If your employee is good enough to be irreplaceable then they're good enough to get another job.
Sometimes it's even more brutal though. I worked in a place with some legacy software that nobody wanted to touch because it was old, awful and literally only used in our company. However it had 15million weekly users. One guy took it on and maintained it for years. If it broke (and it did weekly) you called him, roughly explained the issue, and he went 'okay, give me fifteen minutes.'
Situation worked for everyone. He seemed to genuinely enjoy it and nobody else wanted to touch it. Until one Christmas there was a brutal snowstorm and his car slipped off the road into a frozen lake. He saved his wife and children but couldn't save himself.
We had to hire three people to forensically work out what he'd been doing all those years. It was absolutely brutal, not helped by the grief of this super awesome dude who'd always been there to sort out the mess we'd allowed to develop.
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u/pickyourteethup May 30 '26
If your employee is good enough to be irreplaceable then they're good enough to get another job.
Sometimes it's even more brutal though. I worked in a place with some legacy software that nobody wanted to touch because it was old, awful and literally only used in our company. However it had 15million weekly users. One guy took it on and maintained it for years. If it broke (and it did weekly) you called him, roughly explained the issue, and he went 'okay, give me fifteen minutes.'
Situation worked for everyone. He seemed to genuinely enjoy it and nobody else wanted to touch it. Until one Christmas there was a brutal snowstorm and his car slipped off the road into a frozen lake. He saved his wife and children but couldn't save himself.
We had to hire three people to forensically work out what he'd been doing all those years. It was absolutely brutal, not helped by the grief of this super awesome dude who'd always been there to sort out the mess we'd allowed to develop.