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Comment by coldtea | Hacker News Reader

>The most important thing I need from a programmer I work with is their ability to have a fruitful conversation with me about why the code might be written one way or another, and for them to iterate on the code in response to those conversations. If a coder can write code, but they can’t do that, they’re useless to the org.

Don't worry, you wont be there at the org to make these "fruitful conversations" either. The AI will take your job too

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> Don't worry, you wont be there at the org to make these "fruitful conversations" either. The AI will take your job too

I've been waiting for something to take my job for 15 years.

I started as a small developer testing radio firmware, moved on to test web firmware, now I instruct terraform how to build infrastructure and now I instruct developers on how to do things to build proper infrastructure.

I'm ready to retire but apparently I'm incapable of having an AI that can actually simulate Super Power ADHD at work, so we'll have to wait a bit.

If you're ready to retire, retire. If they can't replace you, they should be paying you way more.

I have observed that companies will choose not to invest further in irreplaceable labor, under any circumstance. Every single company with, that I have been part of over the decades (30ish?), exhibits the same behavior when it becomes common knowledge that someone is a linchpin. Put the company in a game of chicken for a raise (which includes an implicit, or-I-quit) and they let the "irreplaceable" employee go. Every single time. It's not hard to see why. No company wants to have a disgruntled linchpin nor do they want to be beholden to some lower level character.

My experience is similar, though I would personally attribute it at least partly to stupidity - on the one hand, in most cases when I have worked with someone crucial, they've been with the company longer than the people managing them, so the person or people making the firing decision don't really understand what's at stake. Or to put it another way, their cost-benefit is flawed, they know what it'd cost to keep the key employee, but they fail to imagine what it will cost to let them go.

> My experience is similar, though I would personally attribute it at least partly to stupidity

Every company has suffered from the decision, in my experience. Never has it destroyed the employer, but I have heard stories about such eventualities.

Don't know why you'd stay on then?

Why do you think previous commenter is in that position?

Much as I'd like to side with labor here, the companies are probably right. Even if the linchpin is high level and happy, building around a single, irreplaceable employee is not a sound long term strategy.

For all the important contributions Steve Jobs made to Apple when he returned, maybe the least heralded and hardest to implement is that he managed to NOT make himself irreplaceable. To many people's surprise, Apple did not collapse after his retirement and death. So maybe his most genius contribution was not to make Apple dependent on his ongoing genius contributions.

  >  So maybe his most genius contribution was not to make Apple dependent on his ongoing genius contributions.

i wonder if we all acted in this way, would things be better than they are? do we as individuals put our need/want to be depended upon above what is (for lack of a better term) the long-term good?

>No company wants to have a disgruntled linchpin nor do they want to be beholden to some lower level character.

That's because its even lower level characters in managements deciding...

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