On Being Indispensable
I joined a company on a short-term contract, &quot;for a month or two&quot;, to help out a friend and solve a few problems. Which became a four year engagement.<p>I became &quot;the go to guy&quot; for anything and everything related to a particular project, and the DevOps for that project, and eventually the DevOps+CI&#x2F;CD guy company wide. But I also had to work on an assigned project as Lead Programmer, but never got any other programmer assigned to work with me.<p>I shipped two company critical products by myself, front-end, iOS &amp; Android mobile app and backend infrastructure. I made significant contributions in the form of code to other teams, I ensured the company wide build-systems kept humming along and was 24&#x2F;7 on-call DevOps for two years straight with no backup. At one point I literally had five separate managers that I reported directly too that each had their own competing needs.<p>Every couple of months I had a conversation with a higher up, and every couple of months I was told &quot;there&#x27;s no budget, it&#x27;s difficult to hire, you do it so well, and we don&#x27;t trust anybody else to do it, and nobody else wants to do it.&quot;<p>There was no promotion, no prospect of advancing, didn&#x27;t receive a single pay increase in four years, &quot;but you&#x27;re so well paid already, there&#x27;s just not the budget for that this year, we see you as more of a cost center than a profit center.&quot; And every time I was ready to quit, a few &quot;friends&quot; at the company talked me down off the ledge, who I later learned were being prompted to do that by upper management. It was a classic abusive relationship. I realize that now. And I fell for it.<p>When I started to have issues with shipping a product as both the Lead Programmer (mobile apps, fron-end, admin interface, backend infrastructure and API) and also be project manager and interface directly with a demanding client, including doing on-call 24&#x2F;7 DevOps with no backup, and wrangling the company-wide CI&#x2F;CD system, the project I was building, that should have been a five person team in reality, I was assigned a &quot;tough manager&quot; to set me straight and get me back on track. This was literally the conversation I had when the manager sat me down in a conference room, &quot;I&#x27;m here to make sure you do what you need. I&#x27;m giving you some tough love. And I&#x27;m going to ride your arse until I see improvement.&quot; Now this manager was not the project manager, he was specifically assigned to manage my output, and after a month he went back to the execs and said &quot;Justin isn&#x27;t the problem.&quot;<p>This manager put up signs at the end of the cubicle row that said &quot;If you need to speak with Justin, talk to X first.&quot; And people would ignore the posted signs, ignore that I had headphones on, and still interrupt me, and then my Manager and whoever was interrupting would get into an argument, right at my desk, over how urgent their request was. I eventually got moved out of that area to a &quot;quieter area&quot; near the IT guy, which unfortunately meant then people would come by his desk and have loud conversations about an IT issue, and when the IT guy wasn&#x27;t around, would interrupt me to ask if I knew about how to solve problem X on their computer.<p>When the stress is so bad, and I have an outburst where I am screaming at my tech director to go fuck himself in the middle of the hallway, and they still won&#x27;t fire me, an outburst I am not proud of and would never ordinarily do (I&#x27;m kind of a Mr Rogers &amp; Ted Lasso until you hit the wrong button), you kind of get the idea of how indispensable they viewed my position. The outburst was over five people having a meeting directly at my desk, that didn&#x27;t actually involve me, that was very loud and racous, and when I repeatedly and politely asked them to move their meeting elsewhere I was informed that I need to be more understanding and empathetic towards people&#x27;s needs.<p>Coronavirus came along, everbody gets to WFH, which gives me breathing room to think, I start looking for a new position, the company hits a financial tough spot and decides they can do without me, which is like a great weight that lifted from my shoulders. I took three months off and built a few side-projects and was so much more productive than I had ever been in the past four years. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.linkedin.com&#x2F;pulse&#x2F;three-months-side-projects-justin-lloyd&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.linkedin.com&#x2F;pulse&#x2F;three-months-side-projects-ju...</a><p>I was still getting messages and urgent emails from people at the company four to six months later, on an almost daily basis regarding the DevOps and CI&#x2F;CD pipeline. Everything had been documented, nobody wanted to read, it was easier to send me an email even though I no longer worked at the company.<p>I used to love being &quot;the go to guy&quot; but I&#x27;ve since learned, &quot;don&#x27;t ever be indispensable.&quot;<p>Unfortunately, history repeated itself at the following company, and is starting to repeat again. Maybe I&#x27;m the problem.