Programmers: Make Yourself Replaceable

Why making yourself replaceable will lead to a better career

Photo by Helena Lopes on Unsplash

My first internship after studying computer science at college was a disaster. They didn’t use any form of version control. We had no local development environments — we all ran our code on the same staging server. If one person crashed the app, it would crash it for everyone. The application was an undocumented spaghetti code disaster.

There was only one person able to work with this application. They were irreplaceable — without them, nothing would get done. Tasks that would take the rest of us days took them hours.

Here are some of the factors that made them irreplaceable:

• The undocumented framework made it difficult to onboard new team members.
• Having no local development environment made people work less effectively.
• Not using version control made it easier to introduce bugs and made code reviews impossible.
• Information hoarding led to large knowledge silos.

But why is this a bad thing? Shouldn’t we strive to be indispensable? Seth Godin wrote the bestselling book “Linchpin: Are You Indispensable?” In it, he argues that Linchpins, or indispensable people, are the backbone of the workforce. He compels you to hoard knowledge and relationships to make yourself irreplaceable.

This is something that we have heard our entire lives. People joke about how we should make code so obscure that only we can understand it, to ensure job stability. Why would you want to be replaced?

Why You Don’t Want to Be Irreplaceable

1. Your skills become less marketable

If you spend years working with an obscure codebase, your skills become less relevant. You aren’t working with popular open-source frameworks. You might even work with a programming language that’s becoming less and less popular.

Companies want to hire people who have relevant experience. Experience developing features in a homemade framework isn’t relevant. Why hire someone who has only worked with jQuery, when I can hire someone who has two years of React…