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Comment by hinkley | Hacker News Reader

In the spirit of the old saying, "the two happiest days of a boat owner's life are the day they buy a boat, and the day they sell it."

The best advice I got starting out was, "be indispensable."

The best advice I got four years later was, "don't be indispensable."

In a growing company, the indispensable people may find themselves being left holding the bag while new initiatives are undertaken. I very quickly learned the meaning of 'working your way out of a job' after the first time this happened to me.

I'm sure there's some min-max game I'm not playing with regards to how easy I am to lay off, but once I learned there are worse fates that being laid off, I stopped looking for them. Being "stuck" with responsibilities is unpleasant when things are going well, but it's miserable when things are going badly. If you aren't the one who got laid off, then someone you used to trade off with doing onerous tasks certainly was, and now you're stuck doing it every single time.

If given the choice between "my company would be just fine without me" and "everything would fall apart if I didn't show up to work," the latter feels very good for a brief period when you're young, until the weight of that responsibility sinks in. "My company would be just fine without me," can mean "my work here is done," and you can ride off into the sunset with a clear conscience.

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"My Company would be fine without me" also means you can take vacation, medical appointments, heck even weekend (crazy concept!).

"Being Indispensable" can also mean two years of no physical or mental time off; it was not fun!

I am currently lucky that all my layers of higher management understand that if my team can function effectively without me for a period of time, that means I'm doing my job well . I was able to take 2 months of paternity without things falling completely apart, and it was a proud moment for me and the team (plus great chance to bond with family). Sure there were things to catch up on and new initiatives and some bad habits to work through, but it was overall a success.

(In addition to "be indispensable" vs "don't be indispensable", one of the best pieces of advice I got and share is "The moment you get a new job/role/position, start looking for your replacement". I did not understand the value of that the first few years, but I now 100% do. I know a lot of HN SME/IC's believe "it's my boss's job to replace me / I'm in & out in a year or two", but if you are even remotely looking for a sustainable career in a company or small market/industry, it will speak VOLUMEs to your foresight, care and team&business responsibility if you have a trained, capable backup identified and positioned, for your times off as much as for your eventual ambitions).

> "My Company would be fine without me" also means you can take vacation, medical appointments, heck even weekend (crazy concept!).

This is so worth it! A decade ago, I was the technical cofounder of a still-small startup. For a while, it was just me and my co-founder. But when we got signs of product-market fit, I hired a team of developers. We set it up so the default was pair programming with frequent pair rotation, with a lot of other tweaks to make it very collaborative.

This paid off in a lot of ways, but for me the biggest came when my mom got sick. I had to fly across the country and stay for weeks at a time to help her and coordinate her care. I was worried things might grind to a halt. But because every commit to the code base involved at least two people, it was fine. There were things I understood better than others, but there was nothing that was a scary mystery that nobody had touched.

When I left the company, it was the same deal. We were on good terms, so they were welcome to call. But they rarely if ever did! It was great to pop in now and again and see them just chugging ahead.

Being indispensable to a team or a manager in a large company can actually be self-destructive to your career. I realized this the hard way a long time ago when my managers refused to let me move for a promotion because I was "indispensable" and "critical to the project". I've always made it a point to know who my back-ups are and have my supervisors assign them formally.

In short, make it a point to share knowledge anyway. Keep a wiki, well written notes or documents, README.md's, whatever. Make it a point that people who are backing you up acknowledge and understand what you have and most importantly ask them to grow that body of knowledge.

That would be an instant resignation as a matter of principle for me.

Principles are a luxury not afforded the poor masses.

If you are indispensable, then surely you have quite a leverage.

That argument does not solve the problem. You will stay or go from one project that fails to the next like that. Better to have worked on projects that are still good on your CV.

No.

Scenario: There is a project your boss is wholly responsible for. You, from a technical perspective, are absolutely indispensable to the success of said project. Maybe it's a small team, or everyone is overloaded, but you can draw a direct line between you quitting (or doing a bad job) and your boss getting called out or potentially fired.

Your boss, however, is not indispensable to their boss, nor is this project indispensable to the larger department. You ask for your raise because of your leverage. Your boss might be worried and try to get it for you. Their boss, not caring about this project that much in the broader context of their work, laughs and says no.

