side of the programmer bell curve, you're counting down the days until retirement, if you're living in a market with relatively few tech jobs - this makes sense.
wyqydsyq 5y ago
> No, you just make yourself disposable. You might be making yourself disposable specifically in the context of your original role which you are basically making redundant by documenting and automating everything - but trust me any sensible business will want to keep a staff member who massively improved their team's productivity (by enabling them to be more independent with less silo'd knowledge) and reduced the business' risk exposure (by making potentially critical knowledge more accessible and reducing single points of failure). Employees who try to become indesposable by turning themselves into a mega-silo of knowledge that nobody else in the org has might gain some job security in the short term but they lose out on any potential job progression. Turning yourself into a silo like this is practically blackmailing your employer into keeping you. They might keep you employed because they need to keep their systems online, but they will also not think twice about replacing you as soon as an opportunity is presented. That is making yourself disposable. Turning yourself into a leader who improves the outcomes of various teams in a business will not only make you indespensable, it's genuinely the best (if not the only realistic) path for an engineer to work their way up into more senior or C-suite positions.
- pydry 5y ago
  >trust me any sensible business will want to keep a staff member who massively improved their team's productivity Whether sensible or not a lot of companies do not do this. It is difficult to measure productivity increases at the best of times. Increasing your teams productivity doubly so. Increasing their productivity may even be net negative for you as it makes them look more effective compared to you. This may be counterproductive for the company in question and seem idiotic but that doesn't stop it from being common. It's common precisely because it's a template for how most workers are treated. If you see programmers as individual resources not markedly different to Uber drivers (and SO many do) this way of thinking is completely natural. >Turning yourself into a silo like this is practically blackmailing your employer into keeping you. They might keep you employed because they need to keep their systems online, but they will also not think twice about replacing you as soon as an opportunity is presented. Right. But how else do you deal with a company that demonstrates repeatedly that they wouldn't think twice about replacing you no matter what? Starting from that assumption along with the restriction that you cannot easily hop jobs - what else are you supposed to do? Plenty of tech is egalitarian and productive and not like this, but a larger unfashionable un-talked about underbelly of the industry most certainly is. The bimodal salary distribution also comes attached to bimodal working conditions.
- 49531 5y ago
  > Turning yourself into a silo like this is practically blackmailing your employer into keeping you. They might keep you employed because they need to keep their systems online, but they will also not think twice about replacing you as soon as an opportunity is presented. All employer / employee relationships have this dynamic. I get paid _n_ because my employer cannot figure out an effective way to do it cheaper, but as soon as they can I will no longer be paid _n_. While I think blackmail isn't an accurate description of this, what you're describing exists in all employment situations. Making yourself more disposable is only going to give the employer more power, which might work out better or worse depending on the employer.
  - DataGata 5y ago
    People that play zero sum games only get to play with other zero sum players. There is some risk they will lose. People that play win-win games get to play with other winners (and be winners). Be a winner.
leke 5y ago
> No, you just make yourself disposable. Yeah, I agree, but I think you are also meant to prepare yourself for a new or higher role in the company. Looking at the list of what you are supposed to be achieving, it looks like the itinerary of what a manager would want from their perfect employee.
derefr 5y ago
Sounds like you're writing from the perspective of an employee. The advice is a lot more applicable if you read it from the perspective of a founder — one who might want to get off the rocketship they've built at some point, without causing it to blow up (and tanking the value of their equity.)
readonthegoapp 5y ago
