Terminating an employee with a bus factor of 1

If you&#x27;re that concerned, give them a generous severance package, contingent on their cooperation.<p>I was the solo IT guy for a marketing company for 15 years. They always treated me fairly, but as time went on, there was less and less work. They outsourced the job, and gave me a 3 month severance, with health insurance (like I was still working), contingent on my cooperation with the consultants they retained to replace me.<p>There were no hard feelings at all. From time to time for a decade I got the odd call with questions, and was glad to help as much as I could.

I think this is the reason I was hired at my current company and it put me in an awkward position.<p>I was hired as employee #2 for a critical team at my company. For the first 3 months, my colleague and I worked closely together on everything I was doing. From production problems to day to day PR reviews, I had no one else to ask besides my colleague. We didn&#x27;t even have a manager we reported to. Then suddenly I was told they didn&#x27;t work at the company anymore. I was told they were still available for 2 weeks on Slack for any knowledge transfer I needed, but they would have no other access to our network, our Github, or anything else.<p>My advice is that option 1 in the SE question (hire a replacement, then terminate) should be avoided. How is that going to look to the replacement? It really shook me up. I was only a few months in, I didn&#x27;t have time to build trust in the company yet. If I could have, I probably would have went back to my old job right away. Then what happens to that knowledge you were hoping to retain? A year later I still wonder if someday the same will happen to me.<p>Instead, I would recommend approaching the employee and working out a deal for them to amicably train a replacement. The replacement should know going in that they are a replacement and they should be told to focus on training themselves and others on this knowledge. If they don&#x27;t agree to the deal then you fire them immediately. Yes, that&#x27;ll suck, and maybe you even have a production problem because of it, but you can make it work.

I worked with a guy who seemingly intentionally engineered his “bus factor” down to one. He worked on a giant inscrutable shell script that was used in all our provisioning, and it was kept solely on his laptop in RCS (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gnu.org&#x2F;software&#x2F;rcs&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gnu.org&#x2F;software&#x2F;rcs&#x2F;</a>)<p>So obviously, additions or changes all had to go through him. I’ve never seen such aggressive gatekeeping before or since. I’m still a little impressed!

The damage from keeping a seriously negative employee around is almost always underestimated and the risk is often overestimated.<p>I’ve worked in tech 30 years. I’ve seen dozens of “indispensable” employees leave voluntarily. I can only recall one time where the company even had a question that they’d wished they could ask the departed employee.

IMO, the only answer is to terminate them. They mention in comments they harass other employees and make inappropriate comments, which could lead to a hostile workplace lawsuit (and is just not cool).<p>You might end up having to dig out of a hole and that will suck. But just don’t let the hole form next time and take a lesson from the experience of digging out. Explain to the remaining staff how in the future we need to cross train and document, and use the “what if a bus hit someone tomorrow” parable. Folks might not relish the dealing with the mess left over, but sounds like they will appreciate the person not being in their workplace anymore.

The author of that post responded to a comment, saying that this employee that they want to get rid of tries to get other people to do work that is “in his job description” but that he doesn’t want to do.<p>I’m inclined to believe that there are no innocent parties in this workplace.

I once had a colleague who was fired by his company because he pissed someone close to the CEO off. When the off boarding took place they saw that his knowledge could never be transferred in the termination period, so the termination was revoked

Getting things documented so that there is some disaster recovery capability is reasonable.<p>Figure out that threshold, document that minimum, and then let the person go.<p>Possibly the situation changes while doing that, but if the decision to transition has been made, then stick to it.<p>The severance package in one of the other comments is important. Even if the person has to go, the departure need not be as acrimonious.

Why does HR language sound so dehumanizing? I mean terms like &#x27;terminating employees&#x27; &#x27;bus factor&#x27;

My raise was delayed&#x2F;canceled last January, and I loudly announced that I was looking.<p>I have always trained new employees in the use of puttygen and pageant for logins without passwords.<p>I take care of tablespace problems regularly, that would prevent trucks from leading our loading dock.<p>I don&#x27;t have to take malicious action; all I have to do is walk away. And they know it.

I have seen this multiple time.<p>I am now rewarding people and showing by example that you should find ways to make yourself redundant. Be able to go on vacation for 2 weeks while not receiving any calls, etc. The only person that is allowed to not be redundant is the owner of the company.<p>As to advice how to deal with the problem, it would very much depend on the history and combativeness of the employee. If the employee is very combative and a potential risk of doing something stupid, I would fire him immediately.<p>The benefit of this is you reduce a chance he will do something really stupid. You also show to the rest of the company what is and what is not tolerated.<p>If you have relatively good history and the employee is not combative and potential risk of doing something stupid, I would reassign another employee to get as much knowledge transferred. You want reassigned employee because it is already going to be hard following the guy even with the organisational knowledge. Ideally, you also want this person to be relatively high level, intelligent person that knows how to deal with ambiguity, manage problems, etc.<p>If he isn&#x27;t cooperating, I would bar him from touching anything and force him to only work through the assigned employees in training under threat of immediate dismissal. So if he cooperates and works through those employees, he benefits in being in employment for longer, potentially having more chance to find replacement job.<p>Obviously, this will not solve the problem, it will only blunt the blow a bit. If that person had a long time to build his castle, it will be very difficult for the replacement to get the hang of it and a lot of knowledge is going to be lost forever. That&#x27;s unfortunately unavoidable in this situation unless you really want to shower the person with gold to pass all that knowledge. But this is dangerous as it normalizes this type of behaviour and you really don&#x27;t want your other employees&#x27; main takeaway from this to be that making themselves critical is the best way to get rewarded.

