“I was hired by the Director to solve $x problem. I led the project. I put processes in place. I led training for the team and they went public a year later. I met my former director for lunch a year later and most of my processes are still there in a slightly evolved form.”
About the same as above from my job after that. But change “Director” to “CTO” and change “went public” to “got acquired for 10x revenue”.
(Yes I can draw a direct line from the architectural changes that let them pivot to selling access to micro services to their value proposition when acquired)
Maybe. But - maybe they just follow the path of least resistance, which is to lean on you rather than go up to their bosses and say "John Smith is quitting, and when he does, this project will crash and burn. We must stop this or the company will lose $$$."
Some of that is wishful thinking on their part. They can’t acknowledge that the riffraff keep the wheels on and may swing the other way as a form of denial. They probably treat waiters like shit too.
For large enough companies the 'company' is not a single unit making unified decisions. I might be "indispensable" to my boss, perhaps his boss, the project, and my department. However they don't have the power to give me a pay rise or extra time off outside the normal bounds set by their bosses. Me, my boss or even my department however aren't indispensable to the whole global multinational company we all work for.
If I quit and the project fails, then my boss and several people on that project might lose their jobs, and the remnants of that department might end up folded into some other department. My bosses boss might not get a nice bonus that year due to the fact that the project he was overseeing was a massive failure. However "The Company" and it's tens of thousands of other employees all around the world will keep on trucking as if nothing had happened.