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Jonathan Irvin
Jonathan Irvin

Posted on • Updated on

It's OK To Be Replaceable

You might come across some articles on the web about how you should be "irreplaceable" to your team. We tend to put ourselves in positions where we are the only one who can do X, Y, or Z. The whole operation comes crashing down without us.

I'm here to tell you that is a big ol' lie.

The truth is this: your employer can drop you at the blink of an eye. Obviously, no one wants to lose their job and I'm not talking about the loss of gainful employment here. What I am talking about is being in a position where your team can pick up where you left off.

Silos happen purely out of convenience and herein lies the situation. Management tends to "stick with what works" and put the best people on the tasks that would be best suited for them. What people don't realize is you can gain more dividends by putting someone else on the task that would get you 85% of the way there and let the person who you would normally assign the task to provide some feedback. Now you have two people who can do the task.

So, what if you've dug yourself into the trench of reliability? Well, guess what? You're probably inundated with emails, IMs, meetings, Slack messages, PagerDuty ... the list goes on. Those are obviously plentiful, but what isn't is your mental health or your freedom to take PTO.

The answer? Knowledge management.

Write documentation, record videos, loop people in on what you know. Explain. Educate. Powerpoint. If you're the Primary on something, tag someone to be your padawan and show them the ways of the Force. You get the idea. Stop holding the cards close to your chest.

Trust me. You're valuable with what you already know. Sharing doesn't make you any less valuable or put you at any more risk of getting canned. If you're at risk of getting canned, I guarantee it wasn't this article and you likely deserve better employment anyway.

Think about it. We would never have the beautiful works of art from famous painters and sculptors if they never expressed what they know. The same applies to technology. Just because you know something and the other teammate doesn't, means that you have to be available more to do the same task.

Delegate. Educate. Disseminate.

Top comments (2)

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xtofl profile image
xtofl

Cheers to that!

I have felt irreplaceable, been the go-to person for any problem that smelled like my domain, and it wasn't fun. It made me change jobs.

I now feel a duty to be replaceable. I feel terrible when no-one has reviewed my code, or only shallowly so; I want it to be owned by my employer, not by myself.

I truly hate it when a 'team-member' protects their code, or goes on and on as a lone wolf, for the maintenance that work is for certain going to end up in our laps someday and it won't have been designed for that.

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sublimegeek profile image
Jonathan Irvin

Yes, so much this. I don't want to be a bottleneck for anyone. I don't mind braindumping into a doc or recording a video spelling out everything because it's not fun getting pulled like taffy. It's stressful and conversely, it's such a relief if someone else can just cover for you if you need it.