Stack Overflow: Helping One Million Developers Exit Vim

I'm the kid that comes in for 1/10th the price, migrates and/or refactors that piece of shit to something modern, builds a small dev team that can support each other + the org, and then gets the guy 2x my age laid off within a year.

What you're discussing is what's known as "SPF" - singular point of failure, ie: "if this goes we're fucked three ways from Sunday...." In applications development and architecture you avoid SPFs like cancer, in a well functioning org personnel SPFs are seen the same way.

In modern business practices that is actually not job security, but quite the opposite. Things like disaster recovery, security, stability, and scalability are now forefront conversations at the exec and product level. Since we've seen what data breaches can do, or large-scale fraud, etc the notion of "only this one guy knows this" is super-duper dangerous.

I have been hired multiple times to go in, correct this exact issue, and effectively end that SPF's current employment, to which I have no moral qualms against. If you worked yourself into a position as a SPF and you are a credentialed engineer then you've fucked up. If a company is working you into a SPF role - it's time to move on, it's not worth the potential stress and/or 3am phone calls. If you're a SPF you know you're "always on call"... for any enterprise-level application it's not worth the hit to your personal life. I promise.

/r/programming Thread Parent Link - stackoverflow.blog