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Comment by refibrillator | Hacker News Reader

> project management risks: “Lead developer hit by bus”

> software engineering risks: “The server may not scale to 1000 users”

> You should distinguish them because engineering techniques rarely solve management risks, and vice versa.

It's not so rare in my experience. Code quality and organization, tests and documentation, using standard and well known tools - all of those would help both sides here.

That's why I've had to invoke the "hit by bus" hypothetical so many times in my career with colleagues and bosses, because it's a forcing function for reproducible and understandable software.

Pro tip: use "win the lottery" instead to avoid the negative connotation of injury or death.

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> Pro tip: use "win the lottery" instead to avoid the negative connotation of injury or death.

I very much appreciate the attempt to reframe it positively. But personally, if I win the lottery, I’m still doing a handover. The key thing with “hit by a bus” is, no matter what your personality, you don’t have any time to prepare. Thats why you’ve got to get the information out there today. Unfortunately I’ve yet to find a positive spin that has those same connotations.

Depends on the other person, but "gets hit by a bus or abducted by aliens" or some other (movie) trope doesn't sound too bad if it's an informal discussion.

I dislike the "hit by the bus" not because it hypothetically kills a team mate, but because it implies that if one of us dies, the key worry of the management is who left who knows how to deploy the foo-banana service. This phrase is a reminder that nobody would care if you died apart from the fact that only you know how to do x and y.

"Abducted by an alien" is so absurd, it takes away all that and replaces it with something potentially fun and an experience of a lifetime.

I also very much prefer the lottery example, and the fact that someone on HN would still do a handover doesn't change that fact.

> the key worry of the management is who left who knows how to deploy the foo-banana service.

While it might be uncomfortable to be reminded of, it is in most cases true.

The company isn’t your family or your friends, and most managers adhere to the doctrine that the single important responsibility of the company is to create value for the stock holders.

Not that I am trying to make you upset, but I personally find this level of sensetivity in people annoying.

Life and death metaphors are my right to enjoy and share irreverently as the mortal being I am.

I died reading this comment.

But did you hand over your knowledge first?

So you would be OK if I used "abducted and gang raped for so long that you come out seemingly alive and physically intact but your mind has broke and you enter a catatonic state and can't do a handover" as an example? Because if you are not one of those "sensitive people" you should be able to focus on the "can't do a handover" part of the scenario and not get caught up in the gruesome part?

And before you ask, yes I enjoy being overly graphic like this on the pseudonumoyous internet to exaggerate my points but I wouldn't do this irl. That is hypocritical of me.

Depends if aliens were attractive?

Yeah I realize that "abducted" could suggest aliens, I was thinking more along the lines of Mexican drug cartel style abduction where your raping and being left alive is a wake up call to your partner in the police force that has turned the wrong stones. And the dudes doing the raping is not pretty. But the point is you are not able to do a proper handover, remember?

Why do you feel the need to go into details? "bus factor" is well known concept, it doesn't focus on details how the head disintegrates etc.

See my other reply...

The fact that you only respond like this anonymously should answer your original question/not-a-question.

from a more practical perspective: No, because you're replacing a well-understood metaphor with something that is unknown, juvenile and stupid, removing the value we get from shared language constructs.

By exaggerating the example and moving out of shared constructs I was trying to get wegfaw... to see how it is to be "annoyingly sensitive". That even though "hit by a bus" is "well-understood", it could still invoke very graphic memories if for example someone actually has lost someone in a bus accident. Sometimes words are not just words.

But i could imagine someone who states that it's his "right" to be as irreverent as he likes to whomever he wants to is not open to the concept of other people's perspective.

And just to be clear, I wasn't saying that you should use my example instead. :D

I am open to other perspectives, but that does not mean I must endorse all of them.

If it makes you feel any better I have given your perspective what I consider to be a fair consideration.

It just happens to violate my reward function.

Well that's all you can do and in that case I misjudged you, sorry about that.

Well, before everybody got sensitive I'd be OK with that too. It's not even very different from real world teasing talk and examples that were used by actual dev teams before the cult of HR grew.

And of course it's a strawman exaggerated version of the common "hit by a bus" idiom.

To be honest if you said that in a meeting I would laugh and immediatly want to make friends with you.

