How to be dispensable, and why you should document and automate yourself out of a job

Posted on September 25th, 2010 by Sacha Chua

My out-of-office message links to wikis where people can get self-service information, and backup contacts in case people have other questions. I’ve helped the three teams I’m working with learn more about using the Idea Lab tools I built. I can take my two-week vacation without worrying that projects will be delayed. Heck, I can get hit by a bus and things will still be okay at work. (Although I’ll try not to be hit by a bus.)

Making myself dispensable is paying off.

It’s good to make yourself dispensable. It’s even better when you don’t have to do the mad scramble for documents and tools the week before you leave. I’ve been documenting and automating my work from the beginning.

In a recent presentation to a defense client, I talked about how to develop the habit of sharing. During the discussion, one of the participants asked how that related to job security.

I mentioned a good book on how to be indispensable: Linchpin, by Seth Godin.

But it’s much better to be dispensable and invaluable. Indispensable people are a big risk. Whether they’re indispensable for good reasons (always knows the right thing to do) or bad reasons (hoards knowledge so that no one else can solve that problem), they can derail your project or your organization. People become dependent on them. And then when something happens—vacation, lottery, promotion, sickness, death—the team stumbles. Something always happens.

On the other hand, invaluable people help their teams grow along with them. They make themselves obsolete by coaching successors, delegating tasks to help people learn. They eliminate waste and automate processes to save time. They share what they know. They teach themselves out of a job. The interesting thing that happens to invaluable people is that in the process of spreading their capabilities to the team, they create new opportunities. They get rid of part of their job so that they can take on new challenges. Indispensable people can’t be promoted without disruption. Invaluable people can be promoted, and everyone grows underneath them.

You might be harder to fire if you’re the only one who knows the secret recipe, but wouldn’t you rather be the person people want to work with because you can solve new challenges? The first might save you during a round of layoffs, but the second will help you grow no matter where you are.

So, how can you be dispensable and invaluable?

Document with your successor in mind. Write instructions. Organize resources. Make it easy to turn your projects over so that you can take an even better opportunity if it comes along. Document, document, document. Push the knowledge out so that you’re not the only expert. This will help you and your team work more effectively, and it will reduce the work too.

Automate, automate, automate. If you can automate the repetitive or error-prone parts of your work, you’ll rock, and you’ll help your team rock too. If you don’t know how to program, you might consider learning how to – whether it’s Microsoft Excel wizardry or Perl geekery. Save time. Cut out the boring parts. Make your work easier.

If you do this well, you will work yourself out of at least the bottom 10% of your job each year… and you’ll open up at least 20% in productivity and new opportunities–not to mention the multiplying effect that you’ll have on your team and your organization.

Be dispensable. Be invaluable. Make stuff happen.

Cate Huston has a great post about this, too. Check hers out!

More posts about: career, highlight, tips, work // 7 Comments »

Short URL: http://sachachua.com/blog/p/16429

Pingback: Week ending September 26, 2010 » sacha chua :: living an awesome life
http://www.trajano.net/ Archimedes Trajano

Good to see someone else with the same opinion as me on this. It feels like watching Sheldon in Big Bang Theory. :D

Automation is good for the most part, but I find that keeping the automation to myself but having the step by steps documented with standardized tools is better. The problem with automation is the difficulty in setting up the same environment on your successors (though you can document how to set things up). There is also a good chance that maintenance of the automation would fall back on you rather than your successors who would usually be using it, rather than touching the implementation.

To get around this, you should have a richer standard toolset. When I try to set up development environments that are Eclipse based, I try to put in as much as possible into the version control, including the IDE and the plugins I would use.

I would also configure project level Java settings such as organize imports, code cleanup on save. This saves me a great deal of problems when looking at other people’s code because on save the code is formatted with the same consistency as everything else.

I also have plugins for checkstyle, findbugs (just REdiscovered this, for future stuff ), EclEmma for code coverage.

In the end all the developers setup guide would be how to install version control, install the “non-free” stuff, and run a batch file to start up the command line with the environment already set.

If you have your development team in that set up, you can easily deploy automation because the tools are generally inside your version control system already so no additional setup hopefully.
http://sachachua.com Sacha Chua

Ah! Have you considered creating a virtual image with everything set up? That might be the next step. We’ve used this approach with success. =)
http://www.trajano.net/ Archimedes Trajano

I have, then we have this thing called Windows Licensing Issues. However, it is a good idea if your developers can use all FOSS for their development. Remember, not every customer is willing to pay for that extra software.
http://sprdnn.blogspot.com/ Jean-Baptiste Carré

Hi Sacha,

Thanks for this interesting note! It influenced my thoughts and I’m changing my work as a consequence. My answer to your post: http://sprdnn.blogspot.com/2010/09/being-dispensable.html

Best!
jimmzy

This is truly dumb. In a world where corporations marginalize employees, hastening marginalization just doesn’t make sense. I agree that knowledge-sharing and documentation is good, but taken to far it can be your own undoing and loss of job.
- http://sachachua.com Sacha Chua
  
  It’s been working out well for me so far. The skills and network I’ve built by sharing as much as possible have led to all sorts of opportunities! =)

On This Day...

