[moksly]

I’m not sure why this is getting so much negative attention. I’ve been both in and around high level management in the Danish public sector for decades and I’ve never matched or sparred with another manager who would these sort of things.

No one, and I do mean no one, is irreplaceable. Maybe you’ll have to throw away an entire IT system because you’ve lost the know how to keep the business case for the system a net positive, but that means a lot less to an organisation (especially enterprise) that we tend to fool ourselves into believing myself included.

[refurb]

I’m guessing Denmark and the public sector is very different than other countries and industries.

When a key contributor asks for a 20% raise (or say $50,000 more per year) and them leaving put millions of dollars of revenue at risk, or more importantly, reflects poorly on a manager and threatens their advancement (why can’t you keep your team happy?) then the math is actually quite simple.

But in a highly siloed and compartmentalized organization where blame for bad decisions never filters down to the ones making them I could see your point.

[onion2k]

them leaving put millions of dollars of revenue at risk

Every team should fight against this. Writing simple, understandable, documented code that doesn't need some key person to maintain it is a very good thing. For a start, failing to do that locks people in to their job. Not being able to move on, and up, is a very bad thing. Secondly, people leave for reasons other than money. What if someone's husband gets a cool job in another state and they move for that? No amount of money would keep them, so you still lose those millions. Thirdly, there's the bus factor - what if that person is run over by a bus? How do you keep going?

Paying someone more and more to keep them is only patching the underlying problem that your team isn't resilient enough to catastrophic change. Fix that problem.

[refurb]

I’d question how good your people are if the best of them leaving wouldn’t impact your revenue. It sounds like an assembly line punching widgets, so maybe the work is neither urgent nor requiring dynamic thinking and responding quickly to changing market conditions? In that case I could see it not mattering if someone leaves.

My experience is on teams of 2-3 working towards a product launch that has to happen in 6 months and sure we can always replace someone if they die. The cost of that if not in revenue, but team efficiency, sacrifice of other work, is way more than a few tens of thousands per year.

And of course, everyone is replaceable. But replacing them may cost more than just paying them more, even if it keeps them around for another 6 months.

[moksly]

You have to look at it from a bigger perspective. From your and my perspective changing jobs is a big deal, it only happens a few time in our lives and it has a massive impact. The management perspective is quite different, you’ll get to not only hire but also interview hundreds of not thousands in your career.

If you’re a good manager you’ll want to keep your employees for 5-7 years. This is because you want to help your employees develop their talents and grow their career, and when you do that, they’ll eventually outgrow the role you hired them to do and how far it was possibly to extend it to accommodate their growth. By that point, you kind of want your employees to move on. Maybe to a new position within your own organisation or to a different place. It’s not because you don’t like them or don’t want them to stay, but it’s because good employees tend to outgrow you. A select few people can stay in the same functions their entire lives and never lose enjoyment or motivation, but most of us aren’t like that and you have to keep that in mind when it comes to “pay me more, or I’m leaving” negotiating.

More than that though, you have to see how relying too much on individual employees is actually what is the management mistake in these type of situations. The issue isn’t “why couldn’t you keep x”, it’s “why did you let x become irreplaceable” because any good manager should know better.

Maybe the public sector in Denmark is different than other places, maybe not. I don’t think that it is. What typically happens when you have IT systems that rely too much on an employee is that they leave you and then you end up paying them a lot more money to consult for 6 months until someone else has redesigned the systems to no longer be too dependent on a single person and your former employee finally gets to really move on.

[steerablesafe]

> Maybe you’ll have to throw away an entire IT system because you’ve lost the know how to keep the business case for the system a net positive, but that means a lot less to an organisation (especially enterprise) that we tend to fool ourselves into believing myself included.

You are comparing throwing away an entire IT system to increasing the salary of _one_ employee.

[moksly]

Well not exactly. You have to look at it from an organisational perspective, and not from an employee perspective.

If you have systems (and that is any function, also cutting onions in the kitchen) that relies so heavily on one employee that you can not continue to operate them without that person then you have a serious issue.

Because you don’t retain employees, and your goal isn’t to keep them forever either. Even if they are happy and stay for 40 years they will eventually retire and then the system tend to break down anyway, and that’s with planned departure. What if your vital employee gets run over by a truck on the way to work?

So from an organisational perspective, it’s not an entire IT system vs one employee. It’s removing a flawed and dangerous system from your organisation.

Some people will argue that employees who design such systems aren’t worth keeping to begin with. I would agree, if the world was perfect, but it’s not.