When you should fire your most irreplaceable team members | Hacker News Reader

When you should fire your most irreplaceable team members

blog.gigantt.com

5 pointsassaflavie6 comments

This is great... from a managers point of view. A manager that sees an employee as an easy replaceable part in a machine. A manager that is totally oblivious to an employees workload and the time-cost accompanied with offloading all of one's knowledge into a format that is easy to transfer and teach.

On the contrary. This view assumes that replacing employees is about the hardest thing you have to do. Good people are extremely rare. So to mitigate the problem, and also to promote intellectual cross pollination within the organization, it's a very good idea to make sure everyone remembers to document what they know by default. There's no need to assume this means extra work - it just means you divide your time differently, giving more priority to communicating what you know. As an _employee_ I always strove to do just that - volunteer to document and spread on whatever I brought with me into the organization, and everything I picked up along the way, too. I saw this not as a chore but as a an opportunity to share, influence and also have less of a headache when the time eventually comes to move on to the next adventure.

right. key employees documenting everything they know that makes them valuable. This seems to be some empty suit managers wet dream.

As a thought experiment, imagine Google asking Peter Norvig to document everything he knows. The key assumption here is that what really makes your key employees valuable is documentable, and transferable (from said document to someone else's head) to the point where someone else can just read some document and replace him.

Sure, documenting some things may be valuable, but 'fire your most valuable team member' is either utter cluelessness,or just link bait.

First, not every employee is a unique and rare snowflake - a one in a million hire. People _are_ mostly replaceable. This is reality, not a wet dream. Using an example to the contrary does not disprove the rule, just highlights an exception.

If you read the post carefully, it describes very clearly what makes employee valuable _besides_ their domain knowledge. It's quite a lot. That's why it's so hard to lose people. As I wrote, we each bring our own capabilities, attitudes and skill sets. But that doesn't mean that it's alright to work under the assumption that _none_ of our contributions to the organization can be documented and shared. In fact, a lot of what we do in our day to day work is pretty mundane stuff. We tackle problems, we learn things, we talk to people and make decisions. So for the most part it's entirely reasonable to ask people to share their knowledge with others through documentation by default. Mind you, documentation can be as easy as discussing things in a mailing-list vs. personal emails (one is searchable after you quit, the other pretty much disappears).

Additionally, the title of the post is clearly not to be taken literally. If you understood it to mean "find your best people, get them to document everything, and then fire them" then you misunderstood. That makes zero sense. It's those team players - the people who volunteer their knowledge - who are the most precious of all employees, and those are the ones you never actually want to let go.

On the other hand, the ones who are sure that their own Peter Norvig level "genius" could never be put into documentation, are the problem.

For what it's worth, this isn't an "empty suit's" dream. This is the way I've seen it done as a developer in a few software companies, and it's something I'm trying to promote ever since. And I stand by the title of the post, even if you find it controversial. Every organization has its local "guru" knowledge hoarder who is essentially a huge pain in the ass to manage because, intentionally or not, he's not playing well with others. He loves being a required participant in every single meeting. And heaven help you if you try to drive a change he disagrees with - no chance of that happening. These people should be prime candidates to get shit canned as early as possible. By adopting an organization-wide "document by default" attitude you gradually see less and less of this problem and reduce the chances of new hoarders sprouting up.

You can write documentation all day long, you can't avoid the fact that someone who's spent 10 years working on a project will have so much intricate knowledge about it that they are close to irreplacable. It takes months for a new recruit to get even close to productive if they haven't experienced that technology before. If you required all your team members to document so much that they could walk out the door and not be missed, you'd never get anything done.

Yup. But it's a goal to strive to. Nobody's proposing people spend their entire day documenting, but if they remember to document decisions/knowledge by default they mitigate the problem. Besides, who said it's a good thing to have one person with 10 years of very specific, undocumented domain expertise? Sure, in rare cases it's some outlier guru. Sometimes you have PhDs who spent 10 years becoming domain experts and you can hardly expect them to be able to serialize it all into the company wiki. That happens. But I'd bet that in most cases these are just people who positioned themselves into a cozy role, guaranteeing you can never let them go. These are liabilities, not assets.

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