2012: Weekly review: Week ending September 21, 2012 — My family decided to go on a roadtrip to Disneyland in Anaheim, so off we went! Two days going there [...]
2011: Weekly review: Week ending September 23, 2011 — Drupal geeking at work, and a little bit of prep for an upcoming Rails project (which got approved, yay!), plus [...]
2009: Loyalty and love at work — Another post taking off from the Smart Work Jam: One of the participants wondered what I’d say about loyalty. I [...]
2009: Swarming talent and manpower outsourcing — One of the posts from the Smart Work Jam about the future of team work was about the idea of [...]
2009: Thinking about the Smart Work Jam — The Smart Work Jam discussions will be available until October 3. I’m strongly tempted to figure out how to slurp [...]
2008: Cat’s doing better; school barbecue — I didn’t feel well this morning either, so I stayed home with the cat. W- took care of both of [...]
2007: Library run — We exercised by running to the library. Running with a full backpack of books turned out to be interesting—and tiring! It [...]
2007: ARGH, Second Life scripting is driving me nuts — There *must* be a clear way to use XML-RPC to interact with a Rails app… *sigh!* Random Emacs symbol: easy-menu-add-item – [...]
2005: On booth babes and sex in technology — Jon_prez reacts to my comments on Microsoft booth babes and open source posters: Be fair to Microsoft… those booth babes are [...]
2005: Wiki for rolemodels — I’ve decided to put up a wiki to list my role models. =) It’s at http://sacha.free.net.ph/rolemodels/ . Still incomplete. There are so [...]
2005: Looking for role models: Marissa Mayer — Tell me who you love, and I’ll tell you who you are. – Creole proverb and many other variants Role models [...]
2005: Stranger and stranger — More from Jon_P: To infer from what I read on one of the now-absent pages in the SpecOps website which had technical [...]
2005: Business speaker in the Philippines: Bob Martin, ex-CEO of Walmart — On Friday 7 October 2005, Mr. Bob Martin, retired President & CEO of the largest retail operation in the USA shares [...]
2003: Alphabet blocks — education, fixme — Next time, I should buy those large alphabet blocks. I can use them for a lot of examples: arrays, vectors, [...]
2003: Mario Carreon leaving UP Diliman — Mario Carreon is planning to transfer to UP Baguio to help his sister. I’ll miss exchanging ideas with him over dinner. [...]
2003: Computer Science Unplugged — education — Originally blogged on 2003.04.01 In the thread “CS for 5th graders” on the ACM SIGCSE members mailing list, Beth Simon writes: The [...]
2003: Wow, remember-to-planner-plan-page still works — It does my funky cross-referencing too…
2003: Kitten update — Cross-reference: KittenWhoMustNotBeNamed#2
2003: Python Emacs — I was going through my old wiki entries and I found a link to http://www.emacswiki.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?PyMacs on 2003.03.21. Cool.
2003: khaire magsaya! — music, lit — Can’t help but blog this – it’s just so cool. A pair of people – one singing a jazzy version of [...]
2003: gray clouds fight white clouds — gray clouds fight white clouds the sky as their battlefield — mountains playing chess
2003: More realizations — To support peer review and self evaluation, actually, I need a general way to do surveys and evaluations using pre-defined rubrics.
2003: Still having problems with MX — Apparently, it’s stalling on the Installshield Wizard. Do I have to subscribe to winex for this? Hmm…
2003: Radical simplification of design — I just realized that the whole point of the system I’m making is peer review. Not another submission system, but peer [...]
2003: Oops, have to continue working on CS21A — Put off CS215 while new ideas simmer on the back burner.
2003: Free online books — http://www.dhruvaraj.freeservers.com (UPDATE: 2004.01.22: Dhruvaraj S. says it’s now at http://www.dhruvaraj.com)
2003: zvon.org — http://www.zvon.org has a lot of XML, HTML and CSS references, although the site is a bit slow.
2003: du -h — linux — watch du -h is amazingly useful. It lets you easily monitor a large filesystem copy.
2003: More about Flash MX on Linux — Mounting the CD onto the other computer and sharing it over the network.
2003: More news about opencourseware — education — “MIT Everyware” Starting in September, people with the appropriate Internet connection will be able to access material from 500 MIT courses through the [...]
2003: “Britain’s “Cyborg Scientist” Spreads Cyber-gospel” — British cyber-evangelist Kevin Warwick is on a government-funded tour around Asia to promote robotics education at all grade levels. Warwick recently [...]
2003: Free shell accounts — http://www.grex.org/ No outbound connections (telnet/ssh/web), but JM says they’re very usable. Link from JM Ibanez. (Update 2003.09.30: JM says they offer web access [...]

sacha chua living an awesome life