On Being Indispensable
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On Being Indispensable
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Re: On Being Indispensable
#2What else would they do if they weren't answering questions? Write some more CRUD code? I don't know what this person wants or what they expect their job to be. That's probably the underlying issue.
Re: On Being Indispensable
#3What else would they do if they weren't answering questions? Write some more CRUD code? I don't know what this person wants or what they expect their job to be. That's probably the underlying issue.
In the article they said
> I had a hard time thinking strategically about product. I was too busy supporting the entire organization on all things related to the product.
so that's a pretty clear indication of what was missing. Instead of being able to recognize broad industry trends and come up with broad product evolutions that meet those needs, this person is stuck answering quibbles about particular customers or particular implementations.
Re: On Being Indispensable
#4What else would they do if they weren't answering questions? Write some more CRUD code? I don't know what this person wants or what they expect their job to be. That's probably the underlying issue.
How about his managerial duties? Being constantly dragged into unrelated meetings will make you soon burned out and i think most people with management experience can relate to his writing
Re: On Being Indispensable
#5In 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 away to become just another Pac-man gobbling tickets in a maze for the sake of being Agile or whatever reminds me of "...the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother" in its joy at self-abnegation.
Reams could be and have been written about estrangement in society, the reduction of human relationships to mere transactionality, but being The Person Who Is Expert At This Thing in your little Dunbar's Number sized company (give or take) beats being some plastic gear, designed to be replaced as a sacrificial component, if you are interested in stability, continuity, or even something as antiquated as pride in your work.
I sort of get it -- at an early job, we had a lot of clientele. I inadvertently memorized, well, everything about them: faces, names, various ID numbers, and so on, and instead of the handy lookups provided, employees would just call me and ask. This got annoying. But I was also twenty-four and managed to push back enough to say, "You have the ability to look all of this up." Being bothered with dumb questions if you have all of this documentation and a wiki or whatever, yes, that is not acceptable, but I think there's a middle ground at least between being the Turing-complaint helpbot and just bolting out of there so you don't have to be The Guy in the Know.
Re: On Being Indispensable
#6Does 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?
Re: On Being Indispensable
#7This is so silly — being useful should be enough, period.
Re: On Being Indispensable
#8In 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 if 5/8ths of your coworkers all feel it's the right thing to do. And many people use it because they can, through some mix of hubris and/or burnout.
When people say things like, "first, fire all the heroes" it's situations like this that they are thinking of, among others.
Re: On Being Indispensable
#9This 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.
Re: On Being Indispensable
#10In 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 the meaning of 'working your way out of a job' after the first time this happened to me.
I'm sure there's some min-max game I'm not playing with regards to how easy I am to lay off, but once I learned there are worse fates that being laid off, I stopped looking for them. Being "stuck" with responsibilities is unpleasant when things are going well, but it's miserable when things are going badly. If you aren't the one who got laid off, then someone you used to trade off with doing onerous tasks certainly was, and now you're stuck doing it every single time.
If given the choice between "my company would be just fine without me" and "everything would fall apart if I didn't show up to work," the latter feels very good for a brief period when you're young, until the weight of that responsibility sinks in. "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.