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I believe you have it backwards regarding the bus factor. The company wants the bus factor to be as high as possible. From Wikipedia: “The "bus factor" is the m

I believe you have it backwards regarding the bus factor. The company wants the bus factor to be as high as possible. From Wikipedia: “The "bus factor" is the minimum number of team members that have to suddenly disappear from a project before the project stalls due to lack of knowledgeable or competent personnel.” The issue here is you are treating employees as cogs that have to be “in the machine” for it to work (i.e. the value they provide is to keep the business running). Valuable employees don’t necessarily cause the business to stop working if they leave. They just continuously add value (individually, making people around them better, designing systems that provide advantages over the long term, etc.) when working that wouldn’t be created if they weren’t there.

dvfjsdhgfv 5y ago
You're right, also the situation you describe is an ideal one. I might be skewed working for a company that is being "optimized" (it's been several years already). It's not like the financial results are bad, but the CEO assigned the middle management the aim of finding all non-essential jobs and do away with them. Before the pandemic we were throwing goodbye parties to a couple of people each month; now the most they can count are sad Teams meetings that make the thing even more depressing. The work of these people is being distributed among those left, with mixed results. The company is still great to work for for various reasons so basically everybody developed the skills and attitude I mentioned above.
orthoxerox 5y ago
> I believe you have it backwards regarding the bus factor. It's like the learning curve. A steep one is supposed to mean something is easy to learn, but more people have it backwards.