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Comment by blacktriangle | Hacker News Reader

Consulting and working full time have the same problem, you need to program for the customer, not for yourself. If you work with people who are unwilling and/or unable to learn a tool, then DO NOT use that tool. It doesn't matter how much better it makes your life, you've taken a more or less functional organization and given them a bus factor of 1, where that 1 is you and clearly if you're so high on your tool you're willing to shove it down the orgs throat, you're probably looking to leave already.

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Doesn’t that sort of increase your own value to the organization though as well? It would vary based on the situation but it seems like this could sort of work to your advantage if you’re the only person who can reasonably work on something critical (and others can’t be bothered to learn)

I guess, but I think that behavior falls under a dark pattern of employment.

I'm not saying you can't introduce new ideas into your organization, but this is where the politics of development comes into play. You need to get buy-in from your team and management, otherwise you're intentionally hurting your organization.

It also means when there's an outage due to X during christmas or whatever, then you're the only person who can reasonable work on it. Great work.

Only if you can ensure no one ever replaces what you wrote with their own solution.

You become critical in the short term, but also critical to the business to replace in the long term, in the same way that a vendor tripling their price often results in short term profits while customers transition off of them, leading to a long term decline in revenue.

I'd argue it increases your importance but decreases your value.

You become a single point of failure for the org, so you're more important, but you're removing value from the org because you're making it more difficult to scale the organization.

It's your bosses job to make sure there aren't single points of failures. If you try hard to become one, they might start trying hard to make you not one. You're now a bottleneck, after all.

Some places have toxic cultures so that's the norm, but if you're fortunate to be at a better place, don't force their hand to go down that route!

(There's also the aspect where if you're the only person who can do X, but now someone needs to do Y which will actually be ten times more valuable to the company than X, you've closed off that opportunity for yourself!)

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