<story><title>Always Be Quitting</title><url>https://jmmv.dev/2021/04/always-be-quitting.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>booleandilemma</author><text>&lt;i&gt;Paradoxically, by being disposable, you free yourself.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;No, you just make yourself disposable.&lt;p&gt;War is peace.
Freedom is slavery.
Ignorance is strength.&lt;p&gt;Don’t listen to this article. It sounds like something overseers would tell their underlings.&lt;p&gt;And when you’re quitting, that’s the company’s problem, not yours.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>wyqydsyq</author><text>&amp;gt; No, you just make yourself disposable.&lt;p&gt;You might be making yourself disposable specifically in the context of your original role which you are basically making redundant by documenting and automating everything - but trust me any sensible business will want to keep a staff member who massively improved their team&amp;#x27;s productivity (by enabling them to be more independent with less silo&amp;#x27;d knowledge) and reduced the business&amp;#x27; risk exposure (by making potentially critical knowledge more accessible and reducing single points of failure).&lt;p&gt;Employees who try to become indesposable by turning themselves into a mega-silo of knowledge that nobody else in the org has might gain some job security in the short term but they lose out on any potential job progression.&lt;p&gt;Turning yourself into a silo like this is practically blackmailing your employer into keeping you. They might keep you employed because they need to keep their systems online, but they will also not think twice about replacing you as soon as an opportunity is presented. That is making yourself disposable.&lt;p&gt;Turning yourself into a leader who improves the outcomes of various teams in a business will not only make you indespensable, it&amp;#x27;s genuinely the best (if not the &lt;i&gt;only&lt;/i&gt; realistic) path for an engineer to work their way up into more senior or C-suite positions.</text></comment>
<story><title>Always Be Quitting</title><url>https://jmmv.dev/2021/04/always-be-quitting.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>booleandilemma</author><text>&lt;i&gt;Paradoxically, by being disposable, you free yourself.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;No, you just make yourself disposable.&lt;p&gt;War is peace.
Freedom is slavery.
Ignorance is strength.&lt;p&gt;Don’t listen to this article. It sounds like something overseers would tell their underlings.&lt;p&gt;And when you’re quitting, that’s the company’s problem, not yours.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>readonthegoapp</author><text>I had a pretty strong visceral reaction to this article.&lt;p&gt;prob because i just read about the 1%ers avoiding paying taxes, and a thousand other much-more-horrific things, only to see the top post on HN advocating for workers to make themselves even more dispensable that they&amp;#x2F;we already are -- and i don&amp;#x27;t think it was meant as a joke. :-D&lt;p&gt;i&amp;#x27;ve always done the &amp;#x27;obsolete yourself&amp;#x27; routine, and still do&amp;#x2F;am -- part of it was&amp;#x2F;is always self-interest (not advancement, but getting freed from having to do stupid shit), but part of it was&amp;#x2F;is &amp;#x27;just doing the right thing by the company&amp;#x27; and thereby hopefully being part of a successful operation which, if you&amp;#x27;re not doing anything too evil, would allow me to take some pride in it.&lt;p&gt;but i know that many of my improvements to products&amp;#x2F;documentation&amp;#x2F;training&amp;#x2F;etc. only help offshore myself _and_ all my co-workers, especially those of us in the US and other expensive places (and we don&amp;#x27;t even get health insurance).&lt;p&gt;if i was part of some type of co-op, all that would be taken care of.&lt;p&gt;one can dream!</text></comment>