to what extent is this scrum stuff actually taken seriously in the industry?

the buzzwords and vibe I get reminds me way too much of "team-building" and "'leadership" training camps... maybe a touch of tony robbins as well.

Big companies frequently do it wrong. Looking at the way many job postings are written it seems that people take it seriously.

Burning bridges is for morons. I agree that at the end of the day you owe them nothing but that doesn't mean it's not in your self interest to not be an ass (professionally speaking).

Pretty seriously. The fundamentalist scrum people are horrible, imo. But the ideas are still pretty powerful - especially compared to most alternatives.

How is accepting a position at a new company for more money and responsibility burning bridges or being an ass?

It's not. Just put in your two weeks or whatever appropriate notice is, continue to work hard, and thank them for the opportunity on the way out. That is what they mean by not burning bridges.

If you are irreplaceable, you tell you boss that you plan to leave because your job can't be taught to someone in two weeks. It will take a long time to find a job anyways, so you should inform the boss if your intention. There is a huge advantage to being irreplaceable.

Grue, I know that career advice from me sounds stupid, but at every job I've had, I was quickly promoted to positions where replacing me is very difficult. My problem is finding a job, which is very different than my actions and abilities once I have a job.

I don't think you need to tell your boss you're thinking of leaving but I think you should try to become less irreplaceable and consider offering greater than 2 weeks notice.

Is scrum the same as agile? It's a selling point at our company that is mentioned in our RFPs. The sales team has no idea what it is, but it sounds fancy. We even have our product owners getting scrum certified, whatever the **** that means.

Also for anyone who is wondering if your python is up to snuff at a community college level, check out our final exam:

Bus factor for anyone who didn't know. I had to google it :P

I don't know about you guys, but at my company, a lot of former employees who are about to leave, always say the same thing about how they are irreplaceable, everything would fail if they left.

It's the same story over and over again. I just nod my head when I hear the story. Even people said it about me when I moved departments.

Yet everything still runs when people leave. Yes there are a few bumps, but it eventually gets figured out. A lot of people get on their high horse and think they are irreplaceable, when they are actually not.

I am not saying you are one of these people, but just be a little humble. If you are unhappy, talk to your boss about off loading work, or find a new job. And don't tell your boss if you are looking like duh obviously. Keep it simple, don't stress out your life.

IE11 dev tools are like the best sex you ever had compared to IE7 dev tools.

Taken from the wall of one of our conference rooms. I have no idea what it means, but I feel like there must be some deep meaning hidden in there.

I think the caveat to a lot of this is "for the price." I mean, there's no way that someone with less than 30 years experience is irreplaceable in any situation.

At a prior job, they replaced me, but they had to spend 3x the money. The same goes for this job. I can be replaced, but if they are going to hire people at the wages they are hiring, I have to train them on everything I know, which would take 2 months in the best case.

The same goes for SQL Girl. They could replace her, but she's the only person they can find to work for the money.

If we are going to pass of the amount of work and knowledge we have to pass off to another person, we have to take time to find someone to hire, which can take well over a month. The training would take another month. This is why, if you are irreplaceable, you have to say something in advance. I'm literally the only person in my company that can do my job.

Barrin, completely agree, more people think they are irreplaceable than they actually are.

I don't think its at all your responsibility to do this. It's your responsibility to make sure they know that they should be getting someone for you to train regardless of if you're leaving or not - because its a horrible business decision to have something important only known by one person.

Again, you should be pushing for someone to be hired regardless of if you're leaving. If they choose not to follow through on that - that's their decision and not your responsibility.

My comment wasn't that a person is responsible for their employer not getting screwed when they leave. Just that you should take reasonable actions to avoid that.

Also offer to be available for consulting after you leave but don't give them a price or any firm commitment. They probably won't take you up on the offer but it shows you don't want them to stumble hard in the transition even if you don't care.

Understatement of the year.

