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

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.