Bus Factor 1 | Applied Divinity Studies
A friend at a prominent tech company took last month off using their new covid policy. When he got back to work last week, he was horrified. Not to see that things had fallen apart in his absence, but to realize that they hadn’t. Overwhelmingly, life without him had continued as normal.
This is not a coincidence. A company dependent on a single person’s work has a single point of failure. In tech jargon, they have low Bus Factor, the number of people who would have to get hit by a bus for the project to fail. The higher your Bus Factor, the greater your institutional resilience.
But it’s hard to reconcile this experience with faith in an impactful career. If a firing squad executes a prisoner, we can say that each shooter is sufficient but not necessary. The success of the project depends on the shooters in aggregate, but not on any person in particular.
It’s easy to understand why an organization might want this kind of redundancy. Sure, it’s wasteful and inefficient, but it prevents the greatest threat to any company: giving employees leverage.
