Tell HN: A reminder you hold so much power | Hacker News Reader

Tell HN: A reminder you hold so much power

85 pointsthrowarayes20 comments

Having a tough time on your team? Bad relationship with your lead? Working on a death March project? Burnt out?

A reminder you hold so many cards Your org needs you. There are so many software eng opportunities right now, and even with a bear market, you have enough options for employment that your company should be working hard to retain you.

Take care of yourself: you work for YouInc, not your company. You and your satisfaction/sanity are the product. Your employer is just a customer. Don’t get gaslit into believing in the cult around a specific company, no matter how grand.

You can do it. You can interview and get good at selling yourself. Don’t sell yourself short. I believe in you :)

Focus on building YouInc - your personal brand and “product”. Constantly market and grow independent of your employer and you can go far!

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Be the person that everyone has to rely on. Be the person that has the answers no one has.

That’s your real leverage. Not just a hop from job to job.

There’s even a word for it “intrapreneur”. Someone who looks at their job as a business.

Instead of trying to be explicitly independent of your employer, make them be dependent on you.

Life is about relationships. You can’t just be focused on yourself like that. It’s really not the way.

Edit: please, I’m not describing being a knowledge hoarder. That sucks as others have described. I’m describing being a linchpin.

I don't like this. This seems like a lack of transparency and an attitude like "I won't teach anyone anything because then they will take my job" This is not a fun person to work with

There is a way to do this that doesn't involve (possibly unethical) knowledge hording, such as having skills in areas that the team you would typically be on wouldn't have. But skills that still enhance your role. For example, I've always been employed as a Unix (now Linux) sysadmin / engineer / devops whatever. Basically my team creates system build standards, installs and maintains infrastructure. However I also know systems level C programming for the past 30 years. What this means is that when a system is showing a high load, but tools such as top aren't pinpointing any given process, I can run strace on those processes and observe a lot of fork/exec short-lived child processes due to inefficient code. Then I can help the developers make the code better. Or, again using strace, diagnose why a third party vendor's license manager crashes on startup (it kept a few configuration related XML files opened read/write, and when disk full events happened one of the XML files went zero bytes which caused the app to crash on startup because it wasn't coded properly to handle exception conditions from the XML library it used).

I've also thrown out a few sorely needed web utility apps with Javascript, low level server-side code interfacing with specialty equipment, and various data conversion and analysis tools that were useful for specialized in-house software. Oh, and I used my C programming skills to let a developer know why their code went into an infinite loop when porting it from big endian to little endian architecture (they didn't account for a null terminator when copying a string in a loop, overwriting the counter variable on the little-endian machine but the bug went unnoticed on the original big-endian host).

Summary -- be a pinch hitter in addition to your day job.

Yes this is exactly what I meant. Definitely not to be a knowledge hoarder - that would make no sense.

> Be the person that has the answers no one has.

I think (hope) you’re misinterpreting this. Try to be the person everyone comes to for info and then give it to them. You can be the most fun person to work with because you’re the most helpful, have knowledge about systems/processes, will help those who need it to develop the knowledge you’ve gained over the years, and are reliable. You can thrive being very average at your job if you do this.

What that sounds like in practice is "build complex systems no one else knows how to maintain" or "don't document important processes" or "hide essential information from my coworkers". That can be a very successful strategy for some people, but I don't enjoy working in environments where that's the norm and I deliberately try not to do it myself.

The result when you are 'irreplaceable' is that there is no other place to be in the org--you cannot move on to other roles as easily.

For some reason, your opening line prompted me to start singing the pokemon theme in my mind xD

Without knowing much about someone I think the first half of your advice is dangerous. I used to operate that way, thinking I could get a job any time so why worry. I quit a job with nothing lined up and couldn't get anything above minimum wage. Not everyone is having recruiters bang their door down and offer them great jobs.

Yep. The labor market can change on a dime. We're heading into what looks to be a very deep recession, I wouldn't go around burning bridges.

> thinking I could get a job any time

Always try to narrow down the gap between thinking and knowing

Thanks for this reminder, I really appreciate it. I actually came to submit https://jobdescriptiveindex.info/ which is a job satisfaction questionnaire that I just filled out.

I was trying to see if I was "objectively" miserable (i.e. is it the job or is it "in my head"). The score wasn't really high. It helps to consider all of this.

Thanks again

I agree with the latter half entirely, but the first half is just not true. All you have to do matter how good you are, is miss a few meetings or show up late. Yes, you have financial leverage to try and make moves, but with a recession coming up, even that's a bit tenuous. It depends on tenure and company, but a lot of the time you're super disposable, because a lot of tech doesn't matter remotely as much as ICs think it might. It's pretty depressing admittedly, but after many years, but my opinion is that you have no leverage until you definitely have a stake, and until then you might as well do the least amount of work possible to fulfill your duty of being on time. Beyond that, it's not in your best interest to really push for much beyond a higher salary through switching companies, or acquiring a real stake in the business

And save as much as you possibly can. Nothing beats gaining financial independence to avoid employer dependence.

Thank you. This came at the perfect time for me.

> Your employer is just a customer.

Agree with most of it except this bit. In order to be succesful, respect customers, understand their needs, deliver and create value. Lead by example, take initiatives, lift others in your team and hold yourself to the highest standards. Work hard, persevere and be the change you want to see. It's ok to not pledge allegience to your employer or sign off your life like the Japanese corporate culture, but being unreasonably resentful of your employer will make things worse for everyone in the company.

Excellent, balanced advice!

Keep saying the affirmation: ‘I am sufficient’. Affirmations work! They work even better in the industry you’re talking about. Everything is broken and will be for some time. When everything ‘just works’ it will be a form of death to this industry. In fact those drinking the corporate kool-aid and believe that everything just works out of the box are the ones we need to be concerned about.

This is reasonable advice, especially for people with imposter syndrome. It is not universally applicable, some people might need the exact opposite advice.

Understanding your true worth and how it changes over time is an art that is difficult to master.

"Your org needs you."

Nope, I'm not employed. Every organization in the world is having to make do, somehow, without me.

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