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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.

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.

Retric 3y ago
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.
- patrakov 3y ago
  Not crazy at all! 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.
BeefWellington 3y ago
> 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.
deleted 3y ago
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atomicnumber3 3y ago
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.
- syrgian 3y ago
  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).
sharts 3y ago
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.

Retric 3y ago

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.

patrakov 3y ago
Not crazy at all! 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.

BeefWellington 3y ago

> 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.

deleted 3y ago

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atomicnumber3 3y ago

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.

syrgian 3y ago
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).

sharts 3y ago

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.