I had a pretty strong visceral reaction to this article. prob because i just read about the 1%ers avoiding paying taxes, and a thousand other much-more-horrific things, only to see the top post on HN advocating for workers to make themselves even more dispensable that they/we already are -- and i don't think it was meant as a joke. :-D i've always done the 'obsolete yourself' routine, and still do/am -- part of it was/is always self-interest (not advancement, but getting freed from having to do stupid shit), but part of it was/is 'just doing the right thing by the company' and thereby hopefully being part of a successful operation which, if you're not doing anything too evil, would allow me to take some pride in it. but i know that many of my improvements to products/documentation/training/etc. only help offshore myself _and_ all my co-workers, especially those of us in the US and other expensive places (and we don't even get health insurance). if i was part of some type of co-op, all that would be taken care of. one can dream!
dasil003 5y ago
You are disposable though, everyone is. It's generally a losing game to try to cement your position by playing gatekeeper on institutional knowledge, because at best it will prevent you from ever being promoted, and at worst will peg you as a single-point-of-failure liability that needs to be dealt with proactively. I understand this sort of defensive posture might make sense in some companies/situations, but the article is clearly talking about software engineers in large upwardly mobile companies. In those situations it's essential to have a non-adversarial and trusting relationship with your boss, if you don't trust your boss than that's the first thing to address by any means necessary.
- throwawaysleep 5y ago
  I see it as downside protection. If I want a promotion, there are other companies.
- mLuby 5y ago
  Not "if you follow all these rules religiously, you will even guarantee yourself a lifetime of employment, since no one but you has a hope in hell of maintaining the code." https://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~susan/475/unmain.html https://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~susan/475/unmain.html
- hathym 5y ago
  I got a significant raise lately because I was a single point of failure.
  - wyqydsyq 5y ago
    Meaning your employer now has all the more reason to replace you as soon as an opportunity presents itself
    - hathym 5y ago
      They can. But it would be very expensive to replace more than 20 years of domain experience.
hathym 5y ago
It feels like an article written by a middle manager.
phendrenad2 5y ago
The truth is, your disposability has nothing to do with how well you do your job, and everything to do with how visible you are. By writing documentation you're making sure that your name is attached to everything in a huge area that most people ignore.
- pydry 5y ago
  Not all documentation highlights the author. I think if it did it would be more popular.
bongoman37 5y ago
Yea, when the person who is disposable quits, she gets a farewell lunch at best. When a person who is determined to be indispensable quits he gets a counteroffer.
dangerface 5y ago
> War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength. Is this a fascist dog whistle? I keep seeing it and I don't know why anyone would believe these things unless they are fascist,
- detaro 5y ago
  It's a 1984 reference, government slogans in the novel.
  - ryeights 5y ago
    Haha, this is peak 2021
  - dangerface 5y ago
    Ah thanks, that makes more sense now.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
derangedHorse 5y ago
Any good team worth their salt will recognize that those with siloed information on the team are a threat to productivity to everyone else. People should get hired and kept based on their ability to learn, their approach to problem-solving, and their ability to share knowledge and unshackle their coworkers from any dependencies on oneself. If a coworker in my organization had disproportionate value stemming from a cache of undocumented information (meaning that then writing documentation would make them disposable), then they’re not worth having in the long run. A smart manager would start finding someone to receive that knowledge and the smart employee would volunteer to learn. Giving raises to the person with the siloed information to incentivize them to work and share information with other employees is a relatively inexpensive cost to the alternative of spending a yearly salary on someone who’s main draw is being a walking notion/confluence page
apozem 5y ago
> War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength. With all due respect, it's overdramatic and ridiculous to quote Orwell. Comparing a blog post about career advice to totalitarian state propaganda is absurd.
- booleandilemma 5y ago
  You can nitpick but it doesn’t change my point.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
stjohnswarts 5y ago
Yeah I document stuff when I'm assigned it (say it has users that aren't programmers), or I have to take notes that I will understand. I don't dumb it down so a "newb" can take over my place, I document enough so that 6 months or more down the road I can come back to it and have a reasonable review of what's going on.

