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On Being Indispensable

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Re: On Being Indispensable

#131

Post by amelius »

FeepingCreature wrote: post #116
kqr wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Deming sometimes used bus drivers as an example. Some of them might think it's not their job to smile and be nice to passengers. They're hired to drive the bus, and perhaps help out in emergencies, but not much beyond that. However, being nice to passengers (performing "caring labour" as Graeber would have put it) increases the chances that people choose the bus over e.g. the metro or something else. Deming concluded…

Ah, this must be why bus drivers are commonly paid in company shares. Incentive alignment! Makes sense. Wait, they're not? So why should they care, when their bosses don't care even enough to set up a direct reward to bus performance and some way for them to have agency over that reward? Though it would be cool if there was a bus service that had direct, fine-grained association between curteous behavior and reward i…

> "Hey, I need a bus from X to Y some time between 6 and 7 every workday for the next six months, which time and pickup location is cheapest?"

They could even make it so that the people who actually take the bus negotiate the time and place.

This would be great for events outside the city.

Re: On Being Indispensable

#133

Post by giantg2 »

"There was no career path. Sure my title changed, pay went up, but my day-to-day never changed."

Sounds like a career to me. At least that's how most of them work.

Re: On Being Indispensable

#134

Post by dagw »

jacobolus wrote: post #94
gautamdivgi wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being indispensable to a team or a manager in a large company can actually be self-destructive to your career. I realized this the hard way a long time ago when my managers refused to let me move for a promotion because I was "indispensable" and "critical to the project". I've always made it a point to know who my back-ups are and have my supervisors assign them formally. In short, make it a point to share knowledge…

> refused to let me move for a promotion because I was "indispensable" and "critical to the project". So would they rather have you quit? If not they should be willing to give you whatever title, pay bump, time off, etc. is necessary to keep you long enough for a replacement solution to be found. Otherwise if you just quit they’re stuck negotiating from a position of weakness to hire you back as a much higher paid co…

So would they rather have you quit? If not they should be willing to give you whatever title, pay bump, time off, etc.

For large enough companies the 'company' is not a single unit making unified decisions. I might be "indispensable" to my boss, perhaps his boss, the project, and my department. However they don't have the power to give me a pay rise or extra time off outside the normal bounds set by their bosses. Me, my boss or even my department however aren't indispensable to the whole global multinational company we all work for.

If I quit and the project fails, then my boss and several people on that project might lose their jobs, and the remnants of that department might end up folded into some other department. My bosses boss might not get a nice bonus that year due to the fact that the project he was overseeing was a massive failure. However "The Company" and it's tens of thousands of other employees all around the world will keep on trucking as if nothing had happened.

Re: On Being Indispensable

#136

Post by jwsteigerwalt »

So much of this rings true and is familiar. When I was first part of an acquisition, being the technical owner of a bespoke sales stack brought a ton of security while I was also told about the opportunity in the larger organization. Fast forward 18 months and the opportunities were not available because I was on the hook to answer the same issues over and over despite documentation and process in place…

Re: On Being Indispensable

#137

Post by unityByFreedom »

drewzero1 wrote: post #60
smokey_circles wrote: post #35

Alternate title: How it took OP years to realise their teammates and colleagues deserve agency. No such thing as "indispensable". Very few companies and projects die to a singular departure, you're just not that special kiddo. What's actually happened here is a selfish desire to know things without sharing them. If you learn something new, share it somewhere. "People came to ask the Oracle questions only the Oracle c…

You can lead a colleague to documentation, but you can't make them think. It doesn't sound to me like knowledge is being hoarded here; it's all there for the taking, but OP's colleagues have discovered it's more convenient for them to ask OP rather than seeking it out for themselves. Maybe that's an issue with discoverability, or maybe OP has a history of being too available for questions. Sounds to me like OP might…

> You can lead a colleague to documentation, but you can't make them think.

You can point them to the docs that answer their repeat questions rather than spending time to write a unique response every time. Author writes that this worked when the questions and answers were made available to others,

> One thing I instituted that helped was a specific Teams channel called Knowledge Transfer. Any questions that would normally have been DM’d to me could be posted there, publicly for all to see. In theory, others could step up to answer these. I could also forward DMs there to respond to publicly or refuse to answer in DM and require them to retype their question in the Knowledge Transfer channel. Rarely did others step up to answer, but it became more like a SoFuckingAgile office hours, which was still a big improvement.

Re: On Being Indispensable

#138

Post by unityByFreedom »

Casteil wrote: post #71
smokey_circles wrote: post #35

Alternate title: How it took OP years to realise their teammates and colleagues deserve agency. No such thing as "indispensable". Very few companies and projects die to a singular departure, you're just not that special kiddo. What's actually happened here is a selfish desire to know things without sharing them. If you learn something new, share it somewhere. "People came to ask the Oracle questions only the Oracle c…

You make a pretty grand assumption here - that OP had time/capacity in all the madness to be able to document things and simply opted not to. You also gloss over the fact that he addressed this in the article (things were documented, people just kept coming to him anyway).

Kinda seems like the author found a working solution- public email, aka a forum:

> One thing I instituted that helped was a specific Teams channel called Knowledge Transfer. Any questions that would normally have been DM’d to me could be posted there, publicly for all to see. In theory, others could step up to answer these. I could also forward DMs there to respond to publicly or refuse to answer in DM and require them to retype their question in the Knowledge Transfer channel. Rarely did others step up to answer, but it became more like a SoFuckingAgile office hours, which was still a big improvement.

Re: On Being Indispensable

#139

Post by lloydatkinson »

steve_gh wrote: post #112

It's called the Technical Ghetto. The basic problem is technical folks who are too good at being technical to be allowed to do any management or less technical stuff. I've seen it time and time again in my career. I've discussed it at length with colleagues and peers. I've seen very few people escape it. Only once have I seen someone escape it without moving jobs (new company, not in-company). And that one time was d…

What is his saas business out of curiosity? Seems like it could indeed be very successful with this experience

Re: On Being Indispensable

#140

Post by [deleted] »

kqr wrote: post #59
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…

Deming sometimes used bus drivers as an example. Some of them might think it's not their job to smile and be nice to passengers. They're hired to drive the bus, and perhaps help out in emergencies, but not much beyond that. However, being nice to passengers (performing "caring labour" as Graeber would have put it) increases the chances that people choose the bus over e.g. the metro or something else. Deming concluded…

[deleted]
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