If you're that concerned, give them a generous severance package, contingent on their cooperation.
I was the solo IT guy for a marketing company for 15 years. They always treated me fairly, but as time went on, there was less and less work. They outsourced the job, and gave me a 3 month severance, with health insurance (like I was still working), contingent on my cooperation with the consultants they retained to replace me.
There were no hard feelings at all. From time to time for a decade I got the odd call with questions, and was glad to help as much as I could.
I had a very similar experience. The CEO and I had some major drift in what we wanted from the product and company (I thought we were doing slightly unethical stuff), so we had to part ways. He was honest about it, I was honest about it, he gave me an awesome severance package and I rode off into the sunset without giving any trouble about it. My team was a bit gutted, in part because it was so unexpected and they were worried about their own jobs, but it smoothed over fairly quickly and easily.
I fielded questions for my team for 5 years or so. That was awesome. I felt like I had a little legacy there! I didn’t get paid, but the extent of my help was a short call, response to an email, a slack message, etc. I was happy to help. I really liked the people I worked with.
> They outsourced the job, and gave me a 3 month severance, with health insurance (like I was still working), contingent on my cooperation with the consultants they retained to replace me.
This seems a bit light if you are literally the guy who keeps all the lights on. I'd expect at the very least to transition you to a consulting contract at a very generous rate to ensure your continued cooperation.
How much do you think the consultants that they retained to replace you cost?
Far, far less.... they likely saved 75% or more. It started out as a 40 hour/week job, by the end, things got reliable enough that I spent most of my time waiting for things to do.
Because you are honest. I recently said GOOD bye to a coworker who left on their own, but damn, they were awful to work with and in hindsight their work was shit. With the ego we sometimes saw I believe they would have scorched earth had the company got wise and up right fired them.
You and one of the answers both call out 3 months severance, but I think that's far too little. It needs to be an amount where they obviously come out very ahead. Something like one year. An amount so impressive they'll be happy to leave.
I think this is the reason I was hired at my current company and it put me in an awkward position.
I was hired as employee #2 for a critical team at my company. For the first 3 months, my colleague and I worked closely together on everything I was doing. From production problems to day to day PR reviews, I had no one else to ask besides my colleague. We didn't even have a manager we reported to. Then suddenly I was told they didn't work at the company anymore. I was told they were still available for 2 weeks on Slack for any knowledge transfer I needed, but they would have no other access to our network, our Github, or anything else.
My advice is that option 1 in the SE question (hire a replacement, then terminate) should be avoided. How is that going to look to the replacement? It really shook me up. I was only a few months in, I didn't have time to build trust in the company yet. If I could have, I probably would have went back to my old job right away. Then what happens to that knowledge you were hoping to retain? A year later I still wonder if someday the same will happen to me.
Instead, I would recommend approaching the employee and working out a deal for them to amicably train a replacement. The replacement should know going in that they are a replacement and they should be told to focus on training themselves and others on this knowledge. If they don't agree to the deal then you fire them immediately. Yes, that'll suck, and maybe you even have a production problem because of it, but you can make it work.
> If they don't agree to the deal then you fire them immediately
this does nothing but hurt the business. it hurts the person being hired the most, which in this story is you, because that new hire will still happen and they won’t have as good of training.
Indeed it should be a standard practice to maintain some kind of paid retention/consulting relationship for a few months post exit. It’s a win-win for just a few months extra cost.
Or, you can do what I did when an evil manager tried to do this to me: tell the new hire what’s going on, work as a team to do a great job for your customers while turning them against management, then use managements opposition to all your great work together to get said management fired.
> Or, you can do what I did when a manager tried to do this to me, tell the new hire what’s going on, work as a team to do a great job for your customers while turning them against management,
Okay, I'm with you so far.
> then get said management fired.
Then draw the rest of the fucking owl? How did you do this?
I'm guessing you were somewhere relatively large. I knew someone who got replaced like this and it was a small enough company that I don't think this could have been done because there was no layer of management between them and the top dog doing this to them.
Oh, and no one above that guy either. He was the owner of the business.
Yeah, this only works if you can play some higher than your boss against your boss. You’re screwed if it’s a smaller place or the CEO or someone like that is directly doing this to you.
When I graduated I really struggled to find a job. It took 18 months and the first job I got was a small place. I was hired directly by the owner and I had one colleague. On the last day of the first week, the owner took me to lunch and said, "we are going to fire [the other employee] and you will do his job". I was gobsmacked. I quit when we got back to the office. Fire the other person if you want, but don't make me complicit.