For me this sort of signaling isn't a sign of aggressive anticooperation, but a sign to me you see through bullshit, will point out wrongdoings, and will be candid. It doesn't evoke disgust or discomfort. It feels honest and friendly.

In the opposite case, bussiness casual english feels cold and disingenuous to me. Like reading apologies by GPT. I feel it as annoying insincerity. (I give a pass to anyone over 40, and usually find in private they are actually human after all.)

Different strokes.

You can do whatever you want, I'm just sharing if my manager says "we won't know how to fix a bug in the xyz service if you were hit and killed by the bus", my response will be "I don't really give a f what happens at this stupid company after I die".

Take it like this to understand that mine was aimed to be constructive criticism:

Stop reminding the people who work at your stupid company, doing all your stupid scrum bs ceremonies that if they died and left the wife and children behind, you would be really worried about Tom needing two days to fix a bug in the iOS watch application, whereas it would take you only two hours. Again, you are free to do whatever you want, but if you keep reminding me that none of this bs what I'm doing here really matters to me, don't be surprised that I quit as soon as possible.

but the manager is obviously (unless they are very, very bad) using a metaphor (that you don't like). By responding literally, what you're really saying is "I don't really give a f what happens at this stupid company after I LEAVE MY CURRENT RESPONSIBILITIES" regardless of why. It sounds like you have extreme trust issues with your manager if they can't make a (pretty benign) verbal mis-step with you, without this sort of response, and your follow up suggests you're in a really bad space. I can't believe it's not visible and leaking into other aspects of your work and interactions.

I'm okay now, thank you.

I did have a previous workplace, though, where they couldn't stop yapping about the bus factor and I disliked that phrase because it kept reminding me that one day I die and am wasting one more hour of my living days in a pointless retrospective that will have no positive effect on anything.

> You can do whatever you want, I'm just sharing if my manager says "we won't know how to fix a bug in the xyz service if you were hit and killed by the bus", my response will be "I don't really give a f what happens at this stupid company after I die".

So? The company isn't going to let all their employees starve to death out of compassion for the one that did die.

They know you don't give a fuck about what happens after you're dead, but they're still alive, and they have to keep things running so that they can continue eating.

Telling people that you don't care what effect your death has on them is a pretty good way to indicate how selfish you are.

I agree with you. But if you hate the poduct, and you hate scrumlords, and you hate your job, and you think the world would be better off if everyone at your company went on to spend their life working on something else.

It may not be selfish to feel an emotion giving you a background hint about reality. There are hungry children in the world, Im not selfish just because I dont want to eat fermented soybeans.

> This phrase is a reminder that nobody would care if you died

I don’t agree that the phrase implies that at all.

> This phrase is a reminder that nobody would care if you died apart from the fact that only you know how to do x and y.

An alternative interpretation is "we have to keep doing x and y to earn our living, and it's doubly difficult because not only did you know how to do them but we're all having difficulty coping with your passing".

People would care at a personal level, but the show must go on.

I had to take a sudden leave the week before, and my coworkers, and boss cared at a personal level. And while most of my tasks were taken care of by them some weren't, and I had to rush Monday morning when I got back.

This talk is not about personal feelings, even though it could include "do a memorial for the lost person", but it's about all the needed work that must go on on any scenario.

You should understand that people should keep going on their lifes once you are not there, and that is good. If they think kindly of you after your passing depends on your relationship during life, not on any company preparation scenario.

> it implies that if one of us dies, the key worry of the management is who left who knows how to deploy the foo-banana service

Story from this week:

Manager at large-ish IT support company, visibly distraught, tells their manager that one of her direct reports got cancer.

Response: "Oh, and I thought something bad happened, like the direct report quit."

Sorry you have to work with a toxic manager.

Got cancer ranges from will be out of office a few times a month for a few months to a year through to won't be here next month.

You are reading a lot out of words read on an internet screen. This manager may very well be toxic, they may also just not be able to express emotion in the same way and very well went above and beyond putting everything in place for said employee to receive all the medical support they need, mental and physical.

We don't know and for all we know OP is in a bad space and completely misread the situation.

