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Comment by johnny53169 | Hacker News Reader

> If you’re gone for 6 months and everything functions just fine, are you really that important?

The truth is that you're never that important and eventually you'll go away from this place, so what is really important to you?

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A colleague of mine died suddenly. This guy was a tech lead at my tiny satellite office for a major tech company. Within DAYS they already had an internal/external job posting to fill his position up.

I mean I know it's just business, but I realized that I was replacable that day.

A colleague of mine changed job recently. He was tech lead and had been working on the project for years and we other were quite new. It was obvious things would get harder from now on so half of us bailed, i.e. the three programmers with more then 6 month on the project, and the project collapsed.

I mean with enough skill and money the experienced of us and he was replaceable. But not at the current budget. Maybe not even on twice the budget.

'Irreplaceable' is ofent with an implied 'at reasonable cost in a reasonable time'.

I think that it's an important lesson to internalize both about yourself and also your coworkers. My place has a saying that literally translates to something like "there's a full graveyard with irreplaceable people" - and that's how it is; no matter how hard is to replace someone, eventually they will (have to) be replaced anyway.

Yes this. Most of us like to think we're special and hard to replace and some are harder than others to replace but we can all be replaced. Can the replacement do as good a job as you ? Who knows, could be same/better/worse and without access to the multiverse you will never know.

As you say figure out what you care about the most and double down on that if you can.

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