You can absolutely be critical to the success of a project, and even important to your boss's future, but have no real leverage over your situation. That's absolutely a reason to leave but it doesn't mean you'll be able to squeeze any more money out of the place before you do.

Such a great point to make. Specially since I see myself in similar situation. Maintaining a legacy system on which all the devs except me who worked in past have left. It is critical system or so I heard but as far as promotion/raise go, almost nothing for last 3 years.

However instead of getting angry I get that I may be important to direct boss or one level above. But as far as company goes they are all in cloud, next generation and what not. So my criticality is inconsequential in larger context.

Or even a lot of the middling ones. In the US something like a trillion dollars a year is spent on making people want to buy stuff. Not to mention all the social forces that encourage spending. Relatively few people manage to live far enough beneath their means that they can just quit a job on principle.

I happen to be one of the people who can (and has!) quit a job on principle. But it's very much a luxury good that I work hard to afford. And it's easier for me: no kids, no parents to care for, no mortgage to worry about. I would rather more people quit their jobs on principle (or risked it through efforts like unionization). But I mostly don't blame them if they feel like they can't.

Obviously you find another job first. That will take a few weeks in this market.

I’ll take “people who haven’t bought a house or have kids” for 500, Alex

There’s a thread right now in r/experiencedDevs about a guy who is trying to buy a house while his employer is cratering around him. Stuff like that happens and tends to stick with you forever.

I have a house and a kid and I have quit on principle before.

> refused to let me move for a promotion because I was "indispensable" and "critical to the project".

So would they rather have you quit? If not they should be willing to give you whatever title, pay bump, time off, etc. is necessary to keep you long enough for a replacement solution to be found. Otherwise if you just quit they’re stuck negotiating from a position of weakness to hire you back as a much higher paid contractor, or if you decide to take an extended vacation or work somewhere else they are left high and dry.

If you are truly “indispensable”, that makes you the one with all of the leverage. If they can jerk you around without pushback, then “indispensable” sounds more like a rhetorical device / excuse.

I would argue that exercising such leverage is not only for benefit of the indispensable but also for the organizations which are often inert unless enough initiative is given.

Indispensability (true or perceived) hurts not only person but organization as a whole. It creates tension between them, which might break at any point for any reason (a bus, reaching point of no return, dragging organization down) and create difficult to fill void once that happens.

I think it should, however, be considered from the true indispensability and not the perceived one. Perceived one is bullying employees, accidentally or on purpose. Sometimes it's bullying ourselves by creating overly controlled environment that solidified over years.

In perfect life scenario utilizing leverage would work as following: The Indispensable ask for a minor raise (1-5%) -> Company agrees, because The Indispensable is truly indispensable -> 1 month passes -> Repeat

After couple iterations there would be a break point because company will start to weight options and might decide to compensate instead of waiting for next month and another raise request. In this scenario The Indispensable stops being one, so their quality of work improves (less stress) and they get additional income. Company retains The Indispensable since they signaled and through adequate pressure achieved the goal. Fragile process with single point of failure is resolved with more stable solution.

Unfortunately it doesn't work in real life often. Some companies simply can't afford matching expectations, no matter how warranted they are. Indispensability there is simply a tax imposed on worker. Some people aren't confident and courageous enough to bring issues out and try to act on them (as business can be intimidating). Last and not least - true indispensability isn't black or white. There's a mixture of politics, perceived indispensability, true indispensability and controlling behavior by The Indispensable one.

So would they rather have you quit? If not they should be willing to give you whatever title, pay bump, time off, etc.

For large enough companies the 'company' is not a single unit making unified decisions. I might be "indispensable" to my boss, perhaps his boss, the project, and my department. However they don't have the power to give me a pay rise or extra time off outside the normal bounds set by their bosses. Me, my boss or even my department however aren't indispensable to the whole global multinational company we all work for.

If I quit and the project fails, then my boss and several people on that project might lose their jobs, and the remnants of that department might end up folded into some other department. My bosses boss might not get a nice bonus that year due to the fact that the project he was overseeing was a massive failure. However "The Company" and it's tens of thousands of other employees all around the world will keep on trucking as if nothing had happened.

To add on, it is a lot better story to tell during behavioral interviews:

“I was hired by the Director to solve $x problem. I led the project. I put processes in place. I led training for the team and they went public a year later. I met my former director for lunch a year later and most of my processes are still there in a slightly evolved form.”

