
Ask HN: Have you ever been on a project where the key person was hit by a bus? - stevekrouse
We talk about the &quot;bus count&quot; all the time, but I haven&#x27;t heard a first-person account of what <i>actually</i> happens if one of a team&#x27;s key people dies or rage quits or otherwise is unavailable. Have you ever been a part of such a team? How did it occur and more importantly how did the team bounce back? Did you successfully take over their code or does nobody touch it?
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malux85
I haven't, but a friend of mine has. He had a single developer who built the
whole product, and had all the code on his laptop (as far as I know, nowhere
else) and was in a car accident. Months later he's still in a coma. Killed the
project, lots of angry customers and damn near killed the business.

There's ways to mitigate this though, he should have been using source control
and someone else should have at least had access.

From the business angle, you can also get "key man" insurance, to provide some
financial safety net. I am key to 3 startups, and all of them have key-man
insurance against me.

~~~
shoo

      > should have been using source control and someone else should have at least had access.
    

I agree. Leaving aside the question of if anyone else understands the code and
could safely make changes, it seems incredibly negligent not to use source
control and for the company not to have backups in multiple locations that
multiple people have access to. Not rocket science.

~~~
catdog
Yep, being dependent on a single person might be unavoidable if you can't
afford to hire a backup but not backing up mission critical data is simply
incompetence. Doing it at least half way properly does not cost much nor is it
difficult.

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sparkling
Worked at a ~50 people agency (non-IT, other field...) where every single
decision was okay'ed by the CEO, he had full control of all accounts etc. The
guy was a true workaholic and would not hand any tasks or important decisions
to anyone else.

He started having various medical issues that lead to him being in the
hospital 90% of the time, having surgery almost weekly, for ~12 months. He
tried to give out directions and make calls from the hospital bed, but
obviously that was not working. The business collapsed to 1/4 the size it was,
many people got laid off.

~~~
shoo
I think this is a good example of building a business and focusing on being an
operator inside the system versus focusing on designing the system to run
autonomously.

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shoo
I worked in a small team of 6 or so on a web application running in a company
data centre, 2 people in the team were doing nearly all the work of
implementing deployment automation & rearchitecture to migrate the app into
AWS. They both got good job offers from different companies and quit within
about a month of each other, shortly before we were scheduled to migrate
production.

Fun times! I was happy they'd both found better jobs. Before they left there
were lots of knowledge transfer sessions with the team all in a room for a few
hours diving through all the layers of all the automation, trying to
understand how it fit together, and what the design constraints were.

It could have been much worse: enough lead time to do some knowledge transfer
and bring rest of team up to speed, none of the technology involved was
proprietary, everything was reasonably standard mix of open source automation
approaches + AWS, so plenty of access to documentation or working examples
from outside of the project.

In ended up okay in the end but it's still a small bit of data that perhaps
you don't want 2 people in the team with specialist knowledge, more than two
would be even better.

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anon55863
Yes, and it’s the reason I’m still employed with this company.

About 5 years ago, one of the executives wanted to replace our homegrown
software with another product. No one really wanted to switch, but she was
insistent and said she would take full ownership of the project. Once the
product was in place, they would let go of the development team.

So most of the team saw the writing on the wall and left during the
implementation of the product. I was also interviewing for new jobs when all
of a sudden the executive quit.

We were only 1/4 of the way through and no other person wanted to take
responsibility so the project stopped. I then told them I was thinking of
leaving, and they made me an amazing offer since I was one of the few
remaining members of the team. We actually all got huge raises to stay.

I’m still wary and keep active at networking, but it’s been a comfortable day
job.

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EnderMB
Yes.

I worked for a small studio that was a part of a big agency. We had two
directors - one that sat on the board of the main agency, which was in
transition to tech, and a designer that had been relocated. The designer was
allegedly a director in name only, due to years of service, but he tried to
run everything. Many of the in-house clients went through him, and he led the
design work on everything that went through the building.

One Sunday, when I was out with some mates, I got a call from the MD. The
designer hadn't turned up on Friday, and we assumed he was ill or that he was
busy doing something else. He had died in a car crash on his way into work.
The MD was on holiday, and because he was far away he couldn't get a flight
back until later on in the week.

That Monday morning was horrific. Most of our PM's were in tears, while I went
upstairs with the design team to have a beer. We waited until lunch for one of
the London directors to come down, and a few of them spent the week down with
us ensuring that everyone could get back to work. To their credit, we were
largely functional again within a few days.

Many clients were sympathetic that we had suffered a loss, but I remember
being brought into a conference call where one of our PM's was trying to talk
to a client. The designer managed a load of smaller clients himself, and one
of them had some work that needed deploying that day. The PM asked for a few
days to get it ready, and as I walked into the room I heard the client say "I
don't give a fuck who died. I want my website live today". We didn't have any
of the code, so I had to hack together a FOH website from the HTML we had in a
few hours, all while a dozen people were crying downstairs.

We weren't super close, but we had some good chats, and he came across as a
good, family man. We bonded over combat sports, because I train BJJ/MMA, and
his nephew is an amateur boxer. I don't get too emotional, but I struggled
when we all went to his funeral, and I got to meet his family. The main thing
I'll take from that experience was watching his kids play in the pub garden,
having a fun time with their friends, despite this being the wake for their
father.

In terms of bouncing back, the office is no longer operating, but for the
months after there was a stronger bond between many of us. Many of us still
meet up from time to time, and each year some of us meet up to remember him.

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afarrell
No, but my team lead just got married and is on holiday for 2.5 more weeks.

Vacation is a much more common case than death, especially in Europe where 28
days a year is standard.

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marktangotango
No, but somewhat related, I was at a company that mandated a switch from Java
to .net and fired the entire java staff and left only a skeleton crew of java
devs. The skeleton crew left and the newly hired .net folks were left holding
the bag.

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BXLE_1-1-BitIs1
Reminds me of one weird project as a contractor along with two clueless
employees and a project manager who was not producing specs to write code for.
He eventually succumbed to the bottle and vanished from view. For some strange
reason, his replacement and higher manager blamed me for an inability to pull
a rabbit out of a nonexistent hat and for an unwillingness to work for free.

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logiclabs
Worked on project in a small team, where the lead developer had a heart attack
shortly after the project started. I had to step up to take on his role,
though he was back in work 3 weeks later. As it was at the start of the
project, it didn't suffer any real issues.

