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Comment by SapphireSun | Hacker News Reader

That's small ball leverage. Real leverage is being irreplaceable so that if you leave they're screwed. Think of it like being a monopolist supplier. Competition depresses wages, so the way to be rich is to be a monopolist. Straight out of Peter Theil, though I don't think he'd like this version as much.

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"Never make yourself indispensible. If you can't be replaced, you can't be promoted."

-- Something I once read somewhere. I can't say I've followed its advice, but I also can't say I've observed it to be false.

Personally I don't want to be promoted. Promotions suck. Just keep feeding me hard technical problems and keep administrative and management responsibility as far away from me as possible and I'll be happy.

Unfortunately the indispensible employee generally isn't the one getting fed hard technical problems, he's the one responsible for maintaining the complex, mission-critical thingy that only he understands and which seems to break down on a regular basis.

I do not envy the indispensible employee.

It's a trade off. I got in at 9.30, left at 5, was overpaid and spent most of my day reading HN, doing side projects, or playing cool js games like that cat one. My only meaningful responsibility was to make sure we didn't break down too much or for too long, and that took a few hours a week.

I think that for some people that would have been a trade off they'd be happy to make (and in many ways it was attractive), I think if I'd got on with the people I worked with I might still be there.

Also pity them if they want to fix the mission-critical thingy (after staring into the void for so long) but the business' "plan" is to quietly limp along forever.

Who wants to change job titles if instead they can just keep doing what they're good at for more money?

Who will pay you move for doing the same thing?

Every place I've ever worked (to a greater or lesser extent). Every year I'm there "doing the same thing" the better and more productive I get at doing that thing. I also become harder to replace as the cost of training a new person up to my level becomes higher. Thus I'm worth more to the company and it's in their interest to make sure I stay another year, and paying me more is a fairly persuasive tool for achieving that.

If someone does the same thing exactly the same way year after year, they either have a trivial job, or aren't very good at learning. Assuming this isn't the case and, the cynical, baseline answer would be "the guys who know that you'll leave if they don't". The favourable answer would be "the guys who know that experience matters".

There's always, always a company out there's who will be willing to give you 5-10% extra, if only to screw up with their competition by taking their indispensable people.

Exactly. Every good manager has a succession plan in place for each employee.

I had a manager once that had the lazy version of such a plan. It was "don't make any process improvements that your replacement will not be able to understand"

I've also heard people say that if there's someone in your company who is indispensable, fire them now. They will only be harder to fire later, and healing that wound now will be a lot easier.

That doesn't mean companies actually do it, or are able to recognize that situation until it's too late.

I know someone who applied for a promotion, but was denied by her manager because they said she was too indispensable to leave her current job.

A few weeks later she got an offer at a new company and quit.

Real leverage is financial independence. No matter how badly they need your skillset, there is likely to be someone who can do the job. If an employee's best alternative is to do precisely whatever they want with their time, that is a more powerful position than anything they can provide to an employer.

That's part of the answer, but if you're financially independent and chilling that won't get anyone to pay you anything more. It's the ability to walk away from a deal, but it's not the deal itself.

These are both great points, really. Financial independence is the dream. Until then, the deal matters.

Any smart engineer or manager knows that the very first piece of a system you try to remove is the irreplaceable one, because that is the most dangerous piece when--not if!--it fails.

If a place is so incompetent that they foster such people, they deserve to get taken for a ride.

You're absolutely right. The trick is to get into a game where there are barriers to entry (e.g. hard to acquire knowledge, legal barriers, monetary barriers). It's almost like being an entrepreneur!

Being irreplaceable is only step 1 (see: "...killing at work").

Some companies probably don't know which employees are irreplaceable (lower level managers might, but that might not mean much [e.g. stack ranking environment]). Even worse, there are tons of employees that don't realize, track or display their value.

It's not enough to be irreplaceable.

If your managers don't know it, odds are you're probably not as irreplaceable as you think. Basically, it should be a very simple story to communicate: "I leave, this system goes down because XYZ. That costs you some highly uncertain or unbounded amount and could bring down the business." If they care about their business, they're paying attention. (Not to say you should be this blunt, but it should be the subtext.)

I think that the "caring about their business" is the grandparent's point: There are a lot of bad low level and middle managers whose whole reason for being bad is either not caring or having no ability to measure employee contributions.

I think of a job I quit a while ago: I was getting all the credit in the world, as I had been hired by the rare competent manager. The department had a non-public document rating each employee and contractor, and their idea of how likely they were to leave. I got to take a peek at it, and any technical employee could use it to easily identify the bad managers, if just because their team's scores were all wrong: Terrible, toxic employees being rated as great and at risk of fleeing because they behaved like Linus. Good people that were actively looking for other jobs seen as under average but with no risk of leaving... completely wrong.

In the last 15 years I have seen plenty of good and bad developers, but, for the most part, there is little disagreements among the technical staff about each other's competence. If kept in a purely technical role, a bad employee can produce nothing. Bad managers, however, are often seen as successes by their own managers, and end up killing teams and companies.

I'm not sure it's that simple, especially on large systems. I've seen several cases where an employee was responsible for only a small section of a huge system but was actually the only one who knew how the whole thing fit together.

We (his co-workers) all knew it, we were asking him questions all day. Our manager had a vague idea he was good, but that was it.

The system doesn't always reward the best performers...it doesn't even know who they are (that's why performance management is a multi-billion dollar industry).

> The system doesn't always reward the best performer

Reading your comment, it brought back to mind: employee value isn't a linear scale, from "bad" to "good". What they contribute is complex.

Amen. If that isn't the truth, i don't know what is.

To me, that complexity is what makes it difficult for the system to find and reward the right people. That's what make it easy for employee value to get lost in the numbers, in exhaustion, in time crunches and stack rankings.

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