About the same as above from my job after that. But change “Director” to “CTO” and change “went public” to “got acquired for 10x revenue”.

(Yes I can draw a direct line from the architectural changes that let them pivot to selling access to micro services to their value proposition when acquired)

> my department however aren't indispensable to the whole global multinational company we all work for.

Some of that is wishful thinking on their part. They can’t acknowledge that the riffraff keep the wheels on and may swing the other way as a form of denial. They probably treat waiters like shit too.

> However they don't have the power to give me a pay rise or extra time off outside the normal bounds set by their bosses.

Maybe. But - maybe they just follow the path of least resistance, which is to lean on you rather than go up to their bosses and say "John Smith is quitting, and when he does, this project will crash and burn. We must stop this or the company will lose $$$."

> So would they rather have you quit? If not they should be willing to [...]

I know that many folks here work in elite organizations, so maybe it's hard to fathom, but THE NORM for big companies is to be dumb as a box of rocks when it comes to organizational stuff and technical operations.

Talented people who are intrinsically cross-functional, curious, and who always to do what it takes to "help the team" often get hammered flat from years of the daily grind-stone and then just quit, like the OP.

In most places no one is even thinking about "retaining talent" until it's far too late.

Retaining talent conversations feel much like people who show up to AA after the liver disease diagnosis. They didn’t think it would happen to them, they didn’t look at it, and their sudden conversion is a rear-guard action, closing the barn door after the horses have gotten out.

If your bosses are saying “retention” out loud you are probably already fucked, even if your division seems to be doing okay.

It is very clear that bosses have had good luck bluffing or calling other people’s bluffs and many just do it as a matter of course. I bet you won’t quit over a 5% discrepancy in pay, and I’ll just ratchet that up every review period, and hope you don’t notice when that climbs to 10% under market.

It’s kind of the same game landlords play. I always find it somewhat amusing when a landlord forces a business out of a storefront and then the storefront sits empty for six months or a year. How long is it going to take you to break even on that?

For storefronts specifically, and depending on the country you're talking about, there's more likely than not an attempt to evade or avoid tax. For example, this is exactly why tourist attractions like Oxford Street in London are full of American Candy stores now. They'll be there for a few months and then be gone: the landlord saves on business rates because they'd found a tenant, and the actual company vanishes without having paid the rates they were responsible for.

In that case, it's beneficial to the landlord to have some scam shop in because even if they're not being paid rent, the money they're saving from an occupied storefront easily outweighs every other alternative.

Lots of commercial buildings are passed down from generations. You don't know how to think like them. They have the building its been generating money and they have lots of money so they don't care. They want toy X that costs $XXXX per month if the tenant leaves they don't get the toy and they lose the rent they don't need to live anyway. If the tenant stays they get the toy. Otherwise they don't care cause they are good financially. You would be amazed how man "business" decisions are made based on the basis of if it buys the owner the toy they want.

Toy is just a euphemism. It could be a service, it could be just showing up their friend jimmy that they made more money this year. IT could be to win a bet. IT could be the tenant scratched their Bently. It could be that somebody they don't like frequents the establishment.

That sounds to me like an invitation to negotiate ;)

Option A) You truly are indispensable and critical to the project, and soon you're going to be their best-paid employee.

Option B) They will now find ways to make you dispensable. And then you'll qualify for that promotion.

It’s not about “I’m indispensable pay me more”. It’s about “I don’t want to have 1 year of experience 10 times”. I always want to have the optionality to change jobs . Things change. Culture changes.

I've heard this "one year of experience 10 times" phrase before. It seems to mean different things in different contexts to different people. Can you explain what it means to you and the implications?

Real world example:

I started my second job in 1999 it was for a bill processing/printing company. Companies would send us data files via ftp, we would merge the files and create files in a format used by industrial printers and mail them out. Later on we were one of the early integrators with CheckFree that was the backend for most online bill payment services.

I wrote mostly processing programs in VB6, Perl and C++. I did some GUI programming with C++/MFC/COM (ask your parents).

Fast forward to 2008, the world had moved on. But I was still using VB6 (discontinued in 2001) and C++/MFC. My compensation was only $7K more in 2008 than it was in 2000. There were other people doing the new shiny while I maintained the old systems.

