Nobody is invaluable. Every person and every product can be replaced, at a cost.
What "invaluable" really means is "a cost the company doesn't currently want to incur". That only works as leverage for as long as the company would rather acquiesce to the employee than incur the cost, and the employee doesn't generally know where the line in the sand is.
I think people tend to see themselves as invaluable when they really aren't. I've seen "invaluable" people quit or get fired, and it causes a rough patch, but the business recovers. Someone else learns, or the business decides they can do the same thing another way or decides that that system isn't actually as important as they thought.
> 1.) learn how to sell that dirty work and connect it back to the successes your high-growth company enjoyed in the marketplace
This is an incredible amount easier to do with flashy work. If someone leads a revenue-generating product, they can say "I lead this project that created $XM in new revenue". If someone made on-call less crappy, it's hard to quantify that. "We got 70% less on-call pages" is neat, but not really something the business cares about in isolation. You'd have to quantify higher stability on the product leading to not losing revenue, or reducing turnover to have a comparable metric.
Doing dirty work is appealing to other engineers, but it's a cost center for the business. They'd happily have a crappy on-call rotation unless you can demonstrate some kind of financial downside to it.
What "invaluable" really means is "a cost the company doesn't currently want to incur". That only works as leverage for as long as the company would rather acquiesce to the employee than incur the cost, and the employee doesn't generally know where the line in the sand is.
I think people tend to see themselves as invaluable when they really aren't. I've seen "invaluable" people quit or get fired, and it causes a rough patch, but the business recovers. Someone else learns, or the business decides they can do the same thing another way or decides that that system isn't actually as important as they thought.
> 1.) learn how to sell that dirty work and connect it back to the successes your high-growth company enjoyed in the marketplace
This is an incredible amount easier to do with flashy work. If someone leads a revenue-generating product, they can say "I lead this project that created $XM in new revenue". If someone made on-call less crappy, it's hard to quantify that. "We got 70% less on-call pages" is neat, but not really something the business cares about in isolation. You'd have to quantify higher stability on the product leading to not losing revenue, or reducing turnover to have a comparable metric.
Doing dirty work is appealing to other engineers, but it's a cost center for the business. They'd happily have a crappy on-call rotation unless you can demonstrate some kind of financial downside to it.