unishark 5y ago

Is your goal to be indispensable as in the only person still able to maintain some ancient legacy project that is still continuing? Or as in the person who gets things done? Highly-paid professions have cookie-cutter skill-sets taught from the same textbooks at professional schools with the same basic curricula. They are valuable because those skills are valued, not because they trap their clients in some kind of infinite treatment plan.

hughrr 5y ago
From detailed experience on this you want to be both the first person to be asked to take on a complex problem and the last person out of the door when things get tough. Make yourself indispensable through being the person running towards danger, being helpful to your colleagues, being knowledgable and treating people with respect but only write stuff down when asked lest someone think you're replaceable by a few confluence pages.
pydry 5y ago
My goal is to be the latter but I've worked with plenty of people who made it a goal to be the former. I don't think it's necessarily irrational. If you're self aware enough to know that you're on the wrong side of the programmer bell curve, you're counting down the days until retirement, if you're living in a market with relatively few tech jobs - this makes sense.

wyqydsyq 5y ago

> No, you just make yourself disposable. You might be making yourself disposable specifically in the context of your original role which you are basically making redundant by documenting and automating everything - but trust me any sensible business will want to keep a staff member who massively improved their team's productivity (by enabling them to be more independent with less silo'd knowledge) and reduced the business' risk exposure (by making potentially critical knowledge more accessible and reducing single points of failure). Employees who try to become indesposable by turning themselves into a mega-silo of knowledge that nobody else in the org has might gain some job security in the short term but they lose out on any potential job progression. Turning yourself into a silo like this is practically blackmailing your employer into keeping you. They might keep you employed because they need to keep their systems online, but they will also not think twice about replacing you as soon as an opportunity is presented. That is making yourself disposable. Turning yourself into a leader who improves the outcomes of various teams in a business will not only make you indespensable, it's genuinely the best (if not the only realistic) path for an engineer to work their way up into more senior or C-suite positions.

pydry 5y ago
>trust me any sensible business will want to keep a staff member who massively improved their team's productivity Whether sensible or not a lot of companies do not do this. It is difficult to measure productivity increases at the best of times. Increasing your teams productivity doubly so. Increasing their productivity may even be net negative for you as it makes them look more effective compared to you. This may be counterproductive for the company in question and seem idiotic but that doesn't stop it from being common. It's common precisely because it's a template for how most workers are treated. If you see programmers as individual resources not markedly different to Uber drivers (and SO many do) this way of thinking is completely natural. >Turning yourself into a silo like this is practically blackmailing your employer into keeping you. They might keep you employed because they need to keep their systems online, but they will also not think twice about replacing you as soon as an opportunity is presented. Right. But how else do you deal with a company that demonstrates repeatedly that they wouldn't think twice about replacing you no matter what? Starting from that assumption along with the restriction that you cannot easily hop jobs - what else are you supposed to do? Plenty of tech is egalitarian and productive and not like this, but a larger unfashionable un-talked about underbelly of the industry most certainly is. The bimodal salary distribution also comes attached to bimodal working conditions.
49531 5y ago
> Turning yourself into a silo like this is practically blackmailing your employer into keeping you. They might keep you employed because they need to keep their systems online, but they will also not think twice about replacing you as soon as an opportunity is presented. All employer / employee relationships have this dynamic. I get paid _n_ because my employer cannot figure out an effective way to do it cheaper, but as soon as they can I will no longer be paid _n_. While I think blackmail isn't an accurate description of this, what you're describing exists in all employment situations. Making yourself more disposable is only going to give the employer more power, which might work out better or worse depending on the employer.
- DataGata 5y ago
  People that play zero sum games only get to play with other zero sum players. There is some risk they will lose. People that play win-win games get to play with other winners (and be winners). Be a winner.

leke 5y ago

> No, you just make yourself disposable. Yeah, I agree, but I think you are also meant to prepare yourself for a new or higher role in the company. Looking at the list of what you are supposed to be achieving, it looks like the itinerary of what a manager would want from their perfect employee.

derefr 5y ago

Sounds like you're writing from the perspective of an employee. The advice is a lot more applicable if you read it from the perspective of a founder — one who might want to get off the rocketship they've built at some point, without causing it to blow up (and tanking the value of their equity.)

