[49531]

> 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.

All employer / employee relationships have this dynamic. I get paid _n_ because my employer cannot figure out an effective way to do it cheaper, but as soon as they can I will no longer be paid _n_. While I think blackmail isn't an accurate description of this, what you're describing exists in all employment situations. Making yourself more disposable is only going to give the employer more power, which might work out better or worse depending on the employer.

[wyqydsyq]

> All employer / employee relationships have this dynamic

Wrong, no employer relies on a newly hired employee the way they rely on a senior knowledge silo'd engineer with a decade+ of domain knowledge which they are reluctant to share. In most jobs the employee is not in a position to have that kind of bargaining leverage. That leverage is only gained by an employee either intentionally and maliciously making the codebase as esoteric and unmaintainable as possible, or poor management not planning for these risks sufficiently e.g. not hiring more staff for a legacy COBOL system team as it's members leave until there's only one guy left who understands it.

> While I think blackmail isn't an accurate description of this

I'd argue it is. You know their business depends on you as a result of you actively working to make it depend on you, you use that knowledge to leverage your position in bargaining for higher pay or to never get fired from a low-effort "cruiser" job. Essentially blackmailing the business into continuing your employment under threat of losses caused by you leaving and nobody else being able to maintain the mess you created. This is not a normal employer / employee relationship dynamic at all.

[DataGata]

People that play zero sum games only get to play with other zero sum players. There is some risk they will lose. People that play win-win games get to play with other winners (and be winners).

Be a winner.

[49531]

I hate to break it to you, but every economic scenario is a zero-sum game. In order for an economy to work you have to have a relatively fixed amount of resources.

This whole win-win ideology is mostly a tool to erase where the losers are, and to make losers feel better about losing. Every increase in my paycheck is a decrease in someone else's.

[rthomas6]

If that was even remotely true, we would still be sitting in caves sharing raw animal scraps. Fortunately it's not true, and things like discovering fire and inventing tools don't take resources away from others, but instead increase resources for everyone. This is just as true in the modern economy.

Obviously the inventor of fire got more of a reward from his invention's bounty, but everyone still benefited. Similarly whoever automates your job gets most of the reward, but ideally we all benefit through cheaper products.

At least, that's how it's supposed to work. Obviously it doesn't always.