Thread by @QuinnyPig

Ever notice that companies always like to define a key employee leaving as "hit by a bus?"

A thread on this weird, weird, WEIRD framing.

It turns out that the number of employees who leave for "a different job" dramatically outweighs the number of employees who are hit by buses in virtually every geography.

But it terrifies companies if you raise the spectre of taking a new job. Far better to raise the spectre of your untimely demise instead, because it makes your employer more comfortable that way.

Other shops use "win the lottery" as a more upbeat example.

It turns out that the number of employees who leave for "a different job" dramatically outweighs the number of employees who win lotteries in virtually every geography.

There's also an element of "nobody can relate to getting hit by a bus." Buses are loud, slow, noisy things. Only someone completely oblivious would fall prey to one, so clearly nobody's ACTUALLY getting hit by a bus. As long as you're careful it won't happen to you!

"If you collapse at your desk and die of a stroke or heart attack" is an example that absolutely no one uses, because that can happen to anyone without warning.

This of course leads us naturally to the idea of documentation.

It's key to identify who the target audience is for your runbook. If you're "hit by the bus" and someone needs to complete a task, what's the baseline knowledge they're bringing?

I usually default to "someone with my similar skillset, but doesn't know specifics of the env."

In my sysadmin days, my default assumption is that you wouldn't need to teach my replacement what the Linux command line was.

For some things this is insufficient. "A quick primer on the underlying systems" was needed in some cases for a variety of reasons.

Note that many @awscloud blog posts and tutorials make this assumption about IAM roles, otherwise every post would be 2/3 IAM policy creation by volume.

This is a separate problem.

Another aspect to the "hit by a bus" framing is that you're likelier to be fired out of the blue than hit by a bus.

The company finds it unpalatable to hire you as a consultant to help; your heart still beats, but you're dead to them.

They prefer not to raise that, either.

I quit a job once and had a former colleague get salty when they reached out with a question on how I'd set something up. "That sounds like billable work to me" was my response.

I stand by not volunteering for companies. The best part of quitting is that it's Not Your Problem.

I'm a big believer in documenting what you do. The corporate response to a position of "they could never replace me" is "that's a challenge we can't *wait* to solve!"

"Companies that failed because one person rage-quit" isn't that long of a list.

A number of companies have formal policies limiting how many executives may travel on the same commercial flight.

I'm unaware of any policies that restrict how many execs may ride in the same car.

(IBM Cloud can fit 40 execs in the same car because they're a clown show.)

This extends beyond permanent loss, but also to sick days, parental leave, childcare conflicts, etc.

We're a small company; virtually everyone is critical to something or other. How do we compensate?

Primarily by being decent humans.

It turns out that "we need to deal with a weird one-off thing on a tight timeline" gets people volunteering to do it if they feel valued and respected.

And if it's not the common model of operating. If everything's an emergency, you suck at planning.

In conclusion:

* Don't kill your coworkers hypothetically.
* Plan ahead.
* Treat people like humans.