readonthegoapp 5y ago

I had a pretty strong visceral reaction to this article. prob because i just read about the 1%ers avoiding paying taxes, and a thousand other much-more-horrific things, only to see the top post on HN advocating for workers to make themselves even more dispensable that they/we already are -- and i don't think it was meant as a joke. :-D i've always done the 'obsolete yourself' routine, and still do/am -- part of it was/is always self-interest (not advancement, but getting freed from having to do stupid shit), but part of it was/is 'just doing the right thing by the company' and thereby hopefully being part of a successful operation which, if you're not doing anything too evil, would allow me to take some pride in it. but i know that many of my improvements to products/documentation/training/etc. only help offshore myself _and_ all my co-workers, especially those of us in the US and other expensive places (and we don't even get health insurance). if i was part of some type of co-op, all that would be taken care of. one can dream!

dasil003 5y ago

You are disposable though, everyone is. It's generally a losing game to try to cement your position by playing gatekeeper on institutional knowledge, because at best it will prevent you from ever being promoted, and at worst will peg you as a single-point-of-failure liability that needs to be dealt with proactively. I understand this sort of defensive posture might make sense in some companies/situations, but the article is clearly talking about software engineers in large upwardly mobile companies. In those situations it's essential to have a non-adversarial and trusting relationship with your boss, if you don't trust your boss than that's the first thing to address by any means necessary.

throwawaysleep 5y ago
I see it as downside protection. If I want a promotion, there are other companies.
mLuby 5y ago
Not "if you follow all these rules religiously, you will even guarantee yourself a lifetime of employment, since no one but you has a hope in hell of maintaining the code." https://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~susan/475/unmain.html https://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~susan/475/unmain.html
hathym 5y ago
I got a significant raise lately because I was a single point of failure.
- wyqydsyq 5y ago
  Meaning your employer now has all the more reason to replace you as soon as an opportunity presents itself
  - hathym 5y ago
    They can. But it would be very expensive to replace more than 20 years of domain experience.

hathym 5y ago

It feels like an article written by a middle manager.

phendrenad2 5y ago

The truth is, your disposability has nothing to do with how well you do your job, and everything to do with how visible you are. By writing documentation you're making sure that your name is attached to everything in a huge area that most people ignore.

pydry 5y ago
Not all documentation highlights the author. I think if it did it would be more popular.

bongoman37 5y ago

Yea, when the person who is disposable quits, she gets a farewell lunch at best. When a person who is determined to be indispensable quits he gets a counteroffer.

dangerface 5y ago

> War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength. Is this a fascist dog whistle? I keep seeing it and I don't know why anyone would believe these things unless they are fascist,

detaro 5y ago
It's a 1984 reference, government slogans in the novel.
- ryeights 5y ago
  Haha, this is peak 2021
- dangerface 5y ago
  Ah thanks, that makes more sense now.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

derangedHorse 5y ago

Any good team worth their salt will recognize that those with siloed information on the team are a threat to productivity to everyone else. People should get hired and kept based on their ability to learn, their approach to problem-solving, and their ability to share knowledge and unshackle their coworkers from any dependencies on oneself. If a coworker in my organization had disproportionate value stemming from a cache of undocumented information (meaning that then writing documentation would make them disposable), then they’re not worth having in the long run. A smart manager would start finding someone to receive that knowledge and the smart employee would volunteer to learn. Giving raises to the person with the siloed information to incentivize them to work and share information with other employees is a relatively inexpensive cost to the alternative of spending a yearly salary on someone who’s main draw is being a walking notion/confluence page

apozem 5y ago

> War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength. With all due respect, it's overdramatic and ridiculous to quote Orwell. Comparing a blog post about career advice to totalitarian state propaganda is absurd.

booleandilemma 5y ago
You can nitpick but it doesn’t change my point.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]

stjohnswarts 5y ago

Yeah I document stuff when I'm assigned it (say it has users that aren't programmers), or I have to take notes that I will understand. I don't dumb it down so a "newb" can take over my place, I document enough so that 6 months or more down the road I can come back to it and have a reasonable review of what's going on.