Sounds like the lesson is to be a go-to person (for knowledge, not doing work for others) but don’t be irreplaceable. Seek to train others so you can scale your influence and you can be promoted without leaving a team or system in a bad place.

Yes absolutely, once you’re a go-to person your job is to replace yourself. Train others, share your knowledge, and get yourself out of the critical path. That’s where the promo happens.

This is very good insight, I appreciate you posting this. I'm going through this now and I couldn't shake the feeling that I'm training all my replacements but really I'm the expert so I need to train others so that I can move up and work on larger problems.

> Go-to for correctly operating a dated tool deep in the bowels of the machine? Cog.

> Go-to for all questions related to the machine, its history, future, and all machines like it? Not cog.

The difference between these two is the people you work with. If people come to you to have their questions answered but can't execute on it properly then... you become #1. Of course this can be twisted around to theoretically be a you problem or it could be an endless churn of warm bodies coming through hiring.

I think there is a certain skill in being a go-to person in such a way you regularly unblock other people, but also respect your own time and ambitions.

Are you constantly being asked how a system works? Take some time to document it, and then answer future questions by just linking to those docs. It's harder up front, but saves you time in the long run, and also mean that come performance review time you can say "I wrote this documentation <link>!" instead of having to vaguely claim that you definitely answered a lot of questions for a lot of people.

Of course, some companies don't respect that sort of work. I would struggle to be happy at those places.