The Real Cost of a Bus Factor of One

The bus factor measures something most managers think they understand but don't: the distance between what they believe their best employee is handling and what that employee is actually experiencing. Three layers of organizational insulation keep the real conversation from happening, and a vendor quote proves the math was always impossible.

Imagine you got hit by a bus tomorrow. What happens at work?

Not your team — they'd be fine, eventually, the way teams always are. What happens to the twelve things only you know how to do? The service that needs restarting in a specific order. The vendor relationship that lives in your inbox. The legacy codebase nobody else has touched since 2019. The deployment process that's documented in your head and nowhere else.

If the honest answer is "several things would quietly stop working and nobody would know how to fix them for weeks," then your organization has...

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