I think it was unethical to do it like that, yeah. And you're right I don't know the history between the two of them, so I can't say which was the asshole. But I do think I'd have been an asshole had I stayed after learning that.
I've written/read the word asshole so many times, I'm reminded of Spaceballs!
But you're right, I didn't know them enough to judge who was in the wrong. I think that was the problem. If he'd just fired the guy without telling me, I'd have been surprised but there wouldn't be anything I could do. Instead, he effectively gave me a choice: stay and someone you barely know loses their job, or leave.
Unlikely (because he's dead), but... small place, hired directly by the owner, exactly one colleague, told (over a meal) you're going to take over his job.
I worked with a guy who seemingly intentionally engineered his “bus factor” down to one. He worked on a giant inscrutable shell script that was used in all our provisioning, and it was kept solely on his laptop in RCS (https://www.gnu.org/software/rcs/)
So obviously, additions or changes all had to go through him. I’ve never seen such aggressive gatekeeping before or since. I’m still a little impressed!
It's a subtle art that doesn't get as much attention as it should. Instead everybody is into design patterns and functional programming and all that garbage.
The ultimate master would not only hoard code on his own laptop and still keep his job but he would make it seem like you're the crazy one when you speak out and get you fired.
The damage from keeping a seriously negative employee around is almost always underestimated and the risk is often overestimated.
I’ve worked in tech 30 years. I’ve seen dozens of “indispensable” employees leave voluntarily. I can only recall one time where the company even had a question that they’d wished they could ask the departed employee.
The damage of keeping a negative employee is often underestimated but I disagree about the other bit. Companies always greatly underestimate the damage caused by someone with years of knowledge and context leaving. I've seen it time and time again. I feel it each time I switch jobs.
It goes from: someone who can literally look off into the distance during a meeting and go "hmm yeah I just did the architecture design in my head, this won't be too bad of a project, it'll probably take 2 people 1 quarter and one of those people has to be either Alice or Bob" and then you do it and it works and it's great.
And goes to: "we'll have to do a 2 week discovery phase where one of the senior engineers goes in and reads 5 years of source code for 3 days and then mulls it over for 2 more and then does a design and confers with 2 other people so we can patch together the knowledge we lost when <veteran from first example> left"
It's damaging. And it somehow has a habit of reinforcing itself - more people leave, you end up never having people who have more than 1-2 years of context and everyone's context overlaps less. And management never cares, somehow, since all their bs metrics for productivity correlate so poorly with actual work getting done that they don't notice and in fact think the situation is improving.
Same experience. I know one example of "oh yeah, he had been here since the creation of the company but he became a drag and his departure was welcome" for each 10 examples of "development speed, reliability and talent retention dropped after this person left".
And it doesn't happen just with software development, both as individual customer and employee I have cut ties with companies of all kinds after they lost their most valuable employee and the replacements would need years(if ever) to provide equivalent service. Probably most people have done this after service greatly degraded without being able to pinpoint it to an specific employee (e.g. the cook in a restaurant).
I’ve seen multiple instances where 1 person leaving was extremely expensive.
In one case finding the source code took 8 weeks, at the end of that recreating everything from scratch was being seriously considered. The crazy thing is the employee explained where everything was when they left, the other person simply didn’t understand the details.
I have been that bus-factor-1 employee. I raised my concerns to the CEO several times, and it always looked like this: "I am a bus-factor-1 employee, this is bad - please teach somebody else in the company - I tried and failed, nobody has the prerequisite knowledge, nobody understands me when I try to teach". This looks very much like the situation that you are describing. I'd say that "bus factor 1" is not necessarily the root cause of the lost knowledge - it might be a consequence of other hiring mistakes.
I had also seen this in a different company (but not in the context of a person leaving) when we hired a single machine-learning specialist. I watched his struggles to communicate with everyone else who didn't have the background.
In a different company, I was on the other side of the stick - an employee who did not have the prerequisite knowledge to be the target of knowledge transfer. That's also really frustrating - due to not meeting the (unreasonable) expectations and "learning too slowly," I had to go to a psychiatrist and eventually left.
> I can only recall one time where the company even had a question that they’d wished they could ask the departed employee.
This happened to me many many years ago at a job I thought I left on good terms with. Times were tough in the company's particular industry and I got laid off. Wound up working elsewhere in an unrelated industry (still doing sysadmin / netadmin / code monkey type stuff).