Personally I&#x27;d go for documentation. Having all the knowledge in a persons head is useless. You could say your trying to add value to the company. Even help them along by providing an outline document that they have to fill in the blanks, like they&#x27;re answering a FAQ. You would have to know what questions to ask first at a high level. Then determine what needs more details and issue more FAQ requests as required until you have documented the system. OFC this will take another persons time, but guided documentation as part of a persons &#x27;new&#x27; work requirement would be worth it. You could even say its a new way you&#x27;re running the company and get other employees to say &quot;Ok I&#x27;m off to fill in my Friday FAQ&quot;.

Terminating a bus factor 1 employee is not the problem. The real problem is not recreating BF1 reloaded with the new hire. Even a team of two is not completely ideal.<p>Many, mostly small, companies just cannot justify an IT department to mitigate Bf1&#x2F;2 risks. Also, most times this bus factor problem manifests in non-IT jobs too: sales, contract law, accounting functions.<p>Small companies need to first become big companies to afford de-risking from BF1. Part of the growth story really.

I&#x27;m more curious how they became a bus factor 1 in the first place. The comment response<p>&gt; Harassment is one of the reasons. They also regularly make unprofessional and inflammatory comments. More technically, if they&#x27;re not interested in a certain aspect of their job they simply won&#x27;t do it.<p>Makes me think that this was a long standing issue and they kept him on because he kept the lights on even with being a bad person to work with. In my professional experience people usually show their colors early on if they&#x27;re one of those kind of employees, even if they&#x27;re a core pillar of the company.

I really don’t understand this approach to employment in the US.<p>A employer should be able to talk with an employee about issues or notify them with with reasonable time that their position is changing.<p>I know at least that I prefer to work in those kind of environments. I prefer to be approached and trusted with the information (good or bad).<p>Otherwise, how can we even work effectively as a business?<p>OPs situation does seem challenging and if the employee really needs to be fired for cause, then why prolong the inevitable?

I was the replacement for a bus factor 1 employee in a massive company and I would <i>strongly</i> recommend just terminating the employee (if that’s what you have to do) as soon as possible and figure the rest of the details out. It won’t be as bad as you think. If you can give them a severance deal that will secure their cooperation that’s great but if not you and&#x2F;or your existing employees will cope.<p>My story: I was hired by a massive global company to be the London counterpart of an employee in New York. They had hired this guy to run their Linux servers when Linux was a scrappy little experiment for them and very quickly all of their global businesses relied on Linux and they had about 200 Linux boxes globally which were not approved by IT and were supported and maintained by just one dude (who was a contractor on a visa btw. This will become important in a sec).<p>So they realised this one guy was critical and wanted to try to hire him permanently and also hired me to work with him so all this critical infra wasn’t only in the hands of one person. Now he said he had discussed the transition to permanent with his agency (but he hadn’t) and when they found out they immediately sued my new employer. So that was day 2 of my employment. I had flown to New York on what was supposed to be a 2 week stint to learn the ropes before coming back to London[1].<p>So all of a sudden because his contracting company sued they had to shut this guy out which meant his visa status was revoked and he was going to get flown out of the country. And because of the legal action my new employers were enjoined from speaking with him at all.<p>So there I was, suddenly sysadmin for about 200 boxes with (of course) no documentation and in a position where if they went down we stood to lose literally millions of dollars. And all I had had by way of a transition was to be added to the sudoers file (globally) and a friendly chat[2] where we had said no need to overload me while I was jetlagged and over the next two weeks he would hand over all the knowledge about how things worked etc.<p>The point is, there were bumps on the road but the transition worked out ok. We figured out how everything worked and gradually I put everything in a position where if I had to leave they wouldn’t be in that predicament again. I also hired my replacement(s) and moved on to other things within the same organisation.<p>[1] Eventually ended after 4 months when my visa was expiring so I had to fly home<p>[2] In a “subway” of all places

I once had to get to a business at 5am and spend several hours changing passwords for everything and everyone in order to fire a high bus factor employee that had been doing bad things.

Generous severance and ensure leaving on as good terms as much as possible.<p>Ahead of time, inventory all systems and ensure logins.<p>We had to let go several behavior-related folks over the years, and only 1 case where we really needed them after the fact: never for their knowledge, just 1 account access. If you hire smart people, and build in sane ways, few people are truly indispensable, esp around code. Having experienced that reinforces the idea of building a professional team, not hiring rockstars.

One of the benefits of agile done correctly, I.e. XP is that through pair rotation, companies don’t get in this situation.

tell everyone you aim for iso certification.<p>Then bring some auditors in to assess. And given the lack of doc, bring some consultants to &#x27;offload&#x27; the documenting work.<p>Usually toxic employees do not like to write documentation. But like to brag about their design to juniors.

Pay them more. And then pay them extra to do the work necessary to let them go. And then pay them a big bonus if the transition goes smoothly.<p>Saying fuck you, you make me rich, and I resent that I can’t get rich without your effort is no way to act, even if you can get away with it.

Step 1: Fire whomever in management let you get into this situation.

surprised no one mentioned, give them a promotion.