There's ways to mitigate this though, he should have been using source control and someone else should have at least had access.
From the business angle, you can also get "key man" insurance, to provide some financial safety net. I am key to 3 startups, and all of them have key-man insurance against me.
> should have been using source control and someone else should have at least had access.
Having a single point of failure in a business is a big problem. Having a single point of failure that isn’t 100% committed to that business sounds insane
You can still separate tasks based on who is best at something, but make sure every component has been worked on by multiple people.
A company I worked for had a serious problem with that, so I pushed to get every piece covered by two people. I used "code reviews" for this, where in other to submit a change, someone else familiar with the component had to review it, and they had to understand what the code did and how it did it. We only had a handful of employees, and it was definitely a pain getting it set up, but we were able to survive our first "key man" leaving, followed by a second "key man" somewhat soon after.
If there is anyone on a project that isn't replaceable, you better be okay with the project failing if that person leaves for whatever reason.
He started having various medical issues that lead to him being in the hospital 90% of the time, having surgery almost weekly, for ~12 months. He tried to give out directions and make calls from the hospital bed, but obviously that was not working. The business collapsed to 1/4 the size it was, many people got laid off.
Fun times! I was happy they'd both found better jobs. Before they left there were lots of knowledge transfer sessions with the team all in a room for a few hours diving through all the layers of all the automation, trying to understand how it fit together, and what the design constraints were.
It could have been much worse: enough lead time to do some knowledge transfer and bring rest of team up to speed, none of the technology involved was proprietary, everything was reasonably standard mix of open source automation approaches + AWS, so plenty of access to documentation or working examples from outside of the project.
In ended up okay in the end but it's still a small bit of data that perhaps you don't want 2 people in the team with specialist knowledge, more than two would be even better.
About 5 years ago, one of the executives wanted to replace our homegrown software with another product. No one really wanted to switch, but she was insistent and said she would take full ownership of the project. Once the product was in place, they would let go of the development team.
So most of the team saw the writing on the wall and left during the implementation of the product. I was also interviewing for new jobs when all of a sudden the executive quit.
We were only 1/4 of the way through and no other person wanted to take responsibility so the project stopped. I then told them I was thinking of leaving, and they made me an amazing offer since I was one of the few remaining members of the team. We actually all got huge raises to stay.
I’m still wary and keep active at networking, but it’s been a comfortable day job.
I worked for a small studio that was a part of a big agency. We had two directors - one that sat on the board of the main agency, which was in transition to tech, and a designer that had been relocated. The designer was allegedly a director in name only, due to years of service, but he tried to run everything. Many of the in-house clients went through him, and he led the design work on everything that went through the building.
One Sunday, when I was out with some mates, I got a call from the MD. The designer hadn't turned up on Friday, and we assumed he was ill or that he was busy doing something else. He had died in a car crash on his way into work. The MD was on holiday, and because he was far away he couldn't get a flight back until later on in the week.
That Monday morning was horrific. Most of our PM's were in tears, while I went upstairs with the design team to have a beer. We waited until lunch for one of the London directors to come down, and a few of them spent the week down with us ensuring that everyone could get back to work. To their credit, we were largely functional again within a few days.
Many clients were sympathetic that we had suffered a loss, but I remember being brought into a conference call where one of our PM's was trying to talk to a client. The designer managed a load of smaller clients himself, and one of them had some work that needed deploying that day. The PM asked for a few days to get it ready, and as I walked into the room I heard the client say "I don't give a fuck who died. I want my website live today". We didn't have any of the code, so I had to hack together a FOH website from the HTML we had in a few hours, all while a dozen people were crying downstairs.
We weren't super close, but we had some good chats, and he came across as a good, family man. We bonded over combat sports, because I train BJJ/MMA, and his nephew is an amateur boxer. I don't get too emotional, but I struggled when we all went to his funeral, and I got to meet his family. The main thing I'll take from that experience was watching his kids play in the pub garden, having a fun time with their friends, despite this being the wake for their father.
In terms of bouncing back, the office is no longer operating, but for the months after there was a stronger bond between many of us. Many of us still meet up from time to time, and each year some of us meet up to remember him.
Vacation is a much more common case than death, especially in Europe where 28 days a year is standard.