My coworker got "voluntold" to train his replacement. He did it perfectly. That's the problem.
So we have this guy on our team, been here nine years. Knows every system, every shortcut, every vendor contact by first name. The kind of guy who fixes things before you even know they're broken.
Six months ago, upper management decides they want to "distribute knowledge" across the team. Sounds reasonable. What it actually meant was: make Jake train someone cheaper to do his job.
Jake figured this out within about a week. Said nothing. Just started training.
And I mean actually training. Thorough, patient, detailed. Showed the new guy everything. Walked him through the vendor relationships, the workarounds for the broken software nobody's replaced yet, the unwritten rules about which clients need extra hand-holding. Even wrote up guides.
Management loved it. Started making noises about Jake "moving into a strategic role" which everyone knew meant absolutely nothing.
Fast forward three months. New guy is fully onboarded. Jake gets pulled into a meeting and told his position is being "restructured."
Here's the part nobody saw coming though.
Jake smiles, says he completely understands, and offers to stay on for a full transition period. Very professional. Very gracious.
What management didn't know was that Jake had trained the new guy on how things were documented but not why. Every process the new guy learned had the steps but not the logic. So when something breaks in a way that isn't in the guide, he has no idea what to do.
Jake knew that. He documented it that way on purpose.
It's been two months since Jake left. The new guy is drowning. Three of our biggest vendor relationships are rocky because nobody knows how those contracts actually work at a practical level. We lost a client last week that Jake had personally kept happy for six years.
Management asked if anyone had Jake's personal number.
Nobody gave it to them.
The funniest part is Jake didn't do anything wrong. He trained exactly what he was asked to train. He documented exactly what they told him to document. He was professional and cooperative until his last day.
He just understood that nine years of context isn't something you can extract in three months and hand to someone else like a file transfer.
They tried to make him replaceable. Turns out they just made themselves fragile.
He's a consultant now, and he’s doing fine.