Fast forward a year and I get a phone call from a new guy at the old job on speaker with the office manager demanding I give them a bunch of passwords to systems (as though I'd kept them). Very accusatory that I hadn't documented anything when I left, they might have to sue me, etc. It caught me very off guard but I had the sense to simply tell them they knew where to send their legal threats and hung up. I never heard from them after that.
I found out through a former colleague that basically, at the suggestion of a vendor, they got rid of Sharepoint to "save on licensing" and migrated to Google Docs. They didn't really do the migration part properly and lost a bunch of data, among them a bunch of system passwords they hadn't bothered changing after I left.
I’ve done about 20 years. And in majority of cases it’s not about “wishing” they could ask a departed employee —people are smart enough to figure it eventually.
The problem is that having someone to ask would help solve an issue in about 5-minutes to an hour whereas without this ability it becomes a multi-day/multi-week endeavor involving multiple engineers and likely will require a couple of iterations.
Management never correctly factor in not only the amount of time required to address an issue but also the opportunity cost of developers that could be making forward progress on other issues rather than picking up slack, etc.
And the reason this happens is that metrics for productivity tend to just be random nonsense.
IMO, the only answer is to terminate them. They mention in comments they harass other employees and make inappropriate comments, which could lead to a hostile workplace lawsuit (and is just not cool).
You might end up having to dig out of a hole and that will suck. But just don’t let the hole form next time and take a lesson from the experience of digging out. Explain to the remaining staff how in the future we need to cross train and document, and use the “what if a bus hit someone tomorrow” parable. Folks might not relish the dealing with the mess left over, but sounds like they will appreciate the person not being in their workplace anymore.
Yes. The technical cost of having to backfill what they know needs to be strongly considered against the morale cost of the rest of the team observing that the company has chosen to keep a known harasser on the team for one more day.
If management is concerned about losing someone with a bus factor of one, how concerned should they be about "the whole team walked because they realized the company sucks and protects abusers?" People in this business are tired of technically competent assholes getting a pass.
The author of that post responded to a comment, saying that this employee that they want to get rid of tries to get other people to do work that is “in his job description” but that he doesn’t want to do.
I’m inclined to believe that there are no innocent parties in this workplace.
An employee who accomplishes only some of their allotted work accomplishes some work!
The best solution to that problem is almost never to simply get rid of that employee. Why would you be confident that a replacement would set up and do it all? Would any of your current employees do that? I assume not, else you would have them doing it by now.
Just because something is in a job description does not make that thing feasible, let alone reasonable. Too many employers are willfully blind to that reality.
I once had a colleague who was fired by his company because he pissed someone close to the CEO off. When the off boarding took place they saw that his knowledge could never be transferred in the termination period, so the termination was revoked
What is "the termination period" and what obligation does the fired employee have to transfer any knowledge, do any work, or even communicate with the company any more?
what country contractually obligates someone to continue working for a company that fired the person? would the person go to jail if they took a few extra sick days?
sick days are just allowed with the approval of an doctor, it's an European country. btw, you would not go to jail if you would not cooperate but could be you are sued for compensation
I don't believe Bus Factor was invented by an HR person. I believe it was invented by ... probably an engineer, actually as a reflection of "something irreversible". A person who gets married or wins the lottery might be able to be contacted to help; but, if they're dead or in a coma, there's no communication. It's a way of putting weight into something that a company might actually understand.
It's definitely not HR language, they are especially squeamish about evoking gruesome images like a person being run down in the street by a bus.
Wikipedia's sources suggest it's a metaphor conjured by developers, as you suggested:
> An early instance of this sort of query was when Michael McLay publicly asked, in 1994, what would happen to the Python language if Guido van Rossum were to be hit by a bus.
> "Truck number" was already a recurring concept in the Organizational Patterns [of agile software development] book published in 2004, itself an evolution of the work published in the first book of the Pattern Languages of Program Design series in 1995, which was the publication record of the first Pattern Languages of Programs conference in August 1994, where it was referenced in patterns including Solo Virtuoso. ... It was seen in engineering by 2003, and the Debian project in 2005.
I always got the impression it was actually quite neutral. One day the employee was gone due to an unexpected external force. Neither the employee's nor employer's fault.
It is a lot less neutral to say an employee was "fired" or "quit"
It's distastefully ghoulish and trivializes the trauma of people who have lost loved ones to vehicle accidents.
For anyone who hasn't led a wonderfully sheltered life that lets them conceptualize the situation as if it were something out of a "Looney Tunes" cartoon, it's going to evoke imagery of pools of blood and viscera on asphalt.
