A lot of the article relates to a key person dependency issue. >Sure, they have built data infrastructure that works and solved the businesses current problems

A lot of the article relates to a key person dependency issue. >Sure, they have built data infrastructure that works and solved the businesses current problems. They maintain it, and no one asks questions. Probably all the "budget" has allowance for is current needs. Some of the key engineers may not even be paid very fairly considering the true magnitude of business problems being overcome currently. You can't really expect them to prepare for a longer future than they have already been fully staffed for, especially succession. >Perhaps no one realizes that one of the team members has to wake up at 6 AM every morning to check and ensure all the reports and tables have been created. >That all works until the day they leave. If a talented engineer is regularly working overtime to get things going like infrastructure, or worse to keep things going, even worse to keep things from failing, then that engineer is definitely short two staff members. And has probably been short the entire time. Nothing less than an assistant engineer and a technical secretary if they want real documentation as they go along. Plus even more true investment if there's any need to make up for lost time. If infrastructure is important, something like this is absolutely pure executive failure from someone who's just not in the proper league. You can not paint a pretty picture, and it's reported to be very difficult to fix stupid. Some people just should not be accepted as executives in technical endeavors. It can be tough for lesser executives to accept a non-cutthroat non-business-ladder-climber as more of a "key person" than themselves, but it is far too often the case. Whether the bonehead executives realize it and shrewdly calculate how much more payroll would expand if there was to be better coverage, or are completely oblivious, as the article says about the overworked engineers: >They maintain it, and no one asks questions. Example article is from a more expert data "repairman" who knows better than to rely on a single company as an employer if it's got dingbat executives. There's so many of the under-qualified executives to go around, he's got a lifetime of work ahead of him as a consultant fixing the lackadaisical way they let technical debt underlie a business to where it could topple unexpectedly.