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

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 So all of a sudden because his contracting company sued they had to shut this guy out which meant his visa status was revoked and he was going to get flown out of the country.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 [2] In a “subway” of all places