Not the kind of mentality you'd usually expect from an HR department.
It starts with the name "human resources". All HR departments I worked with treated employees as resources rather than humans. Bureaucracy all the way, with a thin veneer of human connection that'd be gone the time you walked out of HR's offices.
I'm fully aware that they're people. That doesn't mean I'm obligated to stick up for them. If they're good, I would stick up for them even if they were a hyena.
I am slowly led to believe there’s a chasm. On one hand, IT guys in classic sysadmin roles, with perhaps some newly added responsibilities, earning them the DevOps moniker. On the other hand, actual software people, capable of more than managing Active Directory and antivirus software.
The former types sometimes proclaim being irreplaceably good, when in reality they’re living out their power fantasies, and were at some point bestowed with all-powerful access. They’re trustworthy, but fungible employees, certainly not kept for their tech chops. I find this to be a weird type.
In my experience the class of people calling what I do “IT” has no conception of million+ dollar roles in software engineering. It’s sort of a (flawed and anecdotal) litmus test in terms of whether they are truly an industry insider.
I am now rewarding people and showing by example that you should find ways to make yourself redundant. Be able to go on vacation for 2 weeks while not receiving any calls, etc. The only person that is allowed to not be redundant is the owner of the company.
As to advice how to deal with the problem, it would very much depend on the history and combativeness of the employee. If the employee is very combative and a potential risk of doing something stupid, I would fire him immediately.
The benefit of this is you reduce a chance he will do something really stupid. You also show to the rest of the company what is and what is not tolerated.
If you have relatively good history and the employee is not combative and potential risk of doing something stupid, I would reassign another employee to get as much knowledge transferred. You want reassigned employee because it is already going to be hard following the guy even with the organisational knowledge. Ideally, you also want this person to be relatively high level, intelligent person that knows how to deal with ambiguity, manage problems, etc.
If he isn't cooperating, I would bar him from touching anything and force him to only work through the assigned employees in training under threat of immediate dismissal. So if he cooperates and works through those employees, he benefits in being in employment for longer, potentially having more chance to find replacement job.
Obviously, this will not solve the problem, it will only blunt the blow a bit. If that person had a long time to build his castle, it will be very difficult for the replacement to get the hang of it and a lot of knowledge is going to be lost forever. That's unfortunately unavoidable in this situation unless you really want to shower the person with gold to pass all that knowledge. But this is dangerous as it normalizes this type of behaviour and you really don't want your other employees' main takeaway from this to be that making themselves critical is the best way to get rewarded.
If the company employs people full time or does critical work for its customers, then even the owner should be redundant to some degree! Maybe a chain of command where top employee(s) could step in and keep things running for a while.
So the owner is a special case (and I specifically used the term owner and not CEO), because he/she can do whatever they want as long as it is within the law.
If they created the company just to feel important and needed then who am I to tell them they need to make themselves redundant?
Obviously, there are good reasons for the owner to actually be redundant and if I was advising them, I would try to argue that the business might be healthier and their ownership less risky if there are other people who can pick up the responsibilities of the owner.
For example, I have seen companies where the owner would be the only person to have access to the company account and pay out salaries. The issue with this is that sometimes he would be busy and salaries would not be paid on time but maybe a day or two late. The owner never ever lived paycheck to paycheck so had no empathy to understand what is this feeling of uncertainty doing to his people who expect and depend on the money arriving on time.
Obviously this was a serious legal problem. But I argued with him that even if it wasn't he would still benefit from somebody else having access to the account and making payments on time just to avoid damaging morale of his entire crew.
In this case, the owner could not stand the feeling of surrendering the access to the account to an employee. I advised that he makes two separate accounts, one where he keeps majority of funds that he and only he can access and the other which has enough of cash on it to allow his employees do day to day business without disruption. This way any damage from an employee would be limited. That placated him somewhat and in time he started to enjoy the feeling of not having to be constantly pressed for time to various payments and started keeping larger buffer.
Personally I'd go for documentation. Having all the knowledge in a persons head is useless. You could say your trying to add value to the company. Even help them along by providing an outline document that they have to fill in the blanks, like they're answering a FAQ. You would have to know what questions to ask first at a high level. Then determine what needs more details and issue more FAQ requests as required until you have documented the system. OFC this will take another persons time, but guided documentation as part of a persons 'new' work requirement would be worth it. You could even say its a new way you're running the company and get other employees to say "Ok I'm off to fill in my Friday FAQ".
