David's Blog

My grandfather tells this story about a paper warehouse he worked in, and about how he had worked in this warehouse for so long that at some point he was the only person who knew how to identify all of the different kinds of paper that they sold. He would brag that his manager wanted to fire him but couldn’t, because he had made himself nearly invaluable to the company:

The manager would come over and say, ‘Hey, what kind of paper is this?’ And I would rip a piece off and lick it and then tell him what it was. And he’d shake his fist at me and he’d say, ‘You son of a b&%$#!’ because he knew I was pulling his leg. But there wasn’t anything he could do about it.

He was the only one who knew what was what. And unless the company wanted to shut the whole warehouse down and not sell anything while they tried to track down all of the separate manufacturers over all the years and get them into the warehouse to tell them what was what, they were stuck with him.

My grandfather tells great stories. I should be clear that I have no idea if they are true.

But even if they aren’t, this story illustrates a special relationship some lucky employees definitely have with their employers – one which is extremely advantageous, gives them great job security, and affords them particularly strong leverage in negotiations. Let’s call employees who have this kind of relationship invaluable employees. They are, roughly speaking, employees who – for whatever reason – bring value to their employers well beyond what other comparably qualified people would otherwise bring to their positions, which is to say: their value relative to replacement is extremely high. If his stories are true, my grandfather full took advantage of this situation. But that is not why I bring this up.

I bring this up to point out something which I think is seldom noted, which is that most software engineering positions have an extremely high likelihood of producing invaluable employees in exactly this sense.

Most people are familiar with the term “10x engineer” and the rule that “it takes 6 months before an engineer can be productive at a new job”. I think both actually point to the same reality, which is that when you are working as a software engineer there is a ton of business-specific knowledge that you need to know in order to do your job. Knowledge like: that there are these background processes that need to run on these machines for this service to work, and – oh – we don’t use EC2 machines because we tried and this happened, and you deploy this process like this but that one you have to deploy like that because if you deploy it the other way then DEAR GOD it took us days to clean up the mess, and you can’t save this record too often because each time you save it we fire off this webhook which we also consume in this job and if it gets too far behind then it slows the whole system down, and you provision servers like this, and you run migrations like this, and you run tests like this, and you lint like this, and you version like this, and you never change this file because of the metaprogramming going on here, here, and here that some guy wrote before he left that he didn’t have tests for but it works well so we all just leave it alone, and – oh yeah – that test is just flaky so you can ignore it, and you always have to remember to let this team know after you touch this file because they’ll need to kick off a new build first, and on and on and on, basically forever.

The point of that long, run-on sentence is that there are large numbers of things you just need to know in order to do most software engineering jobs that other engineers, even otherwise comparably trained and equally knowledgeable engineers, could not ever possibly know. Even an experienced, talented engineer coming into a place with a minimally well-established engineering culture is effectively crippled by the lack of domain knowledge. They get nothing substantial done for months – 6 months apparently. No one even expects them to. How could they, not knowing all these things? Compared to them, the people who have been around for even just a couple years are all “10x engineers”, superheros, gods of the machines. The value of these 10x engineers simply cannot be overstated. You can’t get other people like them. You hire new people, and they just don’t compare – not for a long time. And who stays at any company for a long time these days? The value of the 10x engineer (relative to replacement) is extremely high. Really, we should just say they are invaluable engineers. Make sure you keep them happy. Do whatever it takes.

There are so many great benefits of being a software engineer that we all know about: good pay, good benefits, cool offices, an abundance of jobs, great job prospects for the foreseeable future, the ability to work from anywhere, allows for substantial creativity, is intellectually engaging and rewarding, etc.

Add to that one more: that if you stick around long enough, you tend to become an invaluable employee.