The Cemetery Is Full of Indispensable Men

Kids these days. They like to make up new names for old ideas and claim them for their own. It’s human nature to do so I guess. Kids these days also don’t think the world existed before the internet, so anything older doesn’t need renaming. If it never happened, you can’t re-name it, right?

So the recent generations are fascinated by software, and name situations that turn up in its adumbration and propagation as if they’re brand new problems. But they really aren’t. Just because captains of industry in the past used ledger books instead of Microsoft Excel, doesn’t mean they didn’t have sophisticated ideas about how the business world worked. Just the opposite, for the most part.

So we’re going to talk about the Bus Factor, and pretend it’s not just a javascript wrangler’s gloss on organizational memory, if you don’t mind. I’ve written several times about organizational memory here. I’d post links to it, but my organizational memory, and the regular kind, ain’t so good. Here’s the dictionary definition of the term:

Organizational memory (OM), sometimes called institutional memory or corporate memory, is the accumulated body of data, information, and knowledge created in the course of an organization’s existence. The concept of organizational memory includes the ideas of components knowledge acquisition, knowledge processing or maintenance, and knowledge usage like search and retrieval.

But the kids have coined their own term for it, and I like it better: the Bus Factor. It has a dictionary definition, too:

The “bus factor” is the minimum number of team members that have to suddenly disappear from a project before the project stalls due to lack of knowledgeable or competent personnel.

Of course that’s the least jocular version of what it means. The original meaning is, “What happens if so-and-so gets hit by a bus?”

This is an important consideration in the software world. Software development is filled with people who hate meetings. They hate telling anyone what they’re doing. They don’t like abstract standards of right and wrong. You know, like speling. They love talking about technical debt (I’ll do that later, unless I get hit by a bus), but not doing anything about it.

So the Wikiup suggest three ways to decrease the dangers of the Bus Factor:

Reduce complexity
Document all processes and keep that documentation up-to-date
Encourage cross-training

Since software development is a Aztec temple devoted to cutting out the end user’s hearts and sacrificing them to the gods of complexity, that first one is a non-starter. When was the last time any software was simplified?

Number two’s a doozy, too. For example, have you ever asked Google how to fix a Google problem? They have metric tonnes of “help” in the form of bulletin boards and other forms of “knowledge bases,” which are heavy on text and short on knowledge. All their suggestions refer to things that don’t exist anymore, or are called something different, or beside the point.

Number three’s a lark, too. Ask a code monkey to perform any other operation in the business and be prepared to see them throw themselves on the low-pile carpet and thrash around in a circle like Curley when he sees a tassel.

The kids are on to something here, though. IBM had a very long institutional memory, just to point out one malefactor among many. It didn’t help them survive the thorough Rometting they got. People who are working in new fields can’t always use old procedures to accomplish what they’re trying to accomplish.

But I’d like to commandeer the Bus Factor from the Zoomers and Millennials, and drive it to a destination that they don’t like to visit. They’re worrying about what happens if the guy who coded their statcounter has a suddenly and they don’t know how it works. Back in my day, we used to call that job security. But what they really should be worried about is how many seats are on that bus, and not who’s in front of it, but who’s sitting inside it when it goes off a cliff.

My generation is going to get on that bus en masse. We’re the generation that’s been climbing the phone poles at night on Christmas to get the lights back on. We built all the houses, and paved all the roads. We welded and painted and wired and plumbed and leveled and raised and moved and planted and sawed and every other damn thing that makes the difference between the twenty-first century and the tenth. We built all the missiles that the cocaine cowboy in Kiev is blasting all over the place.  Hell, we even built the internet you’re worrying about the Bus Factor on. In short, we did all the stuff you can’t be bothered to do anymore. Not with that sweet, sweet, javascript empire you’re going to make instead.

Napoleon once remarked that the cemetery was full of indispensable men. Good luck to you, when yours is.