I learned my lesson. Over the next 10 years, I changed jobs 5 times and doubled my income - nothing to brag about. It was still about what entry level developers get as return offers in BigTech. I was laser focused on keeping my skillset in sync with the market.

By 2017 though, I realized my market value as an enterprise dev was going to plateau in 3 years and my youngest was graduating from college. I started pivoting to “cloud” and got into “application modernization” consulting - basically a fancy term for cloud app development and deployments.

I got my current job in consulting in about two years ago.

Good lessons here on tracking the market, keeping skills up to date, and skating to where the puck is going. I imagine the modernization niche pays pretty well. :)

Ironically, “application modernization” seems to be the worse paying cloud specialty in the industry. At most consulting companies, “implementations” pays the least and is outsourced to cheaper labor and junior consultants.

I work at the one company that pays decently well for AWS + enterprise dev + consulting. It’s not hard to guess which one it is..

There's the risk of heroism too... you're indispensible because you're that one person who goes above and beyond and everyone sees you as the go-to when shit goes wrong.

I've been there a lot, not on purpose but in some organisations it's either that you get your hands dirty or you spend 10x as much time watching the buck being passed. It's definitely one of those things as a developer where you need to learn some management skills or end up burned out of the job.

Deming sometimes used bus drivers as an example. Some of them might think it's not their job to smile and be nice to passengers. They're hired to drive the bus, and perhaps help out in emergencies, but not much beyond that.

However, being nice to passengers (performing "caring labour" as Graeber would have put it) increases the chances that people choose the bus over e.g. the metro or something else. Deming concluded that it's always your job to do whatever increases the chances of the company you're working for staying in business.

I still haven't found a good way to phrase it, but I'm starting to think that for knowledge/creative work, this can be specialised to something like, "it's your job to teach others to do what you think your job is."

For knowledge/creative organisations to stay in business over the long term, they need to continuously innovate, and for innnovation you want people to be strong generalists. Not just because it lets them spot opportunities they otherwise might not, but also because it lets the organisation run more efficiently with less paperwork, and because it gives people the autonomy they need to think clearly about things.

If the bus drivers were paid by the number of people who take the bus sure, but when are paid by the travel route distance, they have no obligation to do what they are not paid to do.

What a nihilistic view. Not every aspect that’s part of your job needs to be included in your variable compensation in order to be done, does it?

They’re employed to do a specific job, if they’re not rewarded for bringing the company more money, why should they care?

Because human beings are not coin operated robots?

So they should do unpaid emotional labour for free?

If you equate smiling at someone, or just being generally courteous, with "emotional labor," you need to make an emergency appointment with your therapist.

Being a good human being more often than not (occasional bad moods notwithstanding) should be a non-functional requirement for any job where you interact with other people. I have no problem with anyone, in any role, getting fired simply for being an asshole. The world would be a happier and better place for it.

> If you equate smiling at someone, or just being generally courteous, with "emotional labor," you need to make an emergency appointment with your therapist.

This entire conversation started based on an example that smiling brought economic benefits, not that you should do it because of socializing benefits. Answering in economic terms only makes sense.

Since when is not smiling at people being an arsehole?

I don’t want a bus driver to fake cheerfulness. He’s there to get me from a to b, not to pretend to be my friend.

Smiling is not pretending to be someone's friend. Seriously, if this all sounds like alien talk, you should see a counselor or therapist.

I didn't say not smiling makes you an asshole, I'm making two separate points. The first was that expecting people to be generally courteous to other people, whether they're explicitly paid to or not, is something we should expect from everyone. It's called just being a human being. And again, everyone's allowed to have bad moods now and then. But in general, if you go through life with a scowl on your face and approach things from a standpoint of "I'm not being paid for this so I don't care, I'm not doing 'unpaid emotional labor,'" you're just kind of a jerk. That's the context of the last couple comments in this thread so it's important to keep the "I'm not being paid to smile so I'm not going to smile because that's labor" thing in mind.

The second point, which is related but I think still separate, is that I wish just being an asshole was enough to get fired. I sort of had it in my head but didn't really articulate that I was thinking of being an asshole as a more extreme version of what we're talking about, what I refer to above as just being kind of a jerk. Maybe on a scale of 1-10 being a jerk is a 3 but being an asshole is a 7 or 8.

You keep confusing being polite (something rightfully expected from an employee) with being fake and with real emotional labor.

This are 3 different things.

