by Serguey Shinder
There was a system I understood better than anyone else, and for several years I quietly enjoyed that. Nobody planned it that way. I had built parts of it, fixed most of the failures, and accumulated the kind of knowledge you cannot get from reading the code, the knowledge of why things were the way they were and which parts would bite you. When something went wrong with it, people came to me, and I liked being the person they came to.
I never wrote any of it down properly. I told myself this was because documentation goes stale, which is true, and because the system changed often, which was also true, and neither of those was the real reason. The real reason was that being the only person who understood something felt like security. In a career full of things I could not control, my irreplaceability on that one system was a floor I could stand on, and writing it all down felt like taking the floor away.
It worked, in the narrow sense. I was not going anywhere. But it took me an embarrassingly long time to notice what it had cost, which was that I was also not going anywhere. Every holiday came with interruptions. Every interesting project elsewhere came with the problem of who would handle the system if I moved. I had made myself necessary in one place, and necessary in one place turns out to be indistinguishable, from the inside, from stuck in one place.
The deeper problem was that the knowledge I was guarding had an expiry date, and I was pretending it did not. Systems get replaced. The specific things I knew about that one, all the accumulated detail I was sitting on like a hoard, were worth exactly as much as the system's remaining life and not one day more. I had built my security on an asset that was quietly depreciating while I protected it.
What I have come to believe is that the durable thing is not what you know. It is what you can help other people do, and that compounds in a way that private expertise never does. The engineers I have watched build the best long careers were not the ones who held the most, they were the ones who transferred the most, and they were valuable everywhere because their value was not attached to any particular machine.
So I write things down now, and I explain the parts that only I know, and I actively try to make myself unnecessary on anything I own. It still triggers a small, primitive alarm every time. But the alarm is measuring a kind of safety that does not exist, and what I get instead is the ability to leave, which is the only real security I have ever found in this work.
– Serguey Asael Shinder
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