Everything I learned in 30 years at Microsoft Part IV

Of course you're replaceable

Back when I lived in a cave, wandering about with a club and my pet Sabertooth Doug, there was a woman who spent all day doing data entry. Eight hours a day, five days a week, clickety-clack, her fingers flew across the keys, updating the records, updating the records — the records ever needed updating.

Even back then I worried about her. Sure she’s an extreme case, but can you think of a job that hasn’t changed significantly in the past twenty years? Neither she, nor her replacement are doing that clickety-clack anymore.

Sometimes I thought I was irreplaceable. People would tell me: “Thank God we’ve got you here, Andrew” — “I would never have figured that out” — “How ever did you fix that… and so fast!?” Only I knew the minutiae, the nuance of certain systems. Often I had installed them, even written the code — who else could untangle my mess?

It’s nice to think you’re irreplaceable. If work’s getting you down, it’s a soft pillow to lay your head on. You’re not getting paid enough for this sh*t, your boss is a jerk, you’re working long hours. But dammit, you matter. No one else can do this job. The place would fall apart without you doing your thing. Customers would leave, deadlines would be missed, stuff would break, never to be fixed. The wheels of the business would slow, eventually grinding to an inexorable and full stop.

Nope.

There’s always someone else. They might even do your job better. Microsoft did ok after Bill Gates, Apple after Jobs, Twitter after Dorsey. If you can replace the founder, the CEO, don’t kid yourself.

Now hold on — you are special — but you can cast aside this crutch and flip it.

Don’t be content with mastering the clickety-clack. New project? Get on it. New tech? Try it. Instead of being indispensable, make yourself obsolete. Train the intern to do the clickety-clack, or optimize it so you can do more interesting stuff. Not only will learning new stuff and getting good at new stuff make you feel good — peak irony: now you have made yourself indispensable!

Be the person who will take on a new thing, do something no one’s ever done, go talk down the angry customer, tease apart the hard problem.

There is no employee more valuable than one you can throw into a new thing and they’ll slay it or tell you what they need to get it done.

My boss tapped me on the shoulder once, and said he wanted me to be his successor. I asked him if he was dying or something, but no, succession planning is just a thing. Who could do your job if you move on? If you moved on, would that job persist? Could it be combined with another, done by a vendor, done by — oh my stars — AI?

Caveat Laboris.

Many successful companies institutionalize change. The annual re-org. New year, new goals, new skills, new playbooks. A year is the perfect container to take stock. Bookending this way forces reflection and optimization and gives a beat to reflect — discard what didn’t work, double down on what did, and look ahead to what’s new and newly important.

Personalize that. Schedule your own annual reorg. Have an annual business review with yourself. Take inventory. Are you moving, growing? If you’re the only guy that can do X, well X may not be around forever so go check out Y.

Don’t get pigeonholed into the indispensable guy — either in your head or in your job.

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Perhaps I learned a thing or two in a career in tech, you can judge me:

Part I: Bias for Action, Part II: It’s not what you know, it’s who you know, Part III: There’s no I in TEAM