Many types of emotional interaction are meaningful and true only when they are unpaid. Some big examples: friendship and love.

For employees not to be rude to customers as part of basic work requirements.

But putting on a false smile and feigning warmth to get a tip is a very different thing.

It's quite common and accepted in the US. But also seen as soulless and emotionally manipulative in many other cultures.

The specific job includes customer service. It's what they are being paid for. Employees who do the job poorly are at greater risk for replacement by replacement hires. This is why many companies ask customers to rate individual service providers.

I would never rate a customer service employee poorly because they aren’t cheerful.

What sort of mad world do we live in where that’s even expected of minimum wage employees?

Yes but if the number of people on the bus dropped to zero do you think their employers would keep running the route?

The passenger count is so heavily influenced by factors outside of the bus driver’s influence that this example doesn’t make sense.

Passengers don’t abandon bus routes because the bus driver didn’t smile at them. They abandon routes when the schedule is inconvenient, there are better alternatives to the bus, the fare is too high etc etc. None of these are in the control of the bus driver.

My old bus route to work used to amuse me greatly because on it there were two drivers who were the polar opposite of one another. One guy I assumed had previously been the pilot of a commercial airliner because he used to greet everyone who got onto the bus with that sort of demeanor and make announcements etc. Always brightened my day. The other guy was the grumpiest piece of shit bus driver I've seen anywhere in my life who would frequently berate passengers and oftentimes frighten unsuspecting foreigners. Everyone who needed to get to where they were going showed up and took the bus regardless. It's about the least important variable there is and it averages out to getting a reasonably OK bus driver almost all the time across the different busses you take and the different times of day you take them.

Ah, this must be why bus drivers are commonly paid in company shares. Incentive alignment! Makes sense.

Wait, they're not? So why should they care, when their bosses don't care even enough to set up a direct reward to bus performance and some way for them to have agency over that reward?

Though it would be cool if there was a bus service that had direct, fine-grained association between curteous behavior and reward in the form of immediate payment and future business, possibly mediated via ratings - I was making a joking reference to Uber here, but "Uber for busses" is genuinely something that I want to exist. Ie. not "Uber Bus", but the standard Uber model of engaging a driver directly, only this time applied to longer timespans to allow better schedule coordination. For instance, some way to say "Hey, I need a bus from X to Y some time between 6 and 7 every workday for the next six months, which time and pickup location is cheapest?" would allow for some pretty cool optimizations in routing. Possibly combined with a Kickstarter-like model where a bunch of people can express prospective interest.

If I’m working for a private company. Guess how much I care about “equity” that will statistically be meaningless?

On the other hand, I did implementations as a Senior Develop/de facto “cloud architect” that moved the needle meaningfully at a company with $5 million in revenue. Those same types of implementations happen multiple times daily at a company worth over $1 trillion. Nothing I’m going to ever do will ever have a meaningful affect on the stock price of the company I work at now.

Kind of sounds like the company share price is too coarse-grained. That sort of thing might work better if the company was split into separately traded sub-units, of which the parent company owns some controlling fraction of voting shares. Admittedly the bureaucratic overhead starts being awkward.

There are four companies worth over 1 trillion. How could you split any of them in a way that my small implementations by their standards would make a difference? I purposefully focus on the “nose of the camel in the tent” type work.

I like smaller proof of concept + training type projects.

I agree there is not necessarily a good way to do this in any given company structure. However, if a company can figure out how to do it, other things being equal I would expect it to eat its competitors' lunch. (As with how Uber doesn't need to mandate that drivers should be nice; it just falls naturally out of the incentive structure.)

> "Hey, I need a bus from X to Y some time between 6 and 7 every workday for the next six months, which time and pickup location is cheapest?"

They could even make it so that the people who actually take the bus negotiate the time and place.

This would be great for events outside the city.

This is what Citymapper's Smartbus tried to do in 2017 - regulations don't make it easy, so negotiations with the municipal authority and Transport for London are still ongoing...

“Imagine if you could hire a bus”?

You can; groups of people hire a mini bus or coach and negotiate where and when it travels all the time for social events, work parties, school trips, etc.

BTW, this sort of smugness is why Detroit is a shattered husk of what it used to be.

