Who Replaces Irreplacable Me?

Whenever I get a new supervisor, they always want to know how I can share my knowledge, or how other people can support me by doing something I do so that I can do something else. I listen politely and say that it would be a good idea.

Nothing happens. Never does. I think it never will.

I tell myself I have a rare combination of skills built up over decades, as well as a background in engineering, mathematics, and logic, as well as finance and accounting, marketing, pricing and operations, that let me do the job in the way I do. Also I can code: I’ve been doing it long enough to be able to work on the “need to nerd” principle.

This is not a combination of skills and knowledge anyone in their mid-20’s is going to have. And the chances of getting anyone who can actually code for work, as opposed to a university project they have now forgotten, is about zero. People who can code don’t look for jobs as pricing or insight analysts.

I’ve seen analysts come and go through my bit of The Bank for many years. They learn the party-tricks needed to do the job, and that’s it. The chances of them conceiving of a project that requires two hundred lines of SQL defining a bunch of temporary tables and bringing it all together in a comprehensive SELECT query, for dumping into Tableau, is about zero. Don’t get me wrong, these guys can think through business consequences to some depth. They just ain’t engineers.

I can’t teach the problem-solving bit. That can only be learned by doing, until one has enough experience for all the rules-of-thumb and how-to articles to make sense.

I could be being a bit of a dick about this. Telling myself I’m so damn special that no-one could possibly replace me. That The Bank could hire. There are plenty of people smarter, faster and more effective than me, but they won’t work where I work. Partly because it takes a serious attitude to work amongst a bunch of ambitious, focussed people who want results on their CVs. See, there I go again. I’m so special.

Maybe I suggest that they hire someone with the personality to work in the business, has done coding as part of their day job, and wants to help as much facilitating others as by writing Powerpoints with insights.

In the meantime, I can document all the stuff that needs taking out of my head and putting into print.