This whole comment is devil's advocate, you can make the same argument for the exact opposite and of course your personal experience matters but leave the airing of dirty laundry out of public forums and if I do the same I encourage anyone to call me out on it.

if there is a backup plan then management can care about your death. If there isn't one and you die they can't care or enough to even attend your funeral as neeping things running will consume them.

>because it implies that if one of us dies, the key worry of the management is who left who knows how to deploy the foo-banana service.

That will exactly be the key worry of the management.

We've had team members lost like that - and that was the worry.

They'll still feel sorry, say their condolensces, and might even go to the funeral, but in the end, the work continues - almost immediately.

"Key person risk" captures all the possibilities.

> But personally, if I win the lottery, I’m still doing a handover.

I wonder why we talk about such rare events. People get sick, and burnout is very common, too. Some people look for a new job, and when they find it, they call in sick just to not have to handle all the stress of their old job.

There are plenty of more likely examples of not having a handover.

"Taken by the Rapture"?

"Doing a handover" won't save a lot of companies. There's no level of "handover" that will save some of the shops I've been in, that just 100% rely on one team member to handle _everything._ Even if they took a _month_ to try to pass along along their accumulated knowledge, there's ingrained engineering practices and processes that all boil down to "Go ask Chris."

Honestly, I'd say that if you're able to do a handover in two weeks, and that covers everything it needs to cover? Well, then probably the handover isn't _actually_ necessary, and anything you cover in those two weeks could probably be figured out by a reasonably competent teammate. Knowledge is rarely the issue, being a person-shaped load-bearing component for your team _is._

(But also, good on you for taking a bit of time to make sure your old co-workers aren't left in the lurch. It probably also gives a bit of time to consider what you _really_ want to do with the winnings, so as not to blow it all in the first year like a lot of lottery winners do.)

> "Doing a handover" won't save a lot of companies. There's no level of "handover" that will save some of the shops I've been in, that just 100% rely on one team member to handle _everything._ Even if they took a _month_ to try to pass along along their accumulated knowledge, there's ingrained engineering practices and processes that all boil down to "Go ask Chris."

That might very well be true, but to a manager having a handover means the problem of loss of institutional knowledge is solved, and any subsequent problem due to lack of context or loss of institutional knowledge is avoidable and caused by poor handovers.

>But personally, if I win the lottery, I’m still doing a handover.

How much time are you devoting to it? Enough for the project to ship, which could take months or a year, or merely enough to hastily give some other devs a breakdown of the thing, and "so long suckers" / hope for the best?

And, while you might (still do a handover), would others?

- Kidnapped to paradise

- Abducted by beautiful aliens

I don't like "win the lottery" because it implies that the sole reason for the person staying is money; it devalues their loyalty to the team.

Everyone's working for money in reality of course, but to me it doesn't feel team-spirited to call it out.

Good documentation will commit as much as possible to paper: to turn the implicit into the explicit. But then ya gotta keep it up to date.

It's happened twice now during my career that important colleagues were literally hit by buses.

And both were back to work in about a week.

I need a different standard example disaster.

  > Pro tip: use "win the lottery" instead to avoid the negative connotation of injury or death.

Win the lottery is still quite an euphemism for a more common outcome - getting laid off.

I use "the next person" more often to drive the point.

And there's the worse situation of "burnout" where you still have headcount but they've mentally checked out.

How about "takes a 3 week vacation"? I've seen lots of companies that can't survive that let alone a permanent departure. Or "increase bus count" which refers to removing a single point of failure and focuses on the motivation vs the cause of why you're in trouble. If you were doing root cause analysis you shouldn't stop at "because Larry got hit by a bus / won the lottery" because that's not the issue.

I've heard that positive spin responded to with "this company is my biggest investment, I'm not going anywhere" :)

> using standard and well known tools - all of those would help both sides here.

What if standard tools become unnecessarily complicated and are poorly designed ?

“Win the lottery” doesn’t really work in tech. So many mid career engineers are deca-millionaires with 15-20 years of grants and refreshers. They’re working because they enjoy the work.

Even at “regular” companies that don’t have hockey stick stock graphs, lots of the senior engineering staff are quite well off by their 40s. One of my division leads sold his last startup for 10s of millions of dollars. He still send emails late on Friday nights.

Maybe in silicon valley. Not in the vast majority of the tech world.

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