Abdirahman Jama recently shared something that caught my attention: "Job Security as a Service (JSaaS) 😂".

That single line is funny because it names a feeling a lot of engineers recognize but rarely say out loud: the temptation to turn yourself into a subscription that the company cannot cancel.

But behind the joke is a useful career question: what does job security actually look like for software engineers, and how do you build it without slipping into unhealthy habits like hoarding knowledge or creating needless complexity?

In this post, I want to expand on what Abdirahman Jama hinted at with "JSaaS" and translate it into practical, ethical strategies you can use to become more valuable, more resilient in a reorg, and more confident in your career.

What "JSaaS" is really pointing to

When someone says "Job Security as a Service", they are poking at the idea of productizing your own indispensability.

The joke lands because software work has leverage: a small amount of specialized knowledge can control a large amount of business value.

In many orgs, one person knows the deployment pipeline, the on-call quirks, the legacy service that still prints money, or the customer integration that no one wants to touch. That knowledge becomes a kind of protective moat.

The problem is that there are two very different ways to build that moat:

The unhealthy way: become a single point of failure.
The healthy way: become a consistent source of outcomes.

Only the second one scales, and it is the one that actually increases your long-term security.

The myth of being "irreplaceable"

A lot of early career advice implicitly says: "become irreplaceable".

In practice, companies do replace people. Sometimes for performance reasons, sometimes for budget reasons, sometimes due to reorganizations that have nothing to do with your work.

So if your security plan is "make sure nobody else can run this system without me", you might win in the short term, but you lose on three fronts:

You become stuck. Promotions often require making your team stronger, not making yourself the bottleneck.
You burn out. The more only-you knowledge you hold, the more you get paged, pulled into meetings, and asked to "just take this".
You create risk. Leaders notice single points of failure, and sometimes the fix is to remove the person and rebuild the process.

A better interpretation of Abdirahman Jama's "JSaaS" is this: deliver recurring value so reliably that letting you go feels like cancelling a service the business depends on.

What real job security looks like for engineers

Job security is not a contract. It is a portfolio of signals that you are worth keeping.

Here are signals that tend to hold up across companies and economic cycles:

1) You reduce operational pain

If you consistently lower on-call load, shorten incident duration, improve observability, and remove sharp edges, you become associated with stability.

Concrete examples:

Turning tribal deployment knowledge into a reliable pipeline.
Adding dashboards and alerts that catch issues before customers do.
Improving runbooks so incidents are less dependent on heroics.

Engineers who reduce chaos become hard to cut because they make everyone else more effective.

2) You are a force multiplier, not just a high-output individual

High output is great, but force multiplication is what leaders defend.

Force multipliers:

Unblock others quickly with clear technical guidance.
Write design docs that help a team converge.
Mentor in a way that raises the baseline.
Build libraries and patterns that shrink repeated work.

This is the ethical version of "JSaaS": your value renews every week because other people ship faster and safer with you around.

3) You develop judgment in addition to coding skill

During uncertainty, companies keep people who make good decisions under ambiguity.

Judgment looks like:

Knowing when to pay down technical debt versus when to ship.
Choosing simpler designs when complexity is not buying much.
Communicating tradeoffs clearly to product and leadership.

If your manager can trust your judgment, you are less of a staffing risk.

4) You build credibility through ownership

Ownership is not "I touched it once". It is "I can explain it, improve it, and be accountable for it".

Strong ownership behaviors:

Closing the loop after incidents with measurable follow-ups.
Tracking work to outcomes (latency, cost, reliability, conversion).
Saying "I do not know" quickly, then finding out.

The thin line between "JSaaS" and creating technical debt

There is also a darker reading of the joke: job security through complexity.

You have probably seen this pattern:

A system is overly clever.
Documentation is sparse.
Deployments are scary.
Only one person can change anything safely.

That may feel like security, but it is fragile. Eventually, the organization either invests to remove the risk (by simplifying and documenting), or it routes around the risk (by moving the roadmap elsewhere). Either way, the "indispensable" person often ends up isolated.

If you want the upside without the downside, optimize for clarity, not cleverness.

If your codebase requires you to explain it every time, you are not building security. You are building dependency.

A practical "JSaaS" checklist (the healthy version)

If you want to turn Abdirahman Jama's punchline into a career practice, here is a simple playbook you can run over the next 30 to 90 days.

Step 1: Pick one business-critical surface area

Choose something that the business cares about and that has visible pain:

A service that pages too often
A deployment process that breaks
A cost hotspot
A flaky integration with a top customer

Step 2: Make the work measurable

Write down two or three metrics that reflect real improvement:

Mean time to recover (MTTR)
Number of pages per week
P95 latency
Cloud spend for a service
Build and deploy time

Step 3: Ship small improvements weekly

Security comes from consistency. Deliver small wins that stack:

One missing alert
One runbook section
One test that kills a flaky failure mode
One batch job optimization

Step 4: Document as you go

Documentation is not paperwork. It is a scaling tool.

Write:

A short architecture overview
A "common failures" section
A "how to deploy and roll back" checklist

This is the paradox: sharing knowledge often increases your security because it shows maturity and reduces organizational risk.

Step 5: Create successors

Train at least one other person to handle the basics without you.

If that sounds counterintuitive, remember: promotable engineers are the ones who make themselves replaceable at the current level.

What to do if you feel insecure right now

Sometimes the joke lands because the anxiety is real.

If you are worried about layoffs or performance reviews, focus on controllables:

Increase your visibility by tying work to outcomes.
Reduce risk in a system your team relies on.
Communicate progress clearly and regularly.
Build relationships across functions so your impact is known.

And if your environment rewards only heroics and gatekeeping, consider that as a signal too. Long-term security often comes from choosing teams that value sustainable engineering.

Bringing it back to Abdirahman Jama's post

Abdirahman Jama's "Job Security as a Service (JSaaS)" works as a joke because it names a real dynamic in software: value can renew like a subscription when you own problems that matter.

My takeaway is simple: aim to be the person who makes critical systems calmer, clearer, and easier to change. That is the kind of "service" organizations keep paying for, and it is also the kind that makes your career healthier.

This blog post expands on a viral LinkedIn post by Abdirahman Jama, Software Development Engineer @ AWS | Opinions are my own. View the original LinkedIn post →