When Deming still had all of his hair, he had trouble getting traction in the states. Japan, on the other hand, was intrigued by his ideas and wanted some quality time from him. If you look at the history of the Toyota Production System, they usually credit Taiichi Ohno and Toyoda, with the origin story sometime in the 80’s, after Detroit was already in flames, but before that was Deming, and for some reason he is usually not mentioned.

> However, being nice to passengers (performing "caring labour" as Graeber would have put it) increases the chances that people choose the bus over e.g. the metro or something else.

Increases is a relative measure. It may be 10% or it may be 0.0001%. At very small values it becomes basically a zero because humans are non-divisible unit at which point your theory is basically in the rabbit’s hole of magic and wizardry.

This happened in the first company I worked for. It was a big, well known engineering company, and when things started going south they had to negotiate with the state labor department to do large layoffs, which required giving financial cushions to let go employees. I was a star employee - so while everyone else was being laid off with nice, big compensation packages (like 6-12 months of salary), I was stuck in a company on fire that obviously had no future. I was, in effect, punished for being "indispensable".

Ethical issues aside it's easy to see how people in that situation can basically just stop working / start interview prepping while waiting for the layoff.

I think one of the problems from "being indispensable" is the direction it takes. Being indispensable in regards to people "being left holding the bag while new initiatives are undertaken" means they are/were indispensable in regards to specific tasks/processes/skills or knowledge.

Personally I feel being indispensable can also be seen as being able to be thrown at (nearly) any problem and finding a solution. Catching the ball and creating the basis for a stable project for others to take over/maintain. I am working at an agency and more often than not there is a first small initiative at a client where we just do not know what is expected/needed in terms of skills and in what direction this initiative might go/grow.

So we often throw two people at the "problem". One more senior "jack of all trades" kind of person that can understand a lot of problems and knows how far they themselves can work towards a solution (and when to call in the subject matter experts). And one more junior person to support and learn by swimming in cold water together with said "senior" (can actually - depending on the problem be a junior/intermediate themselves - it depends).

These "jack of all trades" persons, thinking on their feet, being able to improvise and get things done, able to understand and dig into problems ans find solutions - these kinds of persons are indispensable - but they don't get stuck in one specific problem/project.

The processes around them are built in a way so that we free them for the next thing to come our way. And we do everything we can to create new people of that kind.

I'm not really familiar with the military context, but it's almost how I envision an advance/special forces unit operating in front of the actual lines and first creating a beachhead that the regular troops can then build on and bring their strengths to bear.

These types of individuals are indispensable - but ideally not each of the individuals on their own.

TL;DR: Be indispensable for the role you want to be in. This may change over time.

> "My company would be just fine without me," can mean "my work here is done," and you can ride off into the sunset with a clear conscience

It also makes it way easier to take your vacation time.

If your employer is harmed by you taking vacation, they will find ways to make you miserable for it.

> If your employer is harmed by you taking vacation, they will find ways to make you miserable for it.

Ouch, I know this one well and it almost cost me my marriage.

Your marriage wasn't enhancing shareholder value, citizen.

s/citizen/human resource/

I have been in this situation myself, but my former boss has a conscience, as it turned out. My wife and I were on a vacation that was timed to celebrate an important birthday. I had spend days during the preceeding week training up two people on my team, and maybe one or two others, on various processes and contingencies. Yet still, when push came to shove, I was asked to get online to put out a fire. Luckily it only took an hour or two. A few days later I was surprised to find $1000 bucks deposited into my account from my boss as a thank you.

This system that I had hacked together, built out and maintained, kept on growing in size, complexity, attributable revenue and potential compliance liabilities. Within the year, I had to call the execs into a meeting to drive home the point that this wasn't a tenable way for us to operate. Everyone had known as much but it was still a tough pill to swallow. I let them get too spoiled at a huge cost to my own mental health.

I had to paint a dire picture to make my case that the system had to be rebuilt from scratch in order to be integrated into the main infrastructure. I ended up leaving a few months later as the rebuild was nearing completion. A couple of months down the road I was surprised to learn that they were still using a part of my system alongside the rebuild. Apparently their architecture couldn't support an algorithm that this component had relied on.

What a mess!

> If given the choice between "my company would be just fine without me" and "everything would fall apart if I didn't show up to work,

I found the problem. It’s not “your company”, it’s “the purchaser of your time and attention”. Act accordingly.

I remember reading "Anything you want" by Derek Sivers. There he describes, that he actually went towards "my company would just be fine without me" with his own company.

