Ask HN: Have you ever been on a project where the key person was hit by a bus?

I haven&#x27;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&#x27;s still in a coma. Killed the project, lots of angry customers and damn near killed the business.<p>There&#x27;s ways to mitigate this though, he should have been using source control and someone else should have at least had access.<p>From the business angle, you can also get &quot;key man&quot; insurance, to provide some financial safety net. I am key to 3 startups, and all of them have key-man insurance against me.

Worked at a ~50 people agency (non-IT, other field...) where every single decision was okay&#x27;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.<p>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&#x2F;4 the size it was, many people got laid off.

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 &amp; 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.<p>Fun times! I was happy they&#x27;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.<p>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.<p>In ended up okay in the end but it&#x27;s still a small bit of data that perhaps you don&#x27;t want 2 people in the team with specialist knowledge, more than two would be even better.

Yes, and it’s the reason I’m still employed with this company.<p>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.<p>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.<p>We were only 1&#x2F;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.<p>I’m still wary and keep active at networking, but it’s been a comfortable day job.

Yes.<p>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.<p>One Sunday, when I was out with some mates, I got a call from the MD. The designer hadn&#x27;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&#x27;t get a flight back until later on in the week.<p>That Monday morning was horrific. Most of our PM&#x27;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.<p>Many clients were sympathetic that we had suffered a loss, but I remember being brought into a conference call where one of our PM&#x27;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 &quot;I don&#x27;t give a fuck who died. I want my website live today&quot;. We didn&#x27;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.<p>We weren&#x27;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&#x2F;MMA, and his nephew is an amateur boxer. I don&#x27;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&#x27;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.<p>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.

No, but my team lead just got married and is on holiday for 2.5 more weeks.<p>Vacation is a much more common case than death, especially in Europe where 28 days a year is standard.

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.

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.

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&#x27;t suffer any real issues.