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Comment by ozim | Hacker News Reader

But also company actually is much better off when it is not held hostage by couple of technical employees.

Also every employee should be able to quit at any time and not affect business.

So I disagree describing all like it is some evil scheme - that’s how businesses work.

There's a subtle but very important difference between making sure nobody is a "single point of failure" or bottleneck (heck, most great engineers will actively work with management to make sure they're not single points of failure!), and recognizing that engineers are not fungible resources and should not be treated as such.

I do agree that it's simpler for management to pretend that they are, and that's why great management is insanely rare. But great management, like great engineers, can make a huge difference in the success of a company / project.

> most great engineers will actively work with management to make sure they're not single points of failure!

Sure, but that is a load bearing "great" for sure. Not every company is staffed with great, selfless engineers.

I'm an engineer and I've worked at companies with engineers who actively resisted making themselves not a single point of failure because it gave them control and job security. I think it's not uncommon to have these types at companies and it really sucks when they have their management Stockholm syndromed because they make it hard for all the other "great" engineers to do their jobs.

The company not being able to run without you doesn't mean you have job security, it just makes the company hurt more when they fire you based on someone's spreadsheet.

Tell that to the gatekeeping engineers who think otherwise.

Good managers will recognize that and know what those kinds of engineers are doing. Every company should have at least some good managers - seek them out, it's worth it. If you can't find one in current company, try to switch company - again, it's worth it IMO.

Would you say that the atom bomb project was held hostage by a couple of technical physicists?

Obviously it can't succeed (in the desired time frame) without those specific people, and pretending like it can is lunacy.

Functionally 0% of companies are working on things as important or impactful as the atom bomb, and I include FAANG et al in that. Maybe a small handful of AI companies will actually put out something that important? But even most of them won't.

The vast majority of companies are putting web forms over a database. Letting one or two people hold all the technical knowledge for something like that is borderline fiduciary negligence.

That isn't the point; It's not about the importance

It's about specialized knowledge. To the owners of the business, making sure the business doesn't fail to deliver is existentially important.

Web developers are fungible. The guy who designed the carefully tuned graph database that runs on a custom Linux kernel with a custom tuned filesystem is not. If this sort of thing is critical to your business succeeding, that engineer might as well be Niels Bohr.

My point is 90% of companies have no specialized knowledge whatsoever and are staffed almost entirely by web developers.

How many companies have an in-house tuned graph database? How many companies have custom Linux kernels? How many companies have custom filesystems?

90% of companies don't need to think too deeply about compensation, then.

Is it better when it's held hostage by a couple of non-technical employees?

Non-technical employees are by definition replaceable.

Unless they are sales reps that have good relations with customers.

In that case, all employees bar sales reps are replaceable (and the reps are too, you just see the pain more).

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