This is crazy how much this hits home. I created a slack channel 1.5 years ago with a similar title and purpose - stop DMing me directly, there are many people that know. I got a promotion 1.5 years ago and finally was able to do the job 3 months ago. It took that long to disentangle, as soon as I would start some fire would occur or someone would quit and I'd be dragged back in.
On Being Indispensable
181–190 of 296 posts
Re: On Being Indispensable
#182Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you’re going to practice coding like some master craftsman, employing techniques that took years to hone and where every carefully selected pattern, though inscrutable to an untrained eye, carries the thumbprint of an artist at the height of his power… Well, number one congratulations to you on finding a patron willing to fund such fine and intricate work. I hope they appreciate their good fortune in having lucked…
Well, I don't really like thinking of myself as some kind of "elite atrteest," or whatever. There's lots of people that are better than I am. I've met them, and worked with them. I spent most of my career, as the dumbest guy in the room, and I'm smarter than the average bear. It just seems that the bar for "average" is pretty damn low, these days, so what used to be considered "average," is now considered "too compli…
Well no, please let’s not be enemies.
So let me start by saying I have a ton of admiration for the work you’ve done based on that resume - I agree it’s a worthy contribution and you should be proud.
But please don’t mistake my original reaction as being to your actual body of work, but rather to your initial characterization of a method of delivering software.
In particular you were characterizing a development approach of ‘one hard-to-replace cranky old guy’ versus ‘a team of cheap easily replaced inexperienced devs’ - as being alternatives a manager could choose between in order to get a project done. And casting your vote in favor of, it seems, the solo craftsman.
If you are going to really recommend that people who want software developed should, in general look for a highly skilled individual developer to solo the project and leave it in a state where it will take a lengthy dedicated search to find anyone capable of modifying the resulting code, then I’m sorry if my reaction to that was to (perhaps with more sarcasm than is strictly constructive, but we are all performing for a crowd when we post on the Internet) try to suggest that that might not be a particularly universal or sustainable model.
If that isn’t actually how your project operates - with a business funding the development and having the power to choose between those approaches - then my critique doesn’t even apply to your project, so you have no reason at all to take the criticism personally. I am not my code, and I am also not the examples I use in discussions on the Internet.
Re: On Being Indispensable
#183In 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 fine without me" also means you can take vacation, medical appointments, heck even weekend (crazy concept!). "Being Indispensable" can also mean two years of no physical or mental time off; it was not fun! I am currently lucky that all my layers of higher management understand that if my team can function effectively without me for a period of time, that means I'm doing my job well . I was able t…
No post body was provided.
Re: On Being Indispensable
#184Re: On Being Indispensable
#185It feels like if the author was really that indespensable, they could've used that leverage to get pretty much anything they wanted out of the company. Doesn't sound like a bad position to be in to me if you're ready to have some aggressive negotiation
Re: On Being Indispensable
#186This advice of being “so good they can’t ignore you” is better applied to the industry as a whole than a particular company. Since employees are dispensable and the average tenure is a short two years, it’s better to have indispensable skills for your industry so that you can easily find a new job at a higher salary or title.
Re: On Being Indispensable
#187Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
This is what Citymapper's Smartbus tried to do in 2017 - regulations don't make it easy, so negotiations with the municipal authority and Transport for London are still ongoing...
Re: On Being Indispensable
#188Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, I don't really like thinking of myself as some kind of "elite atrteest," or whatever. There's lots of people that are better than I am. I've met them, and worked with them. I spent most of my career, as the dumbest guy in the room, and I'm smarter than the average bear. It just seems that the bar for "average" is pretty damn low, these days, so what used to be considered "average," is now considered "too compli…
Well no, please let’s not be enemies. So let me start by saying I have a ton of admiration for the work you’ve done based on that resume - I agree it’s a worthy contribution and you should be proud. But please don’t mistake my original reaction as being to your actual body of work , but rather to your initial characterization of a method of delivering software . In particular you were characterizing a development app…
Well, I'll admit that "the cranky old man" trope was a bit of a deliberate goad, on my part, but that's mostly because this is pretty much how I am always perceived. It's really sad, because it's very far from the truth, and, if people spend more than thirty seconds, skimming what I write (and I know that I'm prolix), they can figure out that's not me. If you check my LinkedIn, you'll see a ton of testimonials, from folks I've worked with, over the years, saying how rewarding our relationship was.
I will admit, 100%, that I'm a "Quality nut." I consider my work to be a craft, and I take tremendous personal pride in it. If it requires advanced techniques, to achieve the ends, then that is what it takes. I generally don't even bother setting up a bug tracking system for my work, as there are so few issues. GH Issues is generally fine.
I will also admit, 100%, that I'm pretty appalled at what passes for "quality code," these days. I won't go ripping into the works of others; especially if it earns them money, and people are willing to pay for it, but just because everyone else does it, is no reason for me to do it; even if it means that I do it alone.
The project that I'm working on now, I describe as "ambitious." That means that it is "ambitious" for me[0]. To many folks, they wouldn't even dream of a single person, writing something of this magnitude, but I do stuff like that, on a regular. I've been shipping stuff, for my entire adult life. Because it was written by one single person, from napkin sketch, to shrinkwrap, it has great integrity, and extremely high Quality.
There's good people out there. There always have been. They do great work; usually orders of magnitude better than "average" work. It's worth it to track them down, and to hang onto them.
I managed a guy that is "on the spectrum." He could be difficult to manage, but we worked together for almost 27 years; 25 of which, I was his boss. He was better than I will ever be, and still is (just not working for me). It was a privilege and an honor to work with him, and to have him as an employee. He had a high school diploma, and regularly stunned the Ph.Ds in Japan, with his work.
It, too, was pretty inscrutable code, but it was also often 100X faster and more accurate than stuff done the "average" way.
[0] https://littlegreenviper.com/miscellany/thats-not-what-ships...
Re: On Being Indispensable
#189I worked for a european investment bank for a number of years, and they had a policy that every year, every employee (without exception) was required to take 2 weeks holiday as a contiguous block, and during that time, their access to the company was removed, so no email access, no remote login, keycard access to the office removed etc. They basically ran the 'suspend this person from the organisation' script and res…
That is brilliant! In the US it isn't that unusual to find companies that don't even offer 2 weeks vacation in total though.
Come on. Outside of the lowest-level hourly positions, you're not going to find any US company that doesn't offer at least two weeks vacation.
Re: On Being Indispensable
#190In 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…
> loyalty between employer and employee is long in rear window
"between"?
Loyalty towards employees almost never existed in some societies.