Recently, there was a news article about a Singaporean firm using robots to do painting. This shatters two commonly made assumptions. One is that many people assume that remote work would make their jobs easy to replace, easy to outsource. The second assumption is that if you are well-paid, you’ll be targeted to be replaced or outsourced. So, keep your wage affordable and stay physically in office, non-hybrid ideally, as a good little corporate citizen, and you should be fine.
Well, guess what? Even if you’re a low-cost construction painter, and obviously painting is not a job that can be done remotely, you’re still going to be replaced by a robot. So, what lesson does this teach us? I think this teaches us one very simple and crucial lesson that I don’t think everybody thinks about, or at least we don’t want to think about, which is, first, your value to an organization is actually in multiple parts. Many people consider only the value that they provide to the organization, how much work you’re able to do, how much value you’re able to bring to the organization through your work is the value that you have to the organization. And that is, of course, the basis of your value to any organization. But the factor that many people may not think about is the replacement cost of losing you to another organization, and the value that an organization pays you for is both for the amount that you are worth (your basis) and for the amount that it will take to replace you (your replacement cost).
To illustrate the above, say someone in your team is making 8,000 and if you want to retrain someone else to take up this person’s role, okay, well, first of all, you need to hire this person. You spend a couple of months to find someone like this, and then you have to train them. Now you’re spending half a year to actually get someone back up to speed as this other guy. That’s your time, and this new person’s time as well. So guess what? Perhaps you might be willing to give your first staff four months bonus to stay. Or perhaps you are willing to give your original staff a bit more money because if he stays, it’s going to save you a lot of time. You don’t have to do all this that you don’t want to do, hire, interview and all that.
The thing that you have to consider as a worker is, what’s your replacement cost? Like, yeah, you’re a developer, you’re doing really good work, you’re building stuff and all that. Cool, that’s really great. Maybe you rely heavily on functional or business analysts to tell you what to do. Well, guess what? It’s easier to replace a developer that doesn’t understand the functional domain than someone who does. So, maybe you can now understand the functional domain, and you are able to do a little bit of solutioning. Guess what? Now you’re even harder to replace. Now, if I want to replace you, I gotta find a developer who’s good at software development, good at understanding functional domains and also good at doing high-level architecture solutioning.
Take another example, if you’re an operations staff, and you’re really good at following policies/operating models, that’s great. How long will it take to train someone to your level? If you are able to propose efficiency improvements to processes, that makes you harder to replace. If you are able to train others to manage the operations, that makes you harder to replace. If you are able to redesign these processes, that makes you even harder to replace.
And I think this is truly an open secret behind how to be relevant and how to increase your value to your organization, not just in what you do, but what you can do that others cannot do, your differentiation and also the difficulty in replacing you.
Some people build knowledge moats around themselves. They refuse to teach others, they hoard knowledge, they hold processes so that they are the only one who can deal with whatever it is you need done. And guess what? It’s going to be super difficult to replace them because right when you try to replace them, you know nothing of their processes. You know nothing of what they’re trying to do. And you just, you don’t really do anything to this staff. But guess what? You don’t want to hire someone like that. You don’t want to be someone like that because it’s just going to be a negative experience for everyone else working with this person. And you don’t want that. You don’t want to be that worker that stays around because no one else can do what you can do. And so siloing and hoarding knowledge is not a solution at all. It’s not a good plan to retain your value. What is a good plan to retain your value is actually delivering value and being harder to replace. Make yourself harder to replace by being someone who delivers a lot of value, by being someone who is able to cross multiple domains and just be that much more useful to your manager and organization.
I think this is something that some people do not realize. You see developers who insist on being single stack for some reason as they think that it gives more value to the organization because they’re a bit more fluent in C# or some language. Your organization might need someone to do C# for now, but then Typescript later. And if you have that software engineering and programming skill, and you’re able to pick it up, then that’s your value to the organization. While your individual goals matter to you, your organizational goals are what also matter. Should you be able to sync up the two, it will give you a boost in your organizational standing as well as increase the value that you bring to your organization. So this is really something that you should consider when you’re deciding on what to do, or deciding on the project that you’re going to do. Sometimes this means, stepping up beyond your job scope.
One experience that I had was when I was joining a new department in my consulting days. This new department was still setting up its own operating model and figuring out its offerings. Many were trying to figure out what needs to be done next. My manager from the previous department reached out to me and asked if I wanted to lead this project that he was setting up. Now, I was in a new department, and I didn’t want to step on toes, so I spoke with my new manager. He was new to the organization, and he was like, yeah, well, he doesn’t know what’s the right course of action as he’s still new to the organization. He asked me one thing, “Do you think it adds value to the organization?” I said, yes, of course it does, because it was billable work. If you’re in consulting, you know that billable work is everything. If you have no billable work, then you’re on the bench and you are basically not doing what feeds revenue into the organization. As that’s billable work, I think it’s worth doing, and I convinced my new manager of that. Also, as I’m going to be leading this work, I need one or two other team members. Once he understood the value, he told me to just do it. And so we went ahead and did it.
Months from then, he thanked me, and he was like, you know that piece of work that you’re doing right now is one of the few billable projects that we have, and it’s helping to keep the new department afloat (and under the radar of management). Now as I am writing this, with more years of experience, I know it takes time to build a pipeline of work, especially in a new organization. So it was a right call. And that new manager’s hesitation, wasn’t that of not knowing the value of the work, but he didn’t want the team to lose focus.
I went from just doing software engineering, to proposing a team structure that works for the project, to leading a team, and delivering the overall project (with the team’s amazing work and support). I made a bunch of mistakes, and learned a ton of lessons along the way, but I believe that the willingness to step up, to pick up skills needed to do what had to be done, are factors that make a person an invaluable staff. These attributes, along with the right attitude, are the real moats that will make it harder to automate your role.
You will not defend against automation by just being in a role that is physically present, and definitely not by keeping your role’s cost down, since, even low-wage construction painters are not safe from automation.