I don't see how this is a reasonable way to think about replaceability - this makes almost everyone that's not extremely overpaid irreplaceable. Unless the company is extremely bad at negotiating, you're generally not going to be paid the overall cost of your replacement, which includes training, lost productivity due to friction, risk of hiring an unknown person, etc. Being paid that much would imply that you're presently capturing all of the economic surplus in your transaction with your employer, which is unlikely.

This has little to do with years of experience. Young Bill Gates was probably irreplaceable. The same with young Steve Jobs or Wozniak. Young Jeff Dean was likely irreplaceable as well and I'm sure several key members of the teams that built leading products such as Windows, Google Search, iPhone, Office, JVM, etc, may have been irreplaceable. If you're on the frontier, internal expertise is no longer a commodity and cannot be bought - that's where replaceability becomes a question.

We have one guy who is almost irreplaceable. He pretty much created the DB that runs the website from scratch and owns a ton processes and batch jobs no one even knows anything about.

He basically tells management what to do and they put up with it. Whenever they ask him to do something they know he doesn't want to do - their posture and tone is like they're bowing before him and kissing his ring. The request usually starts with "[Some manager way above our dept] wants X...". They never say "Hey you need to do X".

Other than him, there are about 6 or 7 of us who none of us want to see quit because we're basically on a skeleton crew of people who actually know anything. Everyone's job gets that much harder if one of us leaves. Upper management of course willfully doesn't realize this. But the ground level managers know it. So they put up with a lot.

When I first started one of the long term developers had a profanity-laden meltdown on email. I thought something was going to hit the fan. Then I see a manager running to his office. They all walked around on eggshells for a few days after that until he calmed down.

Sadly that guy ended up committing suicide. Our jobs got harder, and we had a rough year or so where things broke that he would have taken care of before they got to that point. But the site survived.

Young Bill Gates might be irreplaceable with perfect hindsight. But who knows. Gates major insights were 1) realizing that the real money to be made in PCs was in the OS (a lesson he took from the mainframe world) and 1) seeing a prototype Windows and realizing he should steal it. Those don't seem particularly other-world visionary to me.

Wozniak I think you could have replaced with any super talented engineer. Jobs probably comes the closest to a once-a-generation visionary imo.

I think if I left my company the downside wouldn't be that **** should fall apart, but that they'd lose out on my skills of turning new technologies into an intuitive workable framework. If I have one thing I think I'm really good at that's hard to teach and few can do well - I think it would be that. So I don't know if they would miss me all that much since they wouldn't even know what could have been. But yeah, I'm probably over-estimating like everyone does.

Irreplaceable as a word is completely flawed to be using in this context. It makes no sense at all, no one is irreplaceable.

Value over replacement level is the only thing that matters in this discussion.

Value over replacement level doesn't take into account domain/tech knowledge and the amount of time it takes the new developer to get up to speed. It doesn't take a new shortstop a year to be productive with a new team.

Well it is not the exact same metric as in baseball, just the same name and general concept. Time to production for your replacement and your unique knowledge experience need to be considered into your VORP in the business world.

In other news, I just recieved an RFP from the Archdiocese of Boston for a fairly large web development project. The same group that did this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_...cese_of_Boston

Yea, not going to be submitting a proposal there.

This works for for-profit corporations because value is at least theoretically quantifiable but it doesn't work for non-profits or open-source projects.

And the word "irreplaceable" does make sense for people whose unique talents make the business possible. Is Jon Bon Jovi irreplaceable to band Bon Jovi? He probably is, in the sense that, Bon Jovi isn't Bon Jovi without Bon Jovi. There probably are and have been a lot of people who are sufficiently critical to the project that without them, the project would have failed in its objective. And some projects, likewise, are critical enough to the companies' success that the companies would have failed along with them.

The point of VORP is to neutralize context and I think when people talk about the bus factor or how they will be missed when they are gone, they are talking about the specific context that makes them less replaceable than they would otherwise be in a neutral context.

Without context, we're just talking market value. We're pretty much all free agents here, so that's easy to figure out.