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That would be justifiable if the risk was proportional to the cost. Frequently it just isn't. As a case in point, if "when, 3-5 people leave, it's almost bare

That would be justifiable if the risk was proportional to the cost. Frequently it just isn't. As a case in point, if "when, 3-5 people leave, it's almost barely noticeable an event" then you've almost certainly over-compensated for the general case. Why? Because the entire set of people who know anything about a given project simultaneously leaving should be incredibly rare. If that's your benchmark event probability, and your risk mitigation costs are linear in the risk probability (which they probably are, by vague handwavy analogy to finance thinking), then you're constantly bearing costs that aren't justified by the downsides you're likely to encounter unless the specific project in question is company-breakingly critical. If an entire dev team up and leaving isn't a rare event, you've got deeper problems.

emteycz 4y ago
This incredibly rare event has happened at almost every firm I've ever worked at (except small startups), multiple times a year (different teams/products, but sometimes also the same product with its new team)... Yeah they should fix the actual issue many layers above, but that's not something the guy planning for this can do at huge corporations. You just deal with whatever it throws at you.
- regularfry 4y ago
  Interesting. I think I've seen it once in a 20-year career.
WJW 4y ago
I think rather frequently the impact of such a "rare" event could indeed be company-breakingly critical, depending on which part of the company that team was running. As a thought experiment, if all DBAs left tomorrow and the database fell over the next day, how much time would the next-most-capable person need to figure out the backup policies and scripts, restore the db and bring everything back up? I've personally seen this sink a company outright. It's only anecdotal evidence ofc, but it is still something that happens. Worse, people leaving a team are not independent events. People leaving a certain team is often highly correlated to other people leaving the same team, because there is some common cause like a toxic manager.
Juliate 4y ago
"should be incredibly rare". Not incredibly, it's rare, but it happens (seen it in two small companies, it killed them; saw it in several ESN/consultancy projects, it killed the contract, but was a manageable event in the whole company; saw it in medium software companies, it killed the projects and sometimes pushed for strategy changes). It happens enough for many (not all) individuals to have noticed across their career (especially when in management, where a big part of their role is already to manage risk). It happens enough for any single company to be quite traumatized by it when it happened, and to try to avoid it in the future. Where some companies do it differently is: they don't overreact, they understand that this is a risk management issue and that you can balance it, and/or they don't setup a "general case" for all projets/teams (depending on the type of the project). This requires quite some serenity and perspective.

emteycz 4y ago

This incredibly rare event has happened at almost every firm I've ever worked at (except small startups), multiple times a year (different teams/products, but sometimes also the same product with its new team)... Yeah they should fix the actual issue many layers above, but that's not something the guy planning for this can do at huge corporations. You just deal with whatever it throws at you.

regularfry 4y ago
Interesting. I think I've seen it once in a 20-year career.

WJW 4y ago

I think rather frequently the impact of such a "rare" event could indeed be company-breakingly critical, depending on which part of the company that team was running. As a thought experiment, if all DBAs left tomorrow and the database fell over the next day, how much time would the next-most-capable person need to figure out the backup policies and scripts, restore the db and bring everything back up? I've personally seen this sink a company outright. It's only anecdotal evidence ofc, but it is still something that happens. Worse, people leaving a team are not independent events. People leaving a certain team is often highly correlated to other people leaving the same team, because there is some common cause like a toxic manager.

Juliate 4y ago

"should be incredibly rare". Not incredibly, it's rare, but it happens (seen it in two small companies, it killed them; saw it in several ESN/consultancy projects, it killed the contract, but was a manageable event in the whole company; saw it in medium software companies, it killed the projects and sometimes pushed for strategy changes). It happens enough for many (not all) individuals to have noticed across their career (especially when in management, where a big part of their role is already to manage risk). It happens enough for any single company to be quite traumatized by it when it happened, and to try to avoid it in the future. Where some companies do it differently is: they don't overreact, they understand that this is a risk management issue and that you can balance it, and/or they don't setup a "general case" for all projets/teams (depending on the type of the project). This requires quite some serenity and perspective.