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Comment by PicassoCTs | Hacker News Reader

This mentality, of the employee as a interchangeable operative box has destroyed so much value. Its what regularly destroys the value of companies bought up by behemoths. The knowledge is just transferable after all, and there can not be any value in constellations, aka teams and pipelines. Thus it gets all destroyed, people shoved around until they quit. Its like management has its own toxic ideology, of a world were working people are just a sort of lego brick, and the ideology wins out every time.

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That's arguably what they want though. These multinational corporations aren't really focussing at extracting the most value out of what they've got, they're mostly trying to minimize risk.

While a talented and motivated individual can indeed create a lot of value, this will inevitably also create a lot of dependency on said person. Now this person has become a liability, and HR doesn't like liabilities.

> The knowledge is just transferable after all

Not exactly. I do agreed about the value destroying part. But unless the knowledge mentioned is standardized, it's not really easy to transfer them to the succeeding team members.

Some highly successful products (or features in these products) was created because the effort from one or two employees who got the idea based on their knowledge from life. Without these key employees, the product/features will never be implemented, and the success will never happen (and nobody will know it's possible).

It's the same way how CEO/CTO works, really. Some CEO lead the company to success while others failed, not because they're incompetent, but because the knowledge is not there, which lead to (for example) the lack of imagination and growth.

But unlike the leaders, employees usually don't receive nearly enough reward for their insight, if their effort is noticed at all. That's the dilemma.

This works on the retail level too, where sufficient customers opt to choose a lower quality product (sometimes unknowingly) for a lower price, and causing the higher quality, higher price product/service to not be viable anymore.

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