Being Useful at Work: Getting Used or Leveling Up?

⚠️ Hot Take Alert: This is my raw, unfiltered brain dump. Not some random agentic made corporate fluff. I'm probably wrong about half of this, and that's cool. Drop your thoughts in the HN comments - whether you're here to roast me or high-five. Just keep it real.

The trending "if you're useful you're not safe" narrative smells real neat but also kinda lazy thinking.

Being useful isn't exploitation by default. Sometimes it's just... value exchange. You get paid, they get output. It's not always evil just cause it's not emotional.

You write code
They ship product
Customer pays
Your salary lands
Everyone eats

And yes, sure you get called during a production fire, but you also get context. You see more problems. You get more trust. You become the default brain people route stuff through. You turn into architecture, not just human Jenkins.

This whole "leverage not labor" angle — ok cool, but what are you even leveraging if you haven't first been useful as hell? You don't get to be needed without years of being the guy who made stuff move. There's no shortcut to that. Leverage is earned, not manifested.

Also, the post lowkey assumes everyone's trying to be indispensable. Some of us just enjoy building. Just wanna solve bugs, learn fast, leave systems cleaner. Don't need fear or absence theatre. Just need slack to be quiet for 4 hours so we can think.

And the "they'll drop you the second you're not useful" - maybe, or maybe not. Some teams are loyal. Some orgs notice. And sometimes it's on us too, to say "yo i'm burning" instead of silently drowning in ticket floods.

So try be smart. Don't be a servant. But also don't treat usefulness like a curse. It's a ladder. Just don't get stuck on the first rung thinking it's chains.

Curse or Gift — Being Useful in the Org?

Depends if you stop at useful or build on top of it.

Being useful is the entry ticket. You get in the room. You get trusted. You get calls at 11 pm. You get respect but also overload.

If you stay there - just the go-to fixer, just the fast one, just the human duct tape - then yeah it's a curse. You get burned. Replaced. Forgotten once you slow down.

But if you pivot - from fixing to designing, from doing to deciding, from answering to owning - then being useful becomes the launchpad. You get leverage. You get to say no. You get space.

So useful is neither gift nor curse. It's the starting state. What you do after that flips the story.