[gsibble]

Oh, I've quit 3 companies where I was the CTO/lead engineer where they had to replace me with 5-10 people (backend and frontend devs, QA, devops, plus a manager or two, etc.) costing them enormous amounts of money.

Many times they've hired me as a consultant where I make 5-10x my hourly rate for several months after bringing the new hires up to speed.

Companies place very little emphasis on retention and retaining institutional knowledge. They don't seem to understand that employees who have worked at a company for years developing systems and architecture know where all of the secrets are.

[ok_computer]

Though it may cost more, spreading functional knowledge across a greater base of people would be more resilient. Even if a company needs to pay an individual 10x salary consulting for a year, it would be in their long term best interest to spread a fraction of that knowledge across a larger employee base and document what is tangible. There is a limit (different for different people) across which an individual cannot cognitively support an operation. With years more growth every person would eventually reach their personal limit or lose interest. It helps to have teams of people that are smart enough to work through new problems and document procedures, playbooks, current states and retrospective reports and rely on institutional processes to maintain a coherent operation. Sometimes money isn’t the singular factor at work.

[gsibble]

They went out of business from the added cost, so, didn't work for them.

[ryan_lane]

In most companies, it's good to let you leave, if they need 5-10 people to replace you. You take this as a point of pride, but I see folks like this as organizational bottlenecks.

When I leave an organization, my goal is for them to either directly replace me, or for them to not need to replace me at all. I do this by ensuring that I don't silo my work (by ensuring others are working with me, or under me), documenting everything I work on, and occasionally changing roles.

My specific goal is to help a company grow, not to make them depend on me.

[93po]

Nice of you to prioritize wealthy company owners over your own income.

[ryan_lane]

I'm prioritizing myself. My value isn't based on how dependent people are on me, it's based on how well I scale the company. They could fire me whenever they wanted and the business would continue running, but they don't want to fire me, because my value is high. My approach has landed me consistent promos, raises, and out of band stock grants.

If you think you're safe because the company is so dependent on you, you're misguided. You're the kind of folks that are actively targeted.

Ignoring money, I'm also prioritizing myself, because by removing myself as a dependency, I also make it possible to take vacations, and my stress levels are low.

[gsibble]

Yeah, my goal is to make a company as dependent upon me as possible in order to grow my income, not make it so I'm disposable.

[ryan_lane]

You think you're making yourself indispensable by making the company dependent on you, but you're doing the opposite. You're a bottleneck, and when companies are trying to become more efficient, you'll be top of the list to make disposable.

Growth is understanding that you become indispensable by removing yourself as a dependency, because you uplift everyone around you. At higher levels of seniority, this is what orgs actually care about.