An old hacker's tips on staying employed
The personal brand thing is interesting. I feel like I&#x27;ve had plenty of job security, and I&#x27;ve been through company downsizing, but the layoffs never got big enough to be any threat to me. But I was an Army officer before I got into engineering, and it&#x27;s obviously a different culture for a very good reason, but due to the fact that the mission is bigger than any person and the organization needs to operate and succeed in environments where all individuals can be killed at any moment, it was always drilled into us to be constantly training your replacement. Make sure you are never the only person who knows what you know or can do what you can do. I&#x27;ve taken that mindset with me and continue to meticulously document everything I do and constantly train others, so that I certainly hope no organization ever fears losing me will drive them out of business, though I don&#x27;t think they want to lose me, either<p>I had a very notable team member at my last employer who was an exact picture of everything opposite to that. He was a complete rock star, always the person called in to put out any fire, always being moved around and temporarily assigned to augment whatever team was having the most trouble. He&#x27;d been there longer than anyone else and personally built out a whole lot of bespoke automation tooling with no peer review, no documentation, and no one else really understood it. That specific program really might go under and the company would lose an enormous contract if he ever left.<p>But is that really a good thing? The only reason they&#x27;re in that situation is because of the way he works in the first place, combined with outdated processes where the management and senior technical leadership is so narrowly blindered by their focus on user-facing features that they have no awareness of what is happening in the realm of platform and developer automation tooling and how reliant on it they are.<p>This is a conflict between individual and organizational rationality. And I don&#x27;t expect individuals to solve it or blame them for being individually rational at the expense of organizations. By all means, keep up the hustle and do what is best for you and your family. But man, there has to be a better way to accomplish collective action.