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On Being Indispensable

• brianliou91 5y ago
  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 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    That sounds like you either know where the bodies are buried, or you helped bury them. D=
• jackblemming 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    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 5y ago
    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
• at_a_remove 5y ago
  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.
  • hinkley 5y ago
    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.
    • 5y ago
• swayvil 5y ago
  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?
  • at_a_remove 5y ago
    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.
    • sdoering 5y ago
      > 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'?
    • bigpeopleareold 5y ago
      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 5y ago
        > "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.
• leoh 5y ago
  This is so silly — being useful should be enough, period.
• hinkley 5y ago
  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.
  • bluefirebrand 5y ago
    > "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.
    • gumby 5y ago
      > 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 5y ago
        Your marriage wasn't enhancing shareholder value, citizen.
• rhplus 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    Isnt this called paid time off.
    • sdoering 5y ago
      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.
• _8j50 5y ago
  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.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• jedberg 5y ago
  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.
  • Casteil 5y ago
    Maybe... but not all companies offer sabbaticals / extended leaves of absence with a way to come back.
    • jedberg 5y ago
      No but if they don't then OP should have just put in for a long vacation to make themselves dispensable again.
      • Casteil 5y ago
        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.
    • shapefrog 5y ago
      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 5y ago
        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 5y ago
• jatins 5y ago
  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.
  • onion2k 5y ago
    I treat the awfulness of Confluence's search as a feature. It forces me to organize and cross-reference documentation.
    • sdoering 5y ago
      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.
  • pferde 5y ago
    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 5y ago
      > ... 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.
• grecy 5y ago
  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.
• Ansil849 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    What successful organizations have you built following your ideology?
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• smokey_circles 5y ago
  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.
  • drewzero1 5y ago
    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 5y ago
      > 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.
• paxys 5y ago
  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.
  • antognini 5y ago
    "The cemeteries are full of indispensable men."
  • iJohnDoe 5y ago
    100% this. A lot of wisdom here.
  • hobs 5y ago
    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 5y ago
      A one sentence horror story. How much of his life was missed for things the company could do without?
• senectus1 5y ago
  wow... this is so familiar. not surprising really.. I've been with this company for approx 17 years now.
• travisgriggs 5y ago
  > 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)
• twelvechairs 5y ago
  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.
• higeorge13 5y ago
  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.
• justin_oaks 5y ago
  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.
• throwaway4good 5y ago
  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.
• wildmanx 5y ago
  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.
  • Aeolun 5y ago
    > 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 5y ago
      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 5y ago
      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.
• Justsignedup 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    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...
• otar 5y ago
  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.
  • throwaway6532 5y ago
    >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. This times 1000.
• quattrofan 5y ago
• kjuulh 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    > 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 $€¥£).
    • kjuulh 5y ago
      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.
• rkagerer 5y ago
  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.
• ge96 5y ago
  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).
• nicolas_t 5y ago
  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.
• SideburnsOfDoom 5y ago
  "The Phoenix Project" featured this guy, of course, and called him "Brent"
• noisy_boy 5y ago
  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.
  • chii 5y ago
    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 5y ago
      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.
      • alar44 5y ago
        Manufacturing. A lot of times the guy invented and built the product himself along with the rest of the business over the years.
  • JimBlackwood 5y ago
    How would you go about learning the business side? Coming from a more business oriented team, it’s something I definitely struggle with.
• bsdz 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    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 5y ago
      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 5y ago
        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.
• buro9 5y ago
  "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.
  • deleted 5y ago
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• dusted 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    > 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.
• jyrkesh 5y ago
  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/ https://xkcd.com/1768/ I cited it as I stayed....
• bigpeopleareold 5y ago
  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.
• steve_gh 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    What is his saas business out of curiosity? Seems like it could indeed be very successful with this experience
• devinnsomnath 5y ago
  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!!
• giantg2 5y ago
  "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 5y ago
    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 5y ago
      "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 5y ago
  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.
• jwsteigerwalt 5y ago
  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…
• cesaref 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    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 5y ago
      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.
      • LanceH 5y ago
        Sadly, there are too many companies that offer zero PTO in the first year.
      • tomcatfish 5y ago
        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.
• ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    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’.
• m4tthumphrey 5y ago
  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.
• thrawy876 5y ago
  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.
• dagw 5y ago
  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.
• codingdave 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    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.
• civilized 5y ago
  > 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.
• teknopaul 5y ago
  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!
• martin_a 5y ago
  Corporate firewall blocked this for me (thanks, URL! :-D), archiv.org to the rescue: https://web.archive.org/web/20220316044015/https://www.sofuckingagile.com/blog/on-being-indispensable https://web.archive.org/web/20220316044015/https://www.sofuc...
• sguav 5y ago
  > 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.
• ravedave5 5y ago
  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.
• malermeister 5y ago
  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
• acconrad 5y ago
  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.
• someelephant 5y ago
  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.
• dangus 5y ago
  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.
• hackitup7 5y ago
  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)
• pSYoniK 5y ago
  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...
• thewebcount 5y ago
  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.
• fhrow4484 5y ago
  > [...] 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 https://www.google.com/search?q=strategic+incompetence
• justinlloyd 5y ago
  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-justin-lloyd/ 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.
• deleted 5y ago
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• shruubi 5y ago
  This post hits so close to home for me it is unsettling. Every 4-6 months we have this ritual where everyone finally accepts that we can't have one person being the "center of the universe" and we have this almost performative process of trying to spread things around to other staff. This will last at most two weeks and then we're back where we started. It can get pretty bad at points, like when dev's get so comfortable in relying on me to solve all their problems that they'll encounter an issue and instead of actually trying to do anything about it themselves, the first thing that happens is I get a call/text/email/slack asking me to fix it for them. And to top it off, outside of the occasional weekend, I can't remember the last time I had a day off, but I do remember it lasted three hours before they called me to come in and fix something for them. Nowadays, I don't even bother with time off, public holidays or weekends, they aren't days off to me anymore, they are just days where I can sleep in a little longer before getting back to work.
• commandlinefan 5y ago
  > Being indispensable is possibly good for job security But surprisingly little money.
• magicroot75 5y ago
  There is a simple answer to being stuck as indispensable for years. Change jobs.