(Software) Engineers and developers at companies

Software engineers and developers, just like any workers, must strive to be indispensable for a company to be hired. Once hired, though, they have to make themselves–and their work if possible–replaceable. They are deemed most valuable when they can replace (unnecessary?) human labor with scalable, automatized, optimized solutions.

They can relieve the contradictory (dialectic?) tension between indispensability and replaceability only by becoming a perpetual source of impetus for their company to move forward (in whichever direction), while they “iterate” (over what? new requirements?) and discard previous versions of themselves.

Yet they do not thereby resolve or escape from the dialectic as long as they work for their companies.