To get to the post of today, I came across a very interesting article on blogoverflow.com, the programmers community blog of StackExchange, titled 20 controversial programming opinions. One opinion really resonated with the way I feel and I was also surprised to know this makes you more valuable to your employer. So, I am sharing this with you below, but don’t neglect to check out the whole article – it’s a great read.
Your job is to put yourself out of work.
When you’re writing software for your employer, any software that you create is to be written in such a way that it can be picked up by any developer and understood with a minimal amount of effort. It is well designed, clearly and consistently written, formatted cleanly, documented where it needs to be, builds daily as expected, checked into the repository, and appropriately versioned. If you get hit by a bus, laid off, fired, or walk off the job, your employer should be able to replace you on a moment’s notice, and the next guy could step into your role, pick up your code and be up and running within a week tops. If he or she can’t do that, then you’ve failed miserably. Interestingly, I’ve found that having that goal has made me more valuable to my employers. The more I strive to be disposable, the more valuable I become to them.