Posted on 10/05/2023 7:25:22 AM PDT by ShadowAce
“But there’s another kind of irreplaceable employee — those who hoard information and techniques so that getting rid of them is impractical. Take all steps necessary to make these irreplaceable employees replaceable. Then, as soon as you can, replace them with the desirable sort of irreplaceable employee.”
Many managers and “efficiency experts” have tried this with me to no avail. It’s not that I am “hoarding” things, its that even if they ask me to train other people and teach them, they can never find anyone who is actually capable of absorbing all the things that I could teach. So it doesn’t work. Maybe if they hired five employees for me to train, they could each grasp 20% of my specialized knowledge, but so far they haven’t hit on that strategy.
“My experience is that many Managers are very afraid of excellent workers. They don’t understand them. They don’t know how to talk with them. They don’t know how to manage them. A lot of Managers try to get rid of excellent workers.”
Been in tech for 3 decades, and I have mixed view on this.
I would say, that your experience may be your managers were not very technical deep themselves. IN tech, there are ton of people who’s egos far exceed their abilities. Usually they are bigger fish in smaller ponds, who think there poop doesn’t smell. Someone without the personal technical experience depth, cant always distinguish who’s good, and who’s good at appearing to be good.
Been hacking code for about 4 decades now myself, done every position/job/role you can imagine in that time.. Now I find myself managing more often than anything else, and I can say I have no fear of the “excellent” worker. I will say however, that often times when I speak with other managers and observe their teams, they don’t really recognize who the real stars on their teams are.
The “hero” guy, may be a good resource, but he isn’t always an “excellent” worker. Sure they show up when things go nuts and play hero, but they can, and often are, the guy who runs roughshod over the folks who would have done it right the first time so the fire never happened.
I’ve had good and bad managers, over my career. I have had horrible managers who were very technically deep, and I have hd great managers who werent. I’d say based on what you are saying is you have been dealing with mediocre managers with little technical depth if they are afraid of the “excellent” worker.
Also, 3 decades in the trenches makes you understand just how much of the tech industry is undiagnosed on the spectrum too..
IT is a pass/fail job. When they get done the only thing that matters is “Does it work and work well?”
Now people are being hired who can’t do this but they satisfy a checkbox for woke HR types.
The days of the typical coders understanding the hardware (other than very specific niches) are long gone.
Virtualization is great, as someone who used to have to deal with base iron and all the problems that it could introduce, modern frameworks and tooling etc are all great as well.... but I’ll be honest, I got more reward a few years back porting a telnet program to my Commodore 128, than I’ve gotten building anything commercially in a long time.
I'll take it one step further. Many managers are jealous of excellent workers because they outshine them and are better workers than they are. Then they treat them like crap and make them want to leave.
I was in that type of situation for over 6 years before I retired this past April. No one wanted me to leave, except for that person, and now they are stuck with personnel who don't step up to the plate like I did.
I'm not boasting in my own abilities mind you, I just go by what my other co-workers told me. I always try to keep a humble mindset about everything.
As I always tell myself, "Except for the grace of God go I."
“80% of the new ones refuse to follow direction, are super sensitive, and looking to job hop into a promotion somewhere else as soon as possible.”
The young ‘uns are tough.
The managers need to spend a lot more time explaining the “culture” to them—one baby step at a time.
“This is what we can do for you, but only if you do this for us. If that does not sound like something that is OK for you then you really need to leave now—so we can find a replacement who is on board.”
That way it is not personal—it is just a question of whether the new hire is willing to share the company goals for them.
Ideally HR would do that upfront but as we all know most HR is useless.
I've known a few women in IT that are were better looking than that woman, but then again, it was IT consulting, not regular grid-it-out IT. There was this one half-Japanese gal with, swear to God, had green hazel eyes. She is probably still devastatingly beautiful.
This article makes happy as I don’t work anymore.
I get to enjoy all these workplace concepts on Sundays watching football. Think salary caps, the salaries of the left tackle, CB, edge rusher. It’s how they go from irreplaceable to replaceable once they get the big money. It’s awesome! And to think these are gladiators I’m watching and this is Rome.
For those who gave up on the NFL because of the Kapernicks out there you’re now missing something. Kapernick can’t even get on a Jets practice squad. He’s outside lookin’ in.
Very often it's a flawed system, always underfunded, and deal with competing internal clients.
You keep upchanneling the need for more staff and better systems but every day you look around you and there's no one new and the systems only get more band-aids.
Smart people stay away. The green newbies who didn't know to stay away get smart quick and move on.
The employee looks in the mirror and realizes the same ignoramus who insists no one is irreplaceable, at the same time made several employees irreplaceable.
I watched small companies fold when just one person left. They were in support roles, some IT, mostly finance and contracts. They kept telling the owners about all the risks but the owners didn't want to listen.
The employee finally retired or had enough and walked away. They offered to train any replacements but no one wanted to walk in and pick up that headache for what the owners could or would pay. After three months of clients switching away due to non-performance, the company was done.
Even in large corporations, look at how many CEOs or prior owners were brought back to save the sinking company (like Steve Jobs at Apple).
The most irreplaceable employee at a company, that most executives don't realize until too late if they recognize it at all, is the employee willing to tell them the truth about bad decisions. Somewhere in a Human Resources file in Anheuser-Busch / InBev is an individual of sufficient corporate rank who knew it was not a smart move to hire the people who would think hiring transvestite Dylan Mulvaney was a good idea.
No one is irreplaceable? Just ask the former board of Project Veritas about how replaceable James O'Keefe was.
The movie 'Margin Call' has a perfect example of that in the character played by Stanley Tucci.
Right. You get yourself trained up to be replaced by an H-1B.
Maybe they recognize bad mgt and act appropriately. So you need an excuse to hire H-1B? LOL.
BTTT!!!
Pay more. Then you will get better employees.
Hasn’t happened yet, knock wood.
Besides in a few years, I’m gone anyway.
Such HorseshIt. Make the simple complicated and call it better.
Crab mentality is everywhere.
“If you have 1 or 2 people who are the only ones that know how to run a particular procedure, that is not good IT Management”
Neither is having 1 or 2 vendors who can provide a needed service. The Vidgo streaming service has been down since Friday due to some contract dispute with a vendor. Actually, it may be a kind of hostage situation. The vendor seems to have them by the short and curlies and they won’t let go.
That should be a crucial part of any “Build vs Buy” analysis, how much leverage the vendor would have over the company.
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