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Comment by sevensor | Hacker News Reader

> Think you're indispensable? Do they know that?

Indispensable employees are a sign of organizational failure. They indicate a weak point in the organization -- if that person gets hit by a bus, or walks off the job, or is on vacation during a crisis, we're all in trouble. And if an employee becomes indispensable on purpose, that person is a problem and should be let go before the situation gets worse. Where I used to work, people who thought they were indispensable were the first to go when we had layoffs.

All this is to say that if you ever find yourself thinking, "this place would fall apart without me," you have a big problem.

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1) I think you're underestimating the number of shops that ARE "in trouble". There's a lot more tech-need in the world than tech-capable people right now, and with the places that have resources and organization gobbling up people, a lot of smaller shops (small startups, govt shops, small non-startup businesses) DO have indispensable people. And often those people will want to stay there. As for becoming indispensable on purpose...I'm sure some people do this, but most don't. This leads me to #2 below.

2) ...All of which is irrelevant since "indispensable" was mild hyperbole for "important/beneficial/worth keeping" in this discussion. I suppose I'll take the hit in the name of accuracy.

Good points, both of them. My experience with indispensable people comes from a big manufacturing organization. When I talk about people trying to become indispensable, I mean the engineer who had her hand in everything her department did and supported the line 24/7, and the technician who told me, "they'll never get rid of me, this place would fall apart without me." Among others. They really do exist, but perhaps it's less of a thing in software? I haven't worked with enough programmers to judge.

Software is by no means immune to what you list. Indeed, as Hubris is one of the Three Virtues of a Programmer, you definitely find it. That said, I think (my opinion) that you'll find more devs/admins that are PROUD to be indispensable than you will devs/admins that SEEK to become indispensable.

Both cases are ignoring what you point out: having a indispensable person is a bad thing for the long term health of your business. But one case (pride) is just mistaking doing a lot of essential work as not also creating a problem, while the other (seeking it) is less forgivable. And of course, there's a third, much worse option ("spaghetti code is job security") that doesn't rely on good work at all.

I've known a lot of devs that were close to indispensible and trying to fix it, fewer devs that were indispensable and proud of it, and only one or two that did crappy work so that they became more vital. A fair number of all of these devs were "responsible" for becoming indispensable simply by improving things to the point that their improvements became essential...and no one else had the skills/knowledge to easily replace them.

But of course, my experiences are subjective.

I think that these devs writing spaghetti code to stay indispensable should never get their code into the codebase through code reviews. Then that person would fail to contribute anything.

You become indispensable by doing things that nobody wants to do. For example, I remember an Engineer I used to work loves writing Perl/awk scripts to go through tera bytes of data to create reports. The data has anamolies and you need to custom create regular expressions to filter data that you don't need. The last I know he is still there.

Software is by no means immune to what you list. Indeed, as Hubris is one of the Three Virtues of a Programmer, you definitely find it.

Hubris isn't necessarily the wrong word in this larger context of indispensability, but I've always viewed Hubris in the context of the Three Virtues to be of "I can do this, against all odds", and being on the negative/low end of the Impostor Syndrome spectrum. Three Virtues Hubris is internal confidence; Indispensability Hubris is (perhaps unfounded) confidence in the perception of how others view you.

IMO, people often become "indispensable" in software when their responsibilities have grown over time to the point where they're actually doing something that should be two (or more) roles. But they've been doing it so long and are comfortable enough in the role that no one realizes it until they have to hire a replacement.

> Indispensable employees are a sign of organizational failure. They indicate a weak point in the organization

> All this is to say that if you ever find yourself thinking, "this place would fall apart without me," you have a big problem.

Just to be clear. _You_ don't have the problem, the organization does. If you're the head of software development at Netflix, you can easily find another job tomorrow if you leave. But if you're indispensable and Netflix falls over after you leave, then you don't have a problem, Netflix does.

No, I'll stand by my point. If you're indispensable, you're partly responsible for an organizational failure. If management recognize the problem and have time and space to address it, they may work with you to fix it. But in a time of crisis, when headcount needs adjusting, smart management will see you as a liability and act accordingly. Bureaucracies have a lot of momentum and are more resilient to the loss of an individual than they may appear. Obviously this is big-company thinking, and it applies in proportion to how bureaucratic your organization is.

Being indispensable can also severely impact any chance you have at progression within an organisation.

If they know they can't promote you or everything will fall over you're always going to get looked over compared to someone with a similar skill set but no 'baggage'.

By this logic Apple should have fired Steve Jobs right after his return when he started negotiating with Microsoft for the investment that would save the company from going bankrupt in weeks. Only he was in a position to do that negotiation and the negotiation was necessary, so he was indispensable and "should be let go" before things got worse?

This rule of thumb sounds like madness to put it bluntly.

Good point -- I'm looking at this from the individual-contributor side. I'm not sure it's possible to apply the same logic to executives.

> Indispensable employees are a sign of organizational failure. They indicate a weak point in the organization

Contention for fun: "Hands are indispensable, thus, they indicate a weak point in the organization."

I think that's a bit of a nonsequitur, to be honest. People who brought up executives as a counterexample made a much better case, as well as those who pointed out that small organizations often do have individual contributors whose absence would wreck the business.

Easy to say in theory, but in reality, you can't build a great organization that's exclusively composed of average performers. There will always be people who contribute far more than the rest, whether management appreciates them or not. (And in my experience, management is usually very well aware of who those people are.)

Indispensable != better at their job. Indispensable != Contributes more.

If someone you work with gets hit by a bus tomorrow, can you still ssh into the server? Can you continue working with the code they wrote?

Or is that all knowledge lost? If they're not indispensable that means that's all well documented.

Not true of small businesses, where the loss of a single key individual, especially on the revenue-generation side, can be a setback from which they cannot recover.

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