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On Being Indispensable
261–270 of 296 posts
Re: On Being Indispensable
#262In 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.
I have been in this situation myself, but my former boss has a conscience, as it turned out. My wife and I were on a vacation that was timed to celebrate an important birthday. I had spend days during the preceeding week training up two people on my team, and maybe one or two others, on various processes and contingencies. Yet still, when push came to shove, I was asked to get online to put out a fire. Luckily it only took an hour or two. A few days later I was surprised to find $1000 bucks deposited into my account from my boss as a thank you.
This system that I had hacked together, built out and maintained, kept on growing in size, complexity, attributable revenue and potential compliance liabilities. Within the year, I had to call the execs into a meeting to drive home the point that this wasn't a tenable way for us to operate. Everyone had known as much but it was still a tough pill to swallow. I let them get too spoiled at a huge cost to my own mental health.
I had to paint a dire picture to make my case that the system had to be rebuilt from scratch in order to be integrated into the main infrastructure. I ended up leaving a few months later as the rebuild was nearing completion. A couple of months down the road I was surprised to learn that they were still using a part of my system alongside the rebuild. Apparently their architecture couldn't support an algorithm that this component had relied on.
What a mess!
Re: On Being Indispensable
#263Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I worked at a company where Sales thought "@channel" was a person they should ping as often as possible I find some people just don't know (or care about) the right way to use Slack. They need to be taught "Hey, don't bother 100 people in this channel for your niche question." Some are oblivious, some don't care about other people. Either way someone needs to pull them aside and say "stop it". Having management tha…
Slack actually pops a dialog when you message @channel or @here. Message says, e.g.: Using @here pings everyone in the channel who's currently online. It's a bit noisy! Are you sure you want to send this? [Edit Message] [Send] Of course it doesn't always help!
Good point. I use @channel or @here so infrequently that I didn't remember that.
Re: On Being Indispensable
#264Earlier quoted context omitted.
So they should do unpaid emotional labour for free?
If you equate smiling at someone, or just being generally courteous, with "emotional labor," you need to make an emergency appointment with your therapist. Being a good human being more often than not (occasional bad moods notwithstanding) should be a non-functional requirement for any job where you interact with other people. I have no problem with anyone, in any role, getting fired simply for being an asshole. The…
Since when is not smiling at people being an arsehole?
I don’t want a bus driver to fake cheerfulness. He’s there to get me from a to b, not to pretend to be my friend.
Re: On Being Indispensable
#265Earlier quoted context omitted.
They’re employed to do a specific job, if they’re not rewarded for bringing the company more money, why should they care?
The specific job includes customer service. It's what they are being paid for. Employees who do the job poorly are at greater risk for replacement by replacement hires. This is why many companies ask customers to rate individual service providers.
I would never rate a customer service employee poorly because they aren’t cheerful.
What sort of mad world do we live in where that’s even expected of minimum wage employees?
Re: On Being Indispensable
#266Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
It is very clear that bosses have had good luck bluffing or calling other people’s bluffs and many just do it as a matter of course. I bet you won’t quit over a 5% discrepancy in pay, and I’ll just ratchet that up every review period, and hope you don’t notice when that climbs to 10% under market. It’s kind of the same game landlords play. I always find it somewhat amusing when a landlord forces a business out of a s…
Lots of commercial buildings are passed down from generations. You don't know how to think like them. They have the building its been generating money and they have lots of money so they don't care. They want toy X that costs $XXXX per month if the tenant leaves they don't get the toy and they lose the rent they don't need to live anyway. If the tenant stays they get the toy. Otherwise they don't care cause they are good financially. You would be amazed how man "business" decisions are made based on the basis of if it buys the owner the toy they want.
Toy is just a euphemism. It could be a service, it could be just showing up their friend jimmy that they made more money this year. IT could be to win a bet. IT could be the tenant scratched their Bently. It could be that somebody they don't like frequents the establishment.
Re: On Being Indispensable
#267This post hits so close to home for me it is unsettling.
Every 4-6 months we have this ritual where everyone finally accepts that we can't have one person being the "center of the universe" and we have this almost performative process of trying to spread things around to other staff. This will last at most two weeks and then we're back where we started.
It can get pretty bad at points, like when dev's get so comfortable in relying on me to solve all their problems that they'll encounter an issue and instead of actually trying to do anything about it themselves, the first thing that happens is I get a call/text/email/slack asking me to fix it for them.
And to top it off, outside of the occasional weekend, I can't remember the last time I had a day off, but I do remember it lasted three hours before they called me to come in and fix something for them. Nowadays, I don't even bother with time off, public holidays or weekends, they aren't days off to me anymore, they are just days where I can sleep in a little longer before getting back to work.
Re: On Being Indispensable
#268Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you equate smiling at someone, or just being generally courteous, with "emotional labor," you need to make an emergency appointment with your therapist. Being a good human being more often than not (occasional bad moods notwithstanding) should be a non-functional requirement for any job where you interact with other people. I have no problem with anyone, in any role, getting fired simply for being an asshole. The…
Since when is not smiling at people being an arsehole? I don’t want a bus driver to fake cheerfulness. He’s there to get me from a to b, not to pretend to be my friend.
Smiling is not pretending to be someone's friend. Seriously, if this all sounds like alien talk, you should see a counselor or therapist.
Re: On Being Indispensable
#269Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you equate smiling at someone, or just being generally courteous, with "emotional labor," you need to make an emergency appointment with your therapist. Being a good human being more often than not (occasional bad moods notwithstanding) should be a non-functional requirement for any job where you interact with other people. I have no problem with anyone, in any role, getting fired simply for being an asshole. The…
Since when is not smiling at people being an arsehole? I don’t want a bus driver to fake cheerfulness. He’s there to get me from a to b, not to pretend to be my friend.
I didn't say not smiling makes you an asshole, I'm making two separate points. The first was that expecting people to be generally courteous to other people, whether they're explicitly paid to or not, is something we should expect from everyone. It's called just being a human being. And again, everyone's allowed to have bad moods now and then. But in general, if you go through life with a scowl on your face and approach things from a standpoint of "I'm not being paid for this so I don't care, I'm not doing 'unpaid emotional labor,'" you're just kind of a jerk. That's the context of the last couple comments in this thread so it's important to keep the "I'm not being paid to smile so I'm not going to smile because that's labor" thing in mind.
The second point, which is related but I think still separate, is that I wish just being an asshole was enough to get fired. I sort of had it in my head but didn't really articulate that I was thinking of being an asshole as a more extreme version of what we're talking about, what I refer to above as just being kind of a jerk. Maybe on a scale of 1-10 being a jerk is a 3 but being an asshole is a 7 or 8.
Re: On Being Indispensable
#270Earlier quoted context omitted.
> but work pales in comparison to: I just want to note that this is a poor generalization. Much like how people wonder how I have the discipline to get up early and workout, it's because I enjoy it. I also enjoy my job the vast majority of the time, and I suspect many others do also. My dad always comments "I'm amazed you get paid to play on the computer all day...", "Me too dad, me too".
What would you say is a good generalization when it comes to work life balance? There's sure a spectrum, from the folks who love to work (or even workaholics) to slackers who don't want to.
If you like what you do who cares? If you don't, find a different job?