I'd try the same, but with more emphasis on your last point. Have your effort or that of a consultant focused on someone else within sight/similar of the troublemaker. Have the consultant ask the troublemaker for help in documenting this other staff member's processes so you build rapport and it's not obvious the focus will soon be directed at them. Prioritise the key bits first.
Could some 'security testing' also require that consultants have overarching access, and at some point indirectly remind the troublemaker that there would be legal repercussions for an employee misusing access/control?
It depends; I write docs because I forget how to do things, so I write everything I'll need to know next time in the wiki, plus a little bit more to help me hand off to someone else so they can do the work too. And this apparently produces docs that other people find useful, because I get very positive feedback.
I also write docs because I forget, but I only write them for myself, a kind of rubber ducking. I don't share them because there's a high level of effort requires to make the docs great and I use Obsidian, so my docs are interlinked notes rather than 1 nice doc. That and also the low view counters in most of the Confluence docs are discouraging.
Terminating a bus factor 1 employee is not the problem. The real problem is not recreating BF1 reloaded with the new hire. Even a team of two is not completely ideal.
Many, mostly small, companies just cannot justify an IT department to mitigate Bf1/2 risks. Also, most times this bus factor problem manifests in non-IT jobs too: sales, contract law, accounting functions.
Small companies need to first become big companies to afford de-risking from BF1. Part of the growth story really.
I'm more curious how they became a bus factor 1 in the first place. The comment response
> Harassment is one of the reasons. They also regularly make unprofessional and inflammatory comments. More technically, if they're not interested in a certain aspect of their job they simply won't do it.
Makes me think that this was a long standing issue and they kept him on because he kept the lights on even with being a bad person to work with. In my professional experience people usually show their colors early on if they're one of those kind of employees, even if they're a core pillar of the company.
I was the replacement for a bus factor 1 employee in a massive company and I would strongly recommend just terminating the employee (if that’s what you have to do) as soon as possible and figure the rest of the details out. It won’t be as bad as you think. If you can give them a severance deal that will secure their cooperation that’s great but if not you and/or your existing employees will cope.
My story: I was hired by a massive global company to be the London counterpart of an employee in New York. They had hired this guy to run their Linux servers when Linux was a scrappy little experiment for them and very quickly all of their global businesses relied on Linux and they had about 200 Linux boxes globally which were not approved by IT and were supported and maintained by just one dude (who was a contractor on a visa btw. This will become important in a sec).
So they realised this one guy was critical and wanted to try to hire him permanently and also hired me to work with him so all this critical infra wasn’t only in the hands of one person. Now he said he had discussed the transition to permanent with his agency (but he hadn’t) and when they found out they immediately sued my new employer. So that was day 2 of my employment. I had flown to New York on what was supposed to be a 2 week stint to learn the ropes before coming back to London[1].
So all of a sudden because his contracting company sued they had to shut this guy out which meant his visa status was revoked and he was going to get flown out of the country. And because of the legal action my new employers were enjoined from speaking with him at all.
So there I was, suddenly sysadmin for about 200 boxes with (of course) no documentation and in a position where if they went down we stood to lose literally millions of dollars. And all I had had by way of a transition was to be added to the sudoers file (globally) and a friendly chat[2] where we had said no need to overload me while I was jetlagged and over the next two weeks he would hand over all the knowledge about how things worked etc.
The point is, there were bumps on the road but the transition worked out ok. We figured out how everything worked and gradually I put everything in a position where if I had to leave they wouldn’t be in that predicament again. I also hired my replacement(s) and moved on to other things within the same organisation.
[1] Eventually ended after 4 months when my visa was expiring so I had to fly home
I once had to get to a business at 5am and spend several hours changing passwords for everything and everyone in order to fire a high bus factor employee that had been doing bad things.
Generous severance and ensure leaving on as good terms as much as possible.
Ahead of time, inventory all systems and ensure logins.
We had to let go several behavior-related folks over the years, and only 1 case where we really needed them after the fact: never for their knowledge, just 1 account access. If you hire smart people, and build in sane ways, few people are truly indispensable, esp around code. Having experienced that reinforces the idea of building a professional team, not hiring rockstars.
I was the solo IT guy for a marketing company for 15 years. They always treated me fairly, but as time went on, there was less and less work. They outsourced the job, and gave me a 3 month severance, with health insurance (like I was still working), contingent on my cooperation with the consultants they retained to replace me.
There were no hard feelings at all. From time to time for a decade I got the odd call with questions, and was glad to help as much as I could.