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> But the corollary there is that if your teams can handle just as well without you as with you, then the rational decision would be for your company to just fire you if you aren't raising the output or success probabilities of your team.

IMO, anyone who deprecates themselves from an important role within a team has successfully scaled themselves in a very interesting way (same output, but person is free to do other things). Such a person would seem very valuable and destined to scale in even more interesting ways.

Or they didn't really contribute before.

That's just manager talk for "we weren't needed here". For example, you say "important role" but who called it important? Were the engineers demanding someone do this job, or was it presumed to be an important job when someone was building out the team?

If someone came into a highly-demanded (by the team itself) role and turned the responsibilities around into work the team can take care of on its own, that's valuable work for sure. But if this was just a role created by an executive as a result of, "We've always needed one of these", then maybe not so much.

I've personally done something similar through mentorship. Learn something interesting and relevant to the company (in this case scheduling and convex optimization), build something, document, teach others how it works, move on.

You can create organizational chaos by skipping that last step, you may even achieve job security. But it's blatantly obvious to both your managers and coworkers if you fight to keep them off your turf. Don't expect respect or admiration.

If you can have the team work well without you, you could probably spend the same time that you used to on one team on five teams. If you're not getting promoted to the level that you can do that, you should probably find a different place to work.

If a good doctor cures their patients to no longer need them, should they be fired?

Absolutely not. The jobs that are the most respectable are the ones where your job is to put yourself out of a job. Management can be a noble profession because of this.

I 100% agree they have scaled / transcended their “job” at that point.

It could be as well that the patients were never sick to begin with. The doctor was not needed to begin with (middle management is not always needed, but “we’ve always done it like that”)

"If you can't replaced, you can't be promoted" -- sometimes attributed to Lee Iacocca

Don't manage your work from a place of fear. If you really don't want to be promoted, that's fine. I respect people that have that opinion. But don't try to ensure job security by slowing the organization down to reassure yourself you're too essential to replace.

> Many folks have family that will help with the kids in the early days, so it was helpful to always have a extra pair of hands at home for the mom during the first half year or so.

This is a strange comment, considering the person asking the question IS the mom.

Secondly, I feel like your entire argument around the extra work the team will face (and the idea that the team being fine with them gone means they provide no value) has an unstated premise; that the amount of work the team has is constant and can't be changed.

When a team member is gone, we expect the team to be less productive. The team and company should plan for this, and commit to less work during the period. The idea is that the team should GRACEFULLY reduce their workload, and not grind to a halt completely.

> When a team member is gone, we expect the team to be less productive. The team and company should plan for this, and commit to less work during the period. The idea is that the team should GRACEFULLY reduce their workload, and not grind to a halt completely.

Good luck making that work at a lean startup or for a team that is already understaffed.

What is the alternative? If you have less people, you are going to be less productive, period. You have no choice but to take a hit to productivity. You can either be smart about it and choose which areas to cut back on, or you can pretend it won't happen and lose productivity in a critical place you can't survive.

The idea isn't that the team will have an identical quantity and quality of output, but that everything will keep working smoothly at an appropriate pace. Deprecating yourself refers to not being a hoarder of information, decisions and all the other nasty ways in which people try to make themselves indispensable. Your team should always benefit from you being there, but your absence should never make the team fall apart and stop working effectively.

Counterpoint about breaking up the parental leave into multiple chunks: I did this once before (3 chunks) and would not recommend it. Each time when I came back, by the time I ramped back up and could finally start contributing again, it was time to go back on leave. Maybe I'm slow on ramp-up, or my team moves very fast, but that was my experience.

> But the corollary there is that if your teams can handle just as well without you as with you, then the rational decision would be for your company to just fire you if you aren't raising the output or success probabilities of your team.

if you're indispensable, you're unpromotable

If you can coach and build a team to the point where they are effective without you being present, when you come back from your maternity/paternity leave I would be delighted to have you take on that same challenge again but on a bigger and more impactful scale.

Hard disagree. This makes the assumption that this person can not put on any other hats, which would make me question how they got into a startup in the first place.

I can see your point in the case where the person does nothing already, leaves, and it has no impact. But in the top-comment where this happens specifically _because_ the person deprecated themselves then that person has definitely shown how valuable they are.

If they can do that well you know they'll fit in anywhere. You should definitely fight to find a place for them when they come back.