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Comment by rantwasp | Hacker News Reader

I guess it’s a good way of thinking. But it’s too idealistic.

You see: if you do this it’s true that you might be able to make everyone’s life easier and you may advance your career, but (you knew there was a but) you also lose most of the leverage that comes with specialization and having critical knowledge. Yes, it may be harder to switch what you’re working on inside the current workplace, but it also means that passing you on promotions and rewards can lead to a lot of pain if you decide to look outside.

As always, there is a soft spot between being the perfect engineer and 100% disposable because of your impeccable “work ethic” vs just being a nightmare to work with and people not having a choice at all.

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we had a principal engineer who thought he was very skilled and held critical knowledge and tried to use it as leverage. turns out, everyone else considered that poisonous behavior.

The real question is - did the company fire him for that? I'd wager a guess that it did not. So, it worked out for him.

I don’t know the details as I didn’t work directly with him, but from what I understand he was trying to get a sabbatical to figure out some life stuff, but eventually he had to quit, which was not his desired outcome as he needed the income and didn’t have the time to find another job quickly.

> turns out, everyone else considered that poisonous behavior.

But did he get his raise?

getting a sabbatical is different from a raise/promotion. one signals that you have other things going on/you don’t care anymore, the other seeks to assert that you are contributing a lot and should be rewarded for this

> you also lose most of the leverage that comes with specialization and having critical knowledge

Your value does not disappear when there is redundancy within your company. If it is a valuable skill there will always be a demand for it outside, and now you can also claim that you are also capable of coaching others in that skill. If the skill is not valuable to the outside world and is a niche to your company, I’d say you still want to move on from that skill exactly because it is not transferable to other jobs. What if your company goes bankrupt?

true, but redundancy is hard to build on critical or under-documented parts of the code. It’s also hard to build when the knowledge needed is not something you can just sit down and do a brain-dump in an afternoon (ie you need a lot of context to see the light).

So, you can help people grow and keep your skill polished while you build up job security and hoard critical knowledge. I’m not saying it’s the right thing to do - just saying that I’ve seen it done and it worked for the persons doing it.

Having a codebase that is so convoluted that only you can work on is really not a skill you should risk your career on. It might work for those people you have seen in a short period, but long term they fall behind as they not only not develop generally valuable skills (because they are constantly working on that project), they also lack the skills to write clean collaborative code, which makes them less employable. So they would be in a very bad situation when that code base loses its value. (due to company going bankrupt or the project being shelved) My argument is not against hoarding critical knowledge. I am saying that by doing so you will be the single person responsible for that area, and therefore won’t have a chance to grow and diversify your knowledge base. I can only imagine a scenario when you are working in a hostile environment with really dumb management where that attitude could be rewarding and protect you. But in that scenario I would be looking for a new job and try to quit anyways. You don’t want to base your career goals on a specific position/employer.

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