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Comment by perlgeek | Hacker News Reader

The "hit by a bus" thing is used for the most dramatic effect: there's nothing you can do, there's no grace period where a "poached" developer can give some wisdom to his/her successor etc.

Managers know that it's not the most likely case, but it's still possible.

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Keep in mind that an organization that doesn't appreciate their top performs (hence them leaving) is also more likely to not take advantage of their limited time left when they give notice.

And a grace period that isn't taken advantage of is functionally equivalent to your employee being hit by a bus.

Yeah I think "hit by a bus" generally means there is 0 chance of knowledge transfer and is more a disaster recovery term than a talent retention term.

Unless you really burn a bridge with your workers they should have at least a week or 2 to transfer knowledge!

I'm picking up from a senior colleague who wasn't hit by a bus, but did die suddenly out of the blue, with absolutely zero warning. Reconstructing everything that he was doing, and why things are the way they are, has been an interesting challenge to say the least.

Opposite opinion. You should never need more then a day to knowledge transfer. If that.

I always try and cross train people enough that I can quit at any point and it’s not an issue.

All processes are kept automatic where no one is crucial to keep it running.

Mostly it’s useful for vacations. In the past I went on a cruise. And I wasn’t sure the company will be online without me to baby them through.

After that I got extremely serious about investing in the team and tools to never let that happen again.

I agree with making things automatic. But sometimes you have to let team members specialize. It's less efficient for everyone to know everything. But, it is good if everything is known, at least in part, by at least two people.

When I was managing the goal for the team was to have at least two people know each thing, but avoid too much overlap between any two people. This is like some form of erasure encoding :)

A Company got down from 20 to 3 people. Completely different tech stack each. Many warnings that company was in major trouble if any of left. Other 2 had no way to support.

Oh It was so painful when it happened.

Then you've mitigated the bus factor, this thread is about that being uncommon or not fully supported in other places.

Part of the mitigation discussion here is a tech stack that is transferable.

In practice, "knowledge transfer" is pretty much a joke anyway. Unless they have been documenting important things to know along the way it's usually at best an ad-hoc, partial data dump of the most recent thing they were working on.

Even that goes a long way. I've seen in-progress work just dropped on the floor, then they launch, and the team scrambling like their hair is on fire when just looking at the dev's assigned tickets would have shown in-progress work to fix all the hair-on-fire issues before launch.

There should be knowledge transfer as part of work review..

yah, terminated with no possibility of knowledge transfer.

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