4 ms·

The “Bus Test” Considered Harmful

2 points by aard 8y ago

zbentley 8y ago
> If you lose an employee and you don’t hurt for at least a few weeks while the organization realigns itself to manage the loss, then that employee was likely not worth having around in the first place. It should hurt to lose them. The better they are, the more it should hurt. I think this misunderstands what the bus test means. It's not about "would there be zero impact if we lost this person", it's about "is there a way to adapt to losing them?" A super high-productivity person who improves others is never an easy loss to weather. That's very different from someone whose work is not understood sufficiently for others to take it over--even with lower productivity. If new, helpful ideas are getting rejected because they don't pass the bus test, it's not a situation of "the company just wants you to be a seamlessly replaceable cog in a wheel". Something else is going on: either the ideas aren't actually as good as the idea-haver thinks, or there's a political/communication problem between approvers and innovators. Very rarely is employee replaceability the real reason for rejection. > Most importantly, every engineer yearns to make new, innovative, unique contributions to his company. And it is precisely these unique contributions that will yield more advantageous market positions in the future. Not always. This is why I suspect that something else is going on, and it sounds like it might be someone who doesn't want to work on "boring" stuff whose managers are trying to find a way to tell them "no, we don't actually need a complete/bespoke/novel rebuild of this system--we need you to improve upon what we already have" in a way that lets them down easy, so they use the bus test as a deflection. > start valuing and rewarding people who make themselves indispensable. Absolutely not. Value and reward people who make themselves valuable and improve others. Someone whose goal is indispensability is usually a massive liability (or a sociopath). Indispensable employees are usually much less valuable than those who improve others--whether through mentoring or just consistently setting the bar really high.

2 points by aard 8y ago

> If you lose an employee and you don’t hurt for at least a few weeks while the organization realigns itself to manage the loss, then that employee was likely not worth having around in the first place. It should hurt to lose them. The better they are, the more it should hurt. I think this misunderstands what the bus test means. It's not about "would there be zero impact if we lost this person", it's about "is there a way to adapt to losing them?" A super high-productivity person who improves others is never an easy loss to weather. That's very different from someone whose work is not understood sufficiently for others to take it over--even with lower productivity. If new, helpful ideas are getting rejected because they don't pass the bus test, it's not a situation of "the company just wants you to be a seamlessly replaceable cog in a wheel". Something else is going on: either the ideas aren't actually as good as the idea-haver thinks, or there's a political/communication problem between approvers and innovators. Very rarely is employee replaceability the real reason for rejection. > Most importantly, every engineer yearns to make new, innovative, unique contributions to his company. And it is precisely these unique contributions that will yield more advantageous market positions in the future. Not always. This is why I suspect that something else is going on, and it sounds like it might be someone who doesn't want to work on "boring" stuff whose managers are trying to find a way to tell them "no, we don't actually need a complete/bespoke/novel rebuild of this system--we need you to improve upon what we already have" in a way that lets them down easy, so they use the bus test as a deflection. > start valuing and rewarding people who make themselves indispensable. Absolutely not. Value and reward people who make themselves valuable and improve others. Someone whose goal is indispensability is usually a massive liability (or a sociopath). Indispensable employees are usually much less valuable than those who improve others--whether through mentoring or just consistently setting the bar really high.