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On Being Indispensable

sofuckingagile.com

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Re: On Being Indispensable

#11

Post by bluefirebrand »

hinkley wrote: post #10

In the spirit of the old saying, "the two happiest days of a boat owner's life are the day they buy a boat, and the day they sell it." The best advice I got starting out was, "be indispensable." The best advice I got four years later was, "don't be indispensable." In a growing company, the indispensable people may find themselves being left holding the bag while new initiatives are undertaken. I very quickly learned…

> "My company would be just fine without me," can mean "my work here is done," and you can ride off into the sunset with a clear conscience

It also makes it way easier to take your vacation time.

If your employer is harmed by you taking vacation, they will find ways to make you miserable for it.

Re: On Being Indispensable

#12

Post by beebmam »

hinkley wrote: post #10

In the spirit of the old saying, "the two happiest days of a boat owner's life are the day they buy a boat, and the day they sell it." The best advice I got starting out was, "be indispensable." The best advice I got four years later was, "don't be indispensable." In a growing company, the indispensable people may find themselves being left holding the bag while new initiatives are undertaken. I very quickly learned…

Sounds like this story is yet another reason people should regularly be moving to different companies

Re: On Being Indispensable

#13

Post by gumby »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #11
hinkley wrote: post #10

In the spirit of the old saying, "the two happiest days of a boat owner's life are the day they buy a boat, and the day they sell it." The best advice I got starting out was, "be indispensable." The best advice I got four years later was, "don't be indispensable." In a growing company, the indispensable people may find themselves being left holding the bag while new initiatives are undertaken. I very quickly learned…

> "My company would be just fine without me," can mean "my work here is done," and you can ride off into the sunset with a clear conscience It also makes it way easier to take your vacation time. If your employer is harmed by you taking vacation, they will find ways to make you miserable for it.

> If your employer is harmed by you taking vacation, they will find ways to make you miserable for it.

Ouch, I know this one well and it almost cost me my marriage.

Re: On Being Indispensable

#14

Post by at_a_remove »

hinkley wrote: post #8
at_a_remove wrote: post #5

In an age where loyalty between employer and employee is long in rear window (if it wasn't just a useful fable from the get-go), all you are left with are the grim permutations of game theory, all wary glances and knife edges barely concealed. Being indispensable is the closest thing you have to security, and as for "stopping learning," well, most companies want you to do that in your off-time, anyway. Throwing that…

There is something to be said for being indispensible for novel problems, instead of for known problems. Some of the worst behavior I've seen in both myself and others has come when you can hold your company hostage by refusing to do something. Even when you are using it for 'the greater good', that's not a good look and not a great feeling. You shouldn't have to go with the nuclear option to get something done, even…

Oh, fire all the heroes, I have worked at one of those places. The people in the know were let go, as some kind of pre-emptive strike of just that nature. Heaven forfend that anyone but the organization have leverage. This was managed before I had a chance to get a Chesterson's Fence view of the processes.

The result was not good: deciphering the how of things was bad enough, but the why, the contexts of the decisions was utterly gone. Nobody could say why things were done, and so it was either the old joke about the five monkeys or the Second System Effect. Glorious chaos, the confidence of our clients eroded, terror at making changes that might affect the way things had been, dread of not making changes to cope with extant problems.

Thanks, but I'll take the M.A.D. that results from the threat of the nuclear option over someone getting to yank out my heartplug ala Lynch's Dune.

Re: On Being Indispensable

#15

Post by andi999 »

rhplus wrote: post #9

This is why teams should run people game days to test their resiliency to organizational outages. Unavailability: force team members to completely disconnect for a day. Consistency: if a team member ask a question about a process that should be documented in a runbook/TSG, instruct them to sometimes answer it incorrectly. Latency: delay responses to email/IM questions about live-site processes by 24 hours.

Isnt this called paid time off.

Re: On Being Indispensable

#17

Post by ivraatiems »

hinkley wrote: post #10

In the spirit of the old saying, "the two happiest days of a boat owner's life are the day they buy a boat, and the day they sell it." The best advice I got starting out was, "be indispensable." The best advice I got four years later was, "don't be indispensable." In a growing company, the indispensable people may find themselves being left holding the bag while new initiatives are undertaken. I very quickly learned…

What's your goal, though? I'd like my company to not absolutely 100% need my constant presence, and I don't want to be in the author's position where he is not doing what he could be most valuable doing. But I do want my company to think "wow, that ivraatiems, we're sure lucky to have him." I would want them to think twice about firing me or laying me off if layoffs were happening. I definitely would not like to have to go look for a new job unexpectedly.

So, I want to be personally valuable to the company - maybe more valuable than the average engineer - but I don't want to have indispensable knowledge that locks me in place. Surely there's a middle ground here?

Re: On Being Indispensable

#18

Post by _8j50 »

Quite interesting. I have learned to make myself useful by making myself redundant, as in the team won't be on fire if I leave. I think it is good to be valuable because you do good work but not so much that if you want to leave for a different company you would leave your old team in a bad shape or if you want to move to a different team the move would get blocked because you are indispensible.

Re: On Being Indispensable

#19

Post by at_a_remove »

swayvil wrote: post #6

Does anybody else ever reflect on how, in our modern world, utter servility is assumed? I mean are we all serfs now? Are we discussing the best method for licking master's boot?

That's what offends me about this piece, really.

And on top of it, Agile, which has always had the whiff of "Taylorism, but from the inside" about it. Always sprinting (huff huff huff); attention atomized by checking texts, emails, phones, voicemail, and of course iterating over an ever-increasing number of Slack channels (or Teams); everything in these bitty increments of moving the assembly line along. And this has to be accomplished through a kind of homogenization, which invariably leads to replacement. But sure, let's hot desk on rows of laminate-topped folding tables for the greater glory.

Re: On Being Indispensable

#20

Post by jedberg »

This is exactly why companies offer sabbaticals. It forces you to train people up on your five years of knowledge before you leave for 10 weeks.

OP could have just taken a long vacation.

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