| >trust me any sensible business will want to keep a staff member who massively improved their team's productivity Whether sensible or not a lot of companies do not do this. It is difficult to measure productivity increases at the best of times. Increasing your teams productivity doubly so. Increasing their productivity may even be net negative for you as it makes them look more effective compared to you. This may be counterproductive for the company in question and seem idiotic but that doesn't stop it from being common. It's common precisely because it's a template for how most workers are treated. If you see programmers as individual resources not markedly different to Uber drivers (and SO many do) this way of thinking is completely natural. >Turning yourself into a silo like this is practically blackmailing your employer into keeping you. They might keep you employed because they need to keep their systems online, but they will also not think twice about replacing you as soon as an opportunity is presented. Right. But how else do you deal with a company that demonstrates repeatedly that they wouldn't think twice about replacing you no matter what? Starting from that assumption along with the restriction that you cannot easily hop jobs - what else are you supposed to do? Plenty of tech is egalitarian and productive and not like this, but a larger unfashionable un-talked about underbelly of the industry most certainly is. The bimodal salary distribution also comes attached to bimodal working conditions. |