On Being Indispensable

I'm not sure how that directly relates to my or original post; but let me try to engage:

I don't understand first sentence; but based on second sentence, my interpretation of your key point is that you may have excellent technical or functional skills, but if your personality / behaviour / look don't fit, people may still find way to get rid of you.

I believe that is true; and I believe that can be true in both positive and nefarious ways.

I've been a hands-on pure techie for 15 years; I've been in leadership/managerial positions lately; and I cannot believe how positively ignorant I was to ever think my technical skills were the only or even primary consideration.

A person knowing a technology is great. But a person then needs to:

* Understand client's top down business goals and priorities (as opposed to bottom-up technical priorities) to prioritize their tasks and recommendations. E.g. As a DBA, you want to spend your time optimizing tables and indexes and access paths that you have; but business may well prioritize new functionality that will gain them market advantage or reduce cost more than optimizing a technical parameter will. And this tension goes forever in every facet of technology.

* Be able to gather true requirements, eek them out of client and product owner and functional & business team. A person who builds exactly and only what a clueless functional person tells them to, is... OK. A fine junior resource. A person who's been around the block and cares enough about business to ask keen questions to identify needs client/functional wasn't fully aware, identify edge cases, danger zones, risks and discuss them in understandable language, is a worthy senior developer

* Work with the team. Coach junior team members; at least consider feedback from everybody - junior, senior, client, management, functional, business, and integrate it appropriately to make yourself more valuable to them. Make their day better - through your work, yes, but also your attitude. Do you help inspire and motivate and get team members excited, or do you drag them down? Do you help move things along or do you get people stuck in some detail forever?

* Communicate well. Strive to understand and be understood. Ensure your team mates and management know what you're doing, how you're doing, how well you're doing, the thoughts and plans, and risks/barriers/issues/constraints you're encountering (as much as they need/desire to). Be self-guided when you can; Ask for help when you reach your limits. (those two goals are a LIFEtime's work to improve and hone and fine tune:). Ensure everybody understands the plan and agrees to plan. Be at all times aware other people's context/background/assumptions/knowledge/perspective may be completely, wildly different than yours; avoid unspoken assumptions and ambiguities.

* Understand your management's goals and help them succeed. It is stunning to me how few technical people (myself historically included!!:) didn't know, and did not want to know, what the management/business goals are. We have this duality of "Just tell me what to do, I don't want to deal with politics and business crap" and "I'm angry that we are not doing what I think we should be doing, how I think we should be doing it".

etc etc etc.

This is not to say that teams and companies don't abuse the "cultural fit" notion; or that north america isn't way too prescriptive about "being a team player to the point of being a yes-person"; or that there isn't racism/nationalism/personal preferences and bias in recruiting and other decisions. There 100% is negative and unproductive ways to people manager, and I see it all the time. But I think many of us would benefit from awareness that our technical/functional skills are a) not the only thing we are judged on and b) they are not the only thing we need/should be judged on, on vast majority of real world non-theoretical projects and teams.

> 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.

Maybe. But - maybe they just follow the path of least resistance, which is to lean on you rather than go up to their bosses and say "John Smith is quitting, and when he does, this project will crash and burn. We must stop this or the company will lose $$$."

How did they make the Confluence search be so horrible? I once searched a page title without noticing I was already at that page, and it couldn't find it. I literally copied the title in and it still didn't find it. truly an awesome (as in awe and fear inspiring) piece of software.

> I don't understand first sentence; but based on second sentence, my interpretation of your key point is that you may have excellent technical or functional skills, but if your personality / behaviour / look don't fit, people may still find way to get rid of you.:

So if you get vocal (online) the security services get involved, its as simple as that, they will keep you busy, and so will other people, whether you like it or not, but not everyone gets to spot when the spooks are getting involved, which is partly their job ie to have deniability of their actions, but thats the way it is.

2nd point, spot on, correct.

The rest of your post is what you have experienced but you dont mention office/team politics, that also plays a part, plus customers who despite all the training are fixated on something else and wont accept a superior solutions until perhaps years later.

Some management are just as bad at conveying their needs as staff at the other end of the hierarchy. People dont always know what they want until its gone.

You can get buried under communication, effective communication is generally better, but everyone is different.

Everyone has a different opinion on the best approach.

You must have worked for some awful companies. Everywhere I've worked the sabbatical was highly encouraged and the people came back refreshed and often got promoted soon afterwards.