If you know something no one else does... sometimes the management is kinda aware that it's a problem, but they are too busy doing something else, so you can keep your job for decades with minimum work.

And sometimes you know something no one else does, and you want to share the knowledge, but management says no, because having you talk to someone else feels like a loss of time when both of you could be developing a new functionality instead... and then one day you leave, no one reads the documentation you wrote, and your successor ends up reimplementing from scratch everything you already did.

Sometimes it seems to me that the perception of your importance is proportional to the number of bugs in your code. If things keep breaking and you keep fixing them, you are a hero, and the company wants to keep you. If things work flawlessly, company assumes that it is easy and that you could be replaced at any moment by a random person who walks in.

> Sometimes it seems to me that the perception of your importance is proportional to the number of bugs in your code.

That's incredible, isn't it? it's one of the many possible manifestations of "worse is better", I fear.

It depends quite a bit on what it is you know, and what it pertains to, and how problematic it is.

If you guard the knowledge to the core application for how the company makes it's money, you're not going anywhere.

If you guard the knowledge to a component used in that core application, which while it's problematic to replace could be swapped out with a lot of effort, you are going to be walking a tightrope. As soon as it becomes more beneficial to replace that component than keep dealing with the problem of it being hard to deal with (because if it wasn't your knowledge would have little value), you're faced with the fact that a large chunk of your value to the company has just been obsoleted with it.

So when taking the hoarding info approach, just how irreplaceable is the thing you're guarding knowledge of? Often it's far more replaceable than people think, and often becomes more so as people hoard knowledge of how to deal with it. Unless you're that guy that's on call 24/7 to immediately deal with a problem, the fact that it all relies on you which is unsustainable will eventually come to light.

If you're the only person who knows something it can also mean you end up in a rut. You can't tackle interesting new stuff because you're stuck looking after the old stuff that no-one else understands.

When I assumed my current position,the first thing I told the owners of the business is that the biggest risk in the business is me and that the company should work towards getting someone in, who could partially cover some aspects of my job. They understood it well,but probably not too well, however some attempts were made to address the issue.

Can I ask why did you do that? Was it so you could divide & delegate your work to underlings? Or was it so you could be totally free from the position one day?

The position I assumed is pretty senior- I report directly to the CEO. As part of the change,I still retained some of my previous responsibilities+ gained a whole lot more. I did it for two reasons:

1) it was the right thing to do,considering the situation. My approach is always to be open about issues within the business, even if it's my own department. This isn't university liked by my colleagues but appreciated by the CEO, as he knows I'll tell the real situation rather than that with a pink filter.

2) I will move on, sooner or later, and I'd rather have someone in place before that happens. I want the company to be successful in the same way as they've given me tons of opportunities that I successfully used.

3) There's a considerable backlog of things I need to do at any given time,so having more resources would free up my day+ speedup certain developments in the business.

Exactly, that's the reality at majority of companies.