
The “Bus Test” Considered Harmful - aard
https://medium.com/@ard_adam/the-bus-test-considered-harmful-b431216db9cc
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zbentley
> If you lose an employee and you don’t hurt for at least a few weeks while
> the organization realigns itself to manage the loss, then that employee was
> likely not worth having around in the first place. It should hurt to lose
> them. The better they are, the more it should hurt.

I think this misunderstands what the bus test means. It's not about "would
there be _zero_ impact if we lost this person", it's about "is there a _way to
adapt_ to losing them?"

A super high-productivity person who improves others is never an easy loss to
weather. That's very different from someone whose work is not understood
sufficiently for others to take it over--even with lower productivity.

If new, helpful ideas are getting rejected because they don't pass the bus
test, it's not a situation of "the company just wants you to be a seamlessly
replaceable cog in a wheel". Something else is going on: either the ideas
aren't actually as good as the idea-haver thinks, or there's a
political/communication problem between approvers and innovators. Very rarely
is employee replaceability the real reason for rejection.

> Most importantly, every engineer yearns to make new, innovative, unique
> contributions to his company. And it is precisely these unique contributions
> that will yield more advantageous market positions in the future.

Not always. This is why I suspect that something else is going on, and it
sounds like it might be someone who doesn't want to work on "boring" stuff
whose managers are trying to find a way to tell them "no, we don't actually
need a complete/bespoke/novel rebuild of this system--we need you to improve
upon what we already have" in a way that lets them down easy, so they use the
bus test as a deflection.

> start valuing and rewarding people who make themselves indispensable.

Absolutely not. Value and reward people who make themselves _valuable_ and
improve others. Someone whose goal is indispensability is usually a massive
liability (or a sociopath). Indispensable employees are usually much less
valuable than those who improve others--whether through mentoring or just
consistently setting the bar really high.

