Being invaluable to the team gives you negotiating leverage.
The other half of this strategy that the blog post left unwritten is: 1.) learn how to sell that dirty work and connect it back to the successes your high-growth company enjoyed in the marketplace 2.) apply to other high-growth companies who want someone willing to do their dirty work 3.) get a competing offer and 4.) negotiate that into a higher salary or stock package.
You can't clear a market without competition. All of the other career advice, whether it be "work for a profit center rather than a cost center" or "impress your boss" or "do the dirty work" or "take credit for other's success" or "don't take credit for other's success" means nothing if there's never a reason to give you a raise because you're going to keep working for your employer regardless of the terms.
>Being invaluable to the team gives you negotiating leverage.
In my experience that hasn't worked out. Being invaluable just means more pressure gets piled on you, and any reward or leverage you think you might be getting in return doesn't materialise. The credit you earn doesn't translate into anything tangible.
Managers just don't take into account the fact that you can and most likely will leave. The project ends up screwed but that's no longer your problem. I've seen it happen multiple times at multiple companies.
I’m in this spot now. Being invaluable to a project just means more work gets piled on me because it’s valuable work that needs to get done. I think I have something like 20 jira tickets in my board at the moment. Maybe half of them are complete with a deadline on Friday.
But it also puts me in a spot where my manager feels he has to micromanage me. If I up and quit, it’ll pretty much derail the project many months. And I do feel like quitting. Not because of the amount of work but because I have this micromanager breathing down my neck every day.
I was in this position recently. It's pure hell. I moved teams internally. Now I'm happy. It feels like an abusive relationship, you don't realise how bad it was until you leave.
You should really draw a line and tell the manager that if this continues that you will quit. Then it's up to them to either not micromanage you, split tasks to more people or make the deadlines more relaxed. If none of that can be done, you should 100% demand a salary increase. There's no reason not to, if they don't give it to you, you quit.
You have no obligations even if it feels like that. I've had the same exact situation so often and it always felt bad until I started drawing the line
> Being invaluable to the team gives you negotiating leverage.
A firm I know fired their lasts Perl developer, purely to cut costs. Their payments system was written in Perl. When it stopped working, they
asked my friend to step in.
He refused, said management should take responsebility for their decisions, and his manager got all pissy. Soon my friend left the firm too. The management is still earning bonuses and promotions. Nobody cares.
Nobody is invaluable. Every person and every product can be replaced, at a cost.
What "invaluable" really means is "a cost the company doesn't currently want to incur". That only works as leverage for as long as the company would rather acquiesce to the employee than incur the cost, and the employee doesn't generally know where the line in the sand is.
I think people tend to see themselves as invaluable when they really aren't. I've seen "invaluable" people quit or get fired, and it causes a rough patch, but the business recovers. Someone else learns, or the business decides they can do the same thing another way or decides that that system isn't actually as important as they thought.
> 1.) learn how to sell that dirty work and connect it back to the successes your high-growth company enjoyed in the marketplace
This is an incredible amount easier to do with flashy work. If someone leads a revenue-generating product, they can say "I lead this project that created $XM in new revenue". If someone made on-call less crappy, it's hard to quantify that. "We got 70% less on-call pages" is neat, but not really something the business cares about in isolation. You'd have to quantify higher stability on the product leading to not losing revenue, or reducing turnover to have a comparable metric.
Doing dirty work is appealing to other engineers, but it's a cost center for the business. They'd happily have a crappy on-call rotation unless you can demonstrate some kind of financial downside to it.
Everything you wrote sounds good in theory but it's not what actually happened to me. My employers actions indicate that they'd rather me leave and have to hire a replacement, even though this will cause them months of trouble, than give me a chance at doing high value work.
> Being invaluable to the team gives you negotiating leverage.
In my experience it hasn't panned out like that.
We desperately want to believe it, because we see how valuable we are to the business. But the reality is that the people making decisions rarely understand the value of the dirty work because they, themselves, have no interest in it. It could be absolutely critical to the business but they will happily walk away because they have no interest in understanding the work you do or its ultimate importance to their own goals.
Still gives you negotiating leverage, but just in a different way.
Doing all the grungy work means that a.) you can describe what grungy work needs to be done that a potential new employer and b.) you can describe the solutions you took to these problems. Basically, you can pass all the bullshit filters that savvy employers put in place, because you are not actually bullshitting.
You still make your money in the transaction, that point where you actually get an offer letter from an employer and negotiate a compensation package. But the input to that compensation package is based on how much value your new employer expects you to add to them, and a primary input to that is how much value you added for your past employer, and how much your new employer believes your claims of that.
The other half of this strategy that the blog post left unwritten is: 1.) learn how to sell that dirty work and connect it back to the successes your high-growth company enjoyed in the marketplace 2.) apply to other high-growth companies who want someone willing to do their dirty work 3.) get a competing offer and 4.) negotiate that into a higher salary or stock package.
You can't clear a market without competition. All of the other career advice, whether it be "work for a profit center rather than a cost center" or "impress your boss" or "do the dirty work" or "take credit for other's success" or "don't take credit for other's success" means nothing if there's never a reason to give you a raise because you're going to keep working for your employer regardless of the terms.