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.
BTTT!!!
+1 (informative)