Why I despise HR thinking....
The author of this article is definitely replaceable.
Having spent 38 years in the IT World, I say be careful about irreplaceable employees, one day they might not be there, and you IT Operations could be severely impacted.
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, especially if it’s not well documented so that everyone is aware of what needs to be done.
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.
If a “great employee” is subjected to bad processes, lousy managers, and/or mediocre teams.
They won’t be employees much longer. They’ll go elsewhere. The money won’t matter.
There are no IT workers who look like the woman (am I allowed to assume that?!) in the picture.
None.
This article was probably written by a chatbot seeking to buy AI more time to take over IT.
Even listed at #1 it should be even higher. This is currently going on in my group now. Team member knows quite a bit and is very technical and efficient. Rubs everyone the wrong way and is abrasive. I know no one likes them.
Not sure who wrote this, but EVERYONE IS REPLACEABLE, PERIOD, at least from a business perspective, and if they aren’t you have a major issue in your organization.
If you are setting up your org, so that everyone in it is irreplaceable, then you won’t be in business long.
Yes, some people are harder and more painful to replace than others, but if your organization cannot survive the loss of someone you are a poorly managed organization.
Maybe we asked mgt to train new people and to cross train experienced people in different areas AND THEY DONT LISTEN.
The part you posted of that article is excellent.
However I can tell you that we are having a very difficult time finding responsible new hires.
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.
Maybe the limited availability of good employees is leading to all these brats, but they are introducing a lot of instability into the overall IT picture with their attitudes alone.
“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.
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.
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.
One thing that rarely goes into calculations about employees is institutional knowledge.