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Comment by skeeter2020 | Hacker News Reader

skeeter2020

I know the bus factor is the morbid "how many people can get hit by a bus?" idea, but I actually like to present it as "how wide is the bus?" in terms of people being the conduits along which information and instructions flow; a wider bus provides redundancy. Aside from being more positive I think it's also more accurate for how we want teams to work. The "win the lottery and quit" metaphor is just stupid.

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I usually rephrase it as “getting run over by the lottery” or “winning a bus”. Just to be different/humorous/less morbid.

Have I been in a life-long bubble such that the ordinary explanation of "bus factor" seems so mild that until reading exchanges like this a couple times it never occurred to me it might be morbid enough to bother someone? Or is this one of those things where people are looking for something to worry about but it's actually entirely fine? Like, I've seen children's cartoons with jokes that were more morbid than that.

(I do also like the lottery version and use them basically interchangeably, though the shorthand is always "bus factor" for me)

I think it may be that some people have low environmental-sensation barriers.

For them, hearing "bus factor" may make it through the barrier and result in an involuntary creation of imagery in their head of someone getting gruesomely hit by a bus, and then the corresponding emotions they would feel (or simply just the emotions, without the imagery).

Phrasing "getting run over by the lottery" sounds like a good humorous, compromise. But "winning a bus" sounds like you're actively rooting for the person to be hit. I'd stick with the former. ))

I don't think the analogy holds in the same way. To me, the bus factor represents how many people you can lose for an extended period of time before there are no subject matter experts left for a particular topic. If you've got 8 people on the team, but only 2 of them know how to do a particular thing, the bus factor is 2.

It's not about having enough people to do the work even if someone quits, it's about having enough people that know how to do something that we aren't losing chunks of knowledge if someone quits (or dies, or gets fired, or gets sick, or etc).

It doesn't make sense to me to treat people as part of a conduit bus that are interchangeable as long as there are enough people.

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