> Leadership made it clear that they saw me as critical to the company’s future, not just because of what I had delivered in the past, but to help shape what came next.
The more useful, though more crude, metric I use in my career is to estimate how replaceable or disposable I am.
This is extraordinarily hard to evaluate at first because we all tend to look at our little domains of the code and imagine how they’d collapse without us. You have to have some humility and some business sense to start recognizing how critical you and your inputs are to the company’s mission.
Nothing brings this in focus quite like being in a meeting where a company is forced to cut budgets and lay people off. I know that’s not helpful because most people won’t get to see that directly, but you can start to imagine how that looks if you do the thought exercise enough times. Imagine the company had to cut some percentage of headcount to avoid bankruptcy. Would you be cut at the 10% threshold? The 50% threshold? 80%? I guarantee your first estimates are going to be too optimistic, but it’s a helpful thought exercise.
From the mentorship side, I frequently see people confuse being good at their job with being irreplaceable. When push comes to shove, a lot of companies can cut deeply, hire some entry-level people to put out fires, and coast for a year or two until budgets are good again. This leads to a lot of great but generic front-end, mobile app, devops, or other generic positions getting cut. The company will suffer a bit, but rarely does complete collapse occur (despite what we like to imagine).
On the other hand, there are roles where companies cannot cut without immediate and long lasting pain. Cutting lead developers of core products or kicking out the sales team isn’t an option. It’s always the people working on generic problems, side quests, pet projects, or acting as clean up crews for the main teams who are normally too valuable to put on the generic work who get cut.
It’s possible for work to be valuable but also be eminently replaceable, offshore-able, or be a top candidate for being paused or cancelled when the budgets suddenly get tight.
Yeah the company needs a website and needs front-end developers for it, but does it need to be you? Or even in-house at all?
The more useful, though more crude, metric I use in my career is to estimate how replaceable or disposable I am.
This is extraordinarily hard to evaluate at first because we all tend to look at our little domains of the code and imagine how they’d collapse without us. You have to have some humility and some business sense to start recognizing how critical you and your inputs are to the company’s mission.
Nothing brings this in focus quite like being in a meeting where a company is forced to cut budgets and lay people off. I know that’s not helpful because most people won’t get to see that directly, but you can start to imagine how that looks if you do the thought exercise enough times. Imagine the company had to cut some percentage of headcount to avoid bankruptcy. Would you be cut at the 10% threshold? The 50% threshold? 80%? I guarantee your first estimates are going to be too optimistic, but it’s a helpful thought exercise.
From the mentorship side, I frequently see people confuse being good at their job with being irreplaceable. When push comes to shove, a lot of companies can cut deeply, hire some entry-level people to put out fires, and coast for a year or two until budgets are good again. This leads to a lot of great but generic front-end, mobile app, devops, or other generic positions getting cut. The company will suffer a bit, but rarely does complete collapse occur (despite what we like to imagine).
On the other hand, there are roles where companies cannot cut without immediate and long lasting pain. Cutting lead developers of core products or kicking out the sales team isn’t an option. It’s always the people working on generic problems, side quests, pet projects, or acting as clean up crews for the main teams who are normally too valuable to put on the generic work who get cut.
It’s possible for work to be valuable but also be eminently replaceable, offshore-able, or be a top candidate for being paused or cancelled when the budgets suddenly get tight.
Yeah the company needs a website and needs front-end developers for it, but does it need to be you? Or even in-house at all?