Every coder likes to think they're the next Jeff Dean but there's only one Jeff Dean and his job is taken.

The truth is most of us are replaceable cogs regardless of our titles and salaries if we're willing to look past our egos.

if that's the only position you're willing to settle for, then i'm afraid your concerns are well-founded D:

It seems he really did lose hope. Perhaps stuck in a lousy job for too long. Over the course of my life, I've changed jobs whenever I felt I needed a change. I've done databases, Java, embedded, mobile, etc. It kept me happy.

You don’t need hope if you are pragmatic. Know your own weaknesses, and have a system for failing. It seems like that guy is maybe going through something in a shitty career, but it becomes a vicious cycle. You end up traumatized and gravitate toward similar abusive workplaces. Have seen that happen to many friends in this industry. Everyone has an upper limit of the political bs they can take at their workplace. That’s why I personally refuse to work at a place with too many h1b. IME management tend to be literal slavedrivers and suck all the fun out of SWE in those places.

My system for failing is currently pretty one-dimensional; i.e. fall back on considerable savings. Good advice about spotting slavedriver management.

Everyone is replaceable. Feeling valued is a separate cultural issue, but no company should have a major dependence on a single individual for survival.

Mitigating risk and ensuring continuity is a core tenant of good business.

it's true that very few people are truly irreplaceable and it's a good hedge for knowledge to be well distributed. at the same time, small companies rarely have the luxury of employing (and keeping busy) multiple senior architects. unless you're at a very large company, there's always going to be a bus factor somewhere - it's just the reality for 90% of small businesses. either that or you have lock-in to outside consulting companies and services and no one with deep technical insight - just someone who's a consultant coordinator.

i'm not saying it's good to be that bus factor (you're on-call basically 24/7), but it also has undeniable perks for the employee (not the employer).

in reality my bus factor is not that high. the nice thing about well-designed systems is that they seldomly need attention, and there's another dev here who's more than capable of bug fixing and maintaining what's already in place.

There are two types of bus factors though. It’s true that at a small company, you can’t share all your responsibilities with someone else, but you can make sure that if they need to you can be replaced by someone else (ie. if you get hit by a bus) by doing things like documenting your work. Alternatively, if you want to make sure your job is secure, don’t do that, but make sure you’re doing it knowingly.