Your value isn’t that they can’t fire you, it’s that they don’t want to.
If you’re reading this, it’s because I’ve got carried away again, WAY carried away, and asked the wonderful people at Manfred for the microphone to tell you what I’ve learned now that, if I had hair, it would be going grey.
I’m going back to the philosophy that you should be easy to fire. But honestly, the reason is that ever since I started working, I’ve always ended up becoming what I didn’t want to be.
So if you already are what you wanted to be, stop reading and enjoy your afternoon, love.
You see, I studied to become a programmer, back when computer scientists were obsessed with Neo from The Matrix. I liked the idea of developing software in a cubicle, in one of those typical American offices. It is what it is, don’t look at me like that.
I moved out at 21, with my partner, after finding a job, yes. Different times, you could afford rent back then, who knows.
My first job was as a field technician, repairing hardware. I spent six years there, averaging 400 km a day in a van.
Those six years weren’t wasted. I started studying philosophy, learned a lot about getting by, getting things done, and self-organisation.
I wasn’t the best, but from the very beginning, whenever I fixed something somewhere, I tried to explain to someone how they could have fixed it themselves without calling me. Because you really don’t want to drive 150 kilometers just to plug in a cable. You really don’t.
By then I no longer wanted to program. I discovered that I liked support work. I envied those who connect remotely to your computer and fix things, or replace a part only if it’s necessary, being the company IT guy in the basement, for example.
Once again, fate took me to a company that valued my hardware experience. There I went from doing the fixes myself to explaining over the phone to shop employees at a huge company how to fix their devices. If they couldn’t, I escalated the ticket to the people who connected remotely.
At that company I met some very good people and some terribly bad ones at their jobs.
Since I was never keen on shift work: it was shift work. I never wanted to work nights: I did stretches of five and seven consecutive night shifts, glued to a screen with a headset on.
At this company, teaching the customer was encouraged, teaching your colleague was not. It blew my mind.
The first manual I wrote was about iPods. Later I expanded it. I shared it with several people. It had moderate success, quietly.
After a year, they offered us English classes because once night shifts started, shops from other countries began calling. One day, the best of our supervisors came down to see me while I was having coffee and said:
— Do you speak English?
I hesitated: I can get by.
— Then tomorrow you’re going to level two for tills.
— What?
Right there I understood something: knowing a lot about one area is not what makes you valuable. What makes you valuable is bringing clarity, standardizing processes, and enabling others to function without you.
They paired me each day with a different person, especially those who were about to leave, which, I think, was lucky because they gave me more information. And guess what I discovered again: everyone worked differently.
There was the one who knew the most, and the one who was a master at bouncing tickets. There was a till software manual that hadn’t been updated in four years. They gave me a few loose notes and let me loose.
Things moved fast. I took the manual and updated it. In just over a year we were twelve people, and I became the official trainer with the added bonus that I always worked mornings and stopped working weekends. Not bad at all.
All I did was help others avoid going through what I’d gone through, and in the process I standardized the way of working that my supervisor wanted.
The team was doing well, but we were transferred to another company, and my supervisor was hired directly by the client’s company.
Who was happily living as a trainer and DIDN’T WANT to be a supervisor? Yours truly.
And who did they offer the role to? Exactly.
The team grew to 21 people. In another office, where I also ended up being the main contact with the company for 67 employees.
The philosophy was always the same: learn how the job is done, write it down, share it, improve it. Be transparent. Help people live better at the bottom and move up.
A supervisor from another team was considered for promotion, but all the knowledge lived in his head. He was the only contact, the one who solved anything outside the basics, the only one the client knew so they couldn’t move him.
Another went on sick leave, and they had to call him almost every day for weeks.
Another clung to the role so tightly that he drip-fed information to the team so that no one could gain a general understanding of how things worked.
They were hard to fire, hard to move, hard to replace.
So it’s simple: even though I was the easiest of them all to fire, I think I’d have been the last person they’d want to get rid of.
Years passed, and the role wore me down for many reasons. Despite the sadness of leaving what I’d built, I started looking for a new job.
I had built a profile, written many posts, and discovered a world where sharing is also valued, and where trying to add value to the company matters more than just being a number.
I was offered a move to the e-commerce area within the same company. It didn’t attract me (surprise), but the conditions were compelling.
I had to learn time management and work across multiple focuses. I went back to programming, learned Python, automated tasks, and expanded my understanding of clients and the consulting business.
What I do today, with nearly 20 years of work experience, I won’t go into, but you can imagine it hasn’t changed much: sharing what I know, learning, and making sure things work.
Being easy to fire is just clickbait to help you understand that a professional isn’t indispensable because they keep passwords in a drawer or have handled the strangest cases. They’re indispensable because the company can trust them to make the business work, even without them.
You don’t want to be the only person who knows something. You want to be the person the company relies on because they enable others, make work clearer, and improve the system.
That’s the kind of professional no one wants to lose.
Jacobo Carricoba - Technical and management systems consultant
Want to know a little more about who wrote this article? 👇
Jacobo Carricoba
Consultant at Ozona Consulting, specialising in the development, auditing and implementation of tools, international standards and management systems.