So regardless of being an employee doing bodyleasing towards their employer, being an employee that identifies with "their" company or being a boss/founder/owner/manager these two sides of the axis exist and one needs to find the spot that fits for them within that range.

I don't think there are "one size fits all" easy answers. Or at least if they are given imho and by my experience they are wrong more often than not.

It's a fine line. If you want to stay employed, but not be pigeonholed, you need your company to see a future with you in it, rather than always thinking of you in the present tense, dealing with the latest problems du jour.

I think for me these sorts of pre-emptions have always felt quite jarring, so the feedback loop for me is tighter than for some.

If you bring me a novel problem to solve, I will happily stop what I'm doing and help you figure it out. For some reason I've only rarely had problems getting back into whatever you interrupted. Whereas with fire drills I have trouble spinning back up into what I was doing before. Perhaps to do with finite energy reserves.

Ultimately I credit my early successes getting promoted to Lead to this pattern, because 'novel' problems either explain a wider portion of the overall architecture to me, or end up being all hands on deck when it turns out this issue is bad and is already in production. I cannot emphasize enough how much smarter you sound offering a solution you've had 30 minutes to an hour to think about instead of 10 minutes. The developer who triages an issue is two steps ahead of everyone else who is thinking on the fly. Doubly so if you have to wrangle everyone into a meeting room to discuss things. Unless the other people are vastly smarter or knowledgeable than you, you will hold your own in that conversation, even if you are somewhat junior. And if you're instead on a par, you will excel.

Unless you are a co-founder or otherwise heavily invested.

What's your goal, though? I'd like my company to not absolutely 100% need my constant presence, and I don't want to be in the author's position where he is not doing what he could be most valuable doing. But I do want my company to think "wow, that ivraatiems, we're sure lucky to have him." I would want them to think twice about firing me or laying me off if layoffs were happening. I definitely would not like to have to go look for a new job unexpectedly.

So, I want to be personally valuable to the company - maybe more valuable than the average engineer - but I don't want to have indispensable knowledge that locks me in place. Surely there's a middle ground here?

Presumably the goal is to be nominally replaceable, but just so all-around awesome they’d be sore to lose you.

Easy, right?

I worked at 3 companies between 2014-2020. My goal going in was to solve the set of problems I was hired to solve by the then new manager and “put myself out of job”.

Today working in a consulting department, I refuse to take on any work that may look like “staff augmentation”. I just do project based implementations with a definition of done and set aside time for training the customer.

Be the best at two things, and train someone to do the less rewarding thing while you learn a new thing.

I think the middle ground is to have a huge stash of savings. That way, the original proposition isn't really relevant anymore. (That proposition being, I need to be valuable so I don't get fired).

Starting in a new role, or new company, often means that there is a period when I'm hard to replace, but since I try to automate everything I can and make the rest simple enough for anyone to do, I'm actively trying to make myself useless and out of a job. Funnily enough, it doesn't seem world is running out of undone work anytime soon and there are always more interesting problems to solve.

There is actually no contradiction there. You want to be indispensable for the position you wish you have, and dispensable for any position you don't wish.

If your interests change, your dispensability should change with it. But this is very hard to achieve, so you get a complex goal of optimizing for many things at the same time.

After about 20 or so years now, one of the main things I've learned is that you aren't as indispensable as you think you are. You might think the company will go under or otherwise degrade when you leave, but that never happens. The company will trudge along without you. That being said though, if you do believe yourself to be "indispensable" to a degree in which the burden of you leaving is large, then by all means, use that to your advantage in obtaining raises/promotions/etc.

Or you are indespensible, and the company could go under, but you can charge them huge afternoon-consulting fees while working a new, better day-job elsewhere.

"You can't be promoted if you can't be replaced."

i think the indispensable idea is from an era where job stability is important and you might be at one company for decades.

The méthode en vogue of the current era is to jump ship every 2 years because that's the best way to get a raise/promotion. With that strategy being indispensable isn't that important because you will self-dispense in 2 years anyway.

Sounds like this story is yet another reason people should regularly be moving to different companies

> you can ride off into the sunset with a clear conscience

You can always do that.

This was the big lesson I learned recently and I whole heartedly agree. It's can be very dangerous to your mental health to not have this perspective if you wind up emotionally trapped in a bad situation.

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