251–260 of 296 posts
This is called learning how to delegate. It's great that the author discovered it.
An alternative tactic people follow when they still like to know the details is to apply "strategic incompetence": https://www.google.com/search?q=strategic+incompetence
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Maybe... but not all companies offer sabbaticals / extended leaves of absence with a way to come back.
No but if they don't then OP should have just put in for a long vacation to make themselves dispensable again.
Long story short, it's impossible to take a long vacation while working for many companies.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In my experience companies offer may offer sabbaticals, HR may promote them, the documentation may be shiny; but it is career suicide for anoyone who hasnt already made it to the top.
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.
Anyway, at my company (F500), if you take over 30 days unpaid, you need to reapply for your job.
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…
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…
I've been there a lot, not on purpose but in some organisations it's either that you get your hands dirty or you spend 10x as much time watching the buck being passed. It's definitely one of those things as a developer where you need to learn some management skills or end up burned out of the job.
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If you are indispensable, then surely you have quite a leverage.
No. Scenario: There is a project your boss is wholly responsible for. You, from a technical perspective, are absolutely indispensable to the success of said project. Maybe it's a small team, or everyone is overloaded, but you can draw a direct line between you quitting (or doing a bad job) and your boss getting called out or potentially fired. Your boss, however, is not indispensable to their boss, nor is this projec…
However instead of getting angry I get that I may be important to direct boss or one level above. But as far as company goes they are all in cloud, next generation and what not. So my criticality is inconsequential in larger context.
The neediness of Sales folks is relatable. I worked at a company where Sales thought "@channel" was a person they should ping as often as possible. And no amount of documentation solves this because documentation is useless if it can't present itself at the time of need. Because rest assured, no once (including me) can find anything using the horrible Confluence search.
> 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…
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]
The neediness of Sales folks is relatable. I worked at a company where Sales thought "@channel" was a person they should ping as often as possible. And no amount of documentation solves this because documentation is useless if it can't present itself at the time of need. Because rest assured, no once (including me) can find anything using the horrible Confluence search.
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 became "the go to guy" for anything and everything related to a particular project, and the DevOps for that project, and eventually the DevOps+CI/CD guy company wide. But I also had to work on an assigned project as Lead Programmer, but never got any other programmer assigned to work with me.
I shipped two company critical products by myself, front-end, iOS & Android mobile app and backend infrastructure. I made significant contributions in the form of code to other teams, I ensured the company wide build-systems kept humming along and was 24/7 on-call DevOps for two years straight with no backup. At one point I literally had five separate managers that I reported directly too that each had their own competing needs.
Every couple of months I had a conversation with a higher up, and every couple of months I was told "there's no budget, it's difficult to hire, you do it so well, and we don't trust anybody else to do it, and nobody else wants to do it."
There was no promotion, no prospect of advancing, didn't receive a single pay increase in four years, "but you're so well paid already, there's just not the budget for that this year, we see you as more of a cost center than a profit center." And every time I was ready to quit, a few "friends" at the company talked me down off the ledge, who I later learned were being prompted to do that by upper management. It was a classic abusive relationship. I realize that now. And I fell for it.
When I started to have issues with shipping a product as both the Lead Programmer (mobile apps, fron-end, admin interface, backend infrastructure and API) and also be project manager and interface directly with a demanding client, including doing on-call 24/7 DevOps with no backup, and wrangling the company-wide CI/CD system, the project I was building, that should have been a five person team in reality, I was assigned a "tough manager" to set me straight and get me back on track. This was literally the conversation I had when the manager sat me down in a conference room, "I'm here to make sure you do what you need. I'm giving you some tough love. And I'm going to ride your arse until I see improvement." Now this manager was not the project manager, he was specifically assigned to manage my output, and after a month he went back to the execs and said "Justin isn't the problem."
This manager put up signs at the end of the cubicle row that said "If you need to speak with Justin, talk to X first." And people would ignore the posted signs, ignore that I had headphones on, and still interrupt me, and then my Manager and whoever was interrupting would get into an argument, right at my desk, over how urgent their request was. I eventually got moved out of that area to a "quieter area" near the IT guy, which unfortunately meant then people would come by his desk and have loud conversations about an IT issue, and when the IT guy wasn't around, would interrupt me to ask if I knew about how to solve problem X on their computer.
When the stress is so bad, and I have an outburst where I am screaming at my tech director to go fuck himself in the middle of the hallway, and they still won't fire me, an outburst I am not proud of and would never ordinarily do (I'm kind of a Mr Rogers & Ted Lasso until you hit the wrong button), you kind of get the idea of how indispensable they viewed my position. The outburst was over five people having a meeting directly at my desk, that didn't actually involve me, that was very loud and racous, and when I repeatedly and politely asked them to move their meeting elsewhere I was informed that I need to be more understanding and empathetic towards people's needs.
Coronavirus came along, everbody gets to WFH, which gives me breathing room to think, I start looking for a new position, the company hits a financial tough spot and decides they can do without me, which is like a great weight that lifted from my shoulders. I took three months off and built a few side-projects and was so much more productive than I had ever been in the past four years. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/three-months-side-projects-ju...
I was still getting messages and urgent emails from people at the company four to six months later, on an almost daily basis regarding the DevOps and CI/CD pipeline. Everything had been documented, nobody wanted to read, it was easier to send me an email even though I no longer worked at the company.
I used to love being "the go to guy" but I've since learned, "don't ever be indispensable."
Unfortunately, history repeated itself at the following company, and is starting to repeat again. Maybe I'm the problem.
Earlier 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…
In that case, it's beneficial to the landlord to have some scam shop in because even if they're not being paid rent, the money they're saving from an occupied storefront easily outweighs every other alternative.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
For storefronts specifically, and depending on the country you're talking about, there's more likely than not an attempt to evade or avoid tax. For example, this is exactly why tourist attractions like Oxford Street in London are full of American Candy stores now. They'll be there for a few months and then be gone: the landlord saves on business rates because they'd found a tenant, and the actual company vanishes wit…