Comment by wyqydsyq | Hacker News Reader

Comment by wyqydsyq | Hacker News Reader

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> No, you just make yourself disposable.

You might be making yourself disposable specifically in the context of your original role which you are basically making redundant by documenting and automating everything - but trust me any sensible business will want to keep a staff member who massively improved their team's productivity (by enabling them to be more independent with less silo'd knowledge) and reduced the business' risk exposure (by making potentially critical knowledge more accessible and reducing single points of failure).

Employees who try to become indesposable by turning themselves into a mega-silo of knowledge that nobody else in the org has might gain some job security in the short term but they lose out on any potential job progression.

Turning yourself into a silo like this is practically blackmailing your employer into keeping you. They might keep you employed because they need to keep their systems online, but they will also not think twice about replacing you as soon as an opportunity is presented. That is making yourself disposable.

Turning yourself into a leader who improves the outcomes of various teams in a business will not only make you indespensable, it's genuinely the best (if not the only realistic) path for an engineer to work their way up into more senior or C-suite positions.

>trust me any sensible business will want to keep a staff member who massively improved their team's productivity

Whether sensible or not a lot of companies do not do this.

It is difficult to measure productivity increases at the best of times. Increasing your teams productivity doubly so. Increasing their productivity may even be net negative for you as it makes them look more effective compared to you.

This may be counterproductive for the company in question and seem idiotic but that doesn't stop it from being common. It's common precisely because it's a template for how most workers are treated. If you see programmers as individual resources not markedly different to Uber drivers (and SO many do) this way of thinking is completely natural.

>Turning yourself into a silo like this is practically blackmailing your employer into keeping you. They might keep you employed because they need to keep their systems online, but they will also not think twice about replacing you as soon as an opportunity is presented.

Right. But how else do you deal with a company that demonstrates repeatedly that they wouldn't think twice about replacing you no matter what? Starting from that assumption along with the restriction that you cannot easily hop jobs - what else are you supposed to do?

Plenty of tech is egalitarian and productive and not like this, but a larger unfashionable un-talked about underbelly of the industry most certainly is. The bimodal salary distribution also comes attached to bimodal working conditions.

> Turning yourself into a silo like this is practically blackmailing your employer into keeping you. They might keep you employed because they need to keep their systems online, but they will also not think twice about replacing you as soon as an opportunity is presented.

All employer / employee relationships have this dynamic. I get paid _n_ because my employer cannot figure out an effective way to do it cheaper, but as soon as they can I will no longer be paid _n_. While I think blackmail isn't an accurate description of this, what you're describing exists in all employment situations. Making yourself more disposable is only going to give the employer more power, which might work out better or worse depending on the employer.

People that play zero sum games only get to play with other zero sum players. There is some risk they will lose. People that play win-win games get to play with other winners (and be winners).

Be a winner.

I hate to break it to you, but every economic scenario is a zero-sum game. In order for an economy to work you have to have a relatively fixed amount of resources.

This whole win-win ideology is mostly a tool to erase where the losers are, and to make losers feel better about losing. Every increase in my paycheck is a decrease in someone else's.

If that was even remotely true, we would still be sitting in caves sharing raw animal scraps. Fortunately it's not true, and things like discovering fire and inventing tools don't take resources away from others, but instead increase resources for everyone. This is just as true in the modern economy.

Obviously the inventor of fire got more of a reward from his invention's bounty, but everyone still benefited. Similarly whoever automates your job gets most of the reward, but ideally we all benefit through cheaper products.

At least, that's how it's supposed to work. Obviously it doesn't always.

> All employer / employee relationships have this dynamic

Wrong, no employer relies on a newly hired employee the way they rely on a senior knowledge silo'd engineer with a decade+ of domain knowledge which they are reluctant to share. In most jobs the employee is not in a position to have that kind of bargaining leverage. That leverage is only gained by an employee either intentionally and maliciously making the codebase as esoteric and unmaintainable as possible, or poor management not planning for these risks sufficiently e.g. not hiring more staff for a legacy COBOL system team as it's members leave until there's only one guy left who understands it.

> While I think blackmail isn't an accurate description of this

I'd argue it is. You know their business depends on you as a result of you actively working to make it depend on you, you use that knowledge to leverage your position in bargaining for higher pay or to never get fired from a low-effort "cruiser" job. Essentially blackmailing the business into continuing your employment under threat of losses caused by you leaving and nobody else being able to maintain the mess you created. This is not a normal employer / employee relationship dynamic at all.

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