Make Yourself Replaceable In Your Job

To succeed in your career you need to make sure that you are replaceable. Why? To be able to climb the corporate ladder.

I read a very interesting about your irreplaceableness in the work environment: Where Is the Place for Irreplaceableness in the Work Environment? It got me thinking about an anecdote I had been given a few months ago on why you want to be replaceable. I should say that it was originally a story attempting to convince a group of software developers that it is a good idea to write easily maintainable code, but it fits very nicely into this context.

There was a software team working on a very advanced product. Over the years, supporting it was becoming more and more difficult. A second team was added overseas to aid in the support. The first team balked! They made the code base more and more obscure to make themselves irreplaceable. The new team wasn’t able to work on it as easily, and the first team felt they had created job security. This tactic turned out to be a bad thing…

As the second team worked on other tasks, the first team was the only team that was able to support the application -exactly as planned. Over time the situation became such that only members of the original team were able to work on the code base, and none of the work could be done by any outsider.

As the original product became dated, it became time to work on a new version. Which team do you think worked on the new version? Yep, the second team. The first team was too busy supporting the first product. As the original product was phased out, so was the original team. Had they made the code more maintainable for the new team, they would have been put on the more exciting new development as they were originally the prime team.

Their plan for job security had backfired.

Now for those in the software industry this is a clear reason why you should always write maintainable code. For others, this is a clear reason why you should make sure that other people are able to do your job functions.

There are several benefits to this, the main being that you have not created your own plateau. If you are the only one who can perform your task, it will be hard to move to other roles when yours becomes stagnant. It makes it very hard to be promoted or even to get vacation approved. You want to make sure that many other people in the organization can perform your role. This will allow you to easily move on to other more exciting roles, or better yet promoted.

Tags: Career, Career Advancement, Career Plateau, replaceable