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What If Linus Torvalds Gets Hit by a Bus? (2000)

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Re: What If Linus Torvalds Gets Hit by a Bus? (2000)

#4

Post by Svip »

soneca wrote: post #3
Svip wrote: post #2

Might want to add '(2000)' to the title. I feel like Torvalds himself have been addressing aspects of this issue this year.

Read the text, it is not what you think

I did read the text. It's humorous. But the question itself is no less important. And considering what happened with Torvalds' position this year, one might think it is a follow up to that question. So I think adding '(2000)' would definitely be helpful, if not just accurate.

Re: What If Linus Torvalds Gets Hit by a Bus? (2000)

#5

Post by an-allen »

Real Story Here. A colleague and I developed a training course on the Foundations of DevOps. We started the course off with a discussion about risk in Software Delivery and IT in general. Attendees would often surface the "Key-Person Risk" or the "Hit by a Bus Risk" to which we would use as a teachable moment for pair programming, cross pollination, and measuring and improving the time it takes for new joins to become productive with the systems and or code base. We would illustrate that one of the ways we mitigated the Key Person Risk with the course was to always deliver it in pairs.

My colleague was tragically struck by a car and killed about three months ago. The course suffered an immense blow to the knowledge capital it had - but due to the fact that we had planned to mitigate against key-person risk by pairing - the course was able to survive and retain a fair bit of the legacy my colleague left behind.

I just share this to say that the getting "hit by a bus" scenario is something that, much like this post, we throw around in jest and treat in a laissez-faire fashion. The fact is that it is a tragic, unimaginable, event that does in fact occur from time to time and something I will take seriously for the rest of my life.

Re: What If Linus Torvalds Gets Hit by a Bus? (2000)

#7

Post by geofft »

an-allen wrote: post #5

Real Story Here. A colleague and I developed a training course on the Foundations of DevOps. We started the course off with a discussion about risk in Software Delivery and IT in general. Attendees would often surface the "Key-Person Risk" or the "Hit by a Bus Risk" to which we would use as a teachable moment for pair programming, cross pollination, and measuring and improving the time it takes for new joins to becom…

I'm very sorry for your loss.

I've heard "wins the lottery" as a less morbid metaphor for the same concept: one of your employees stops working in a low-probability event. Of course the higher-probability event is leaving their job (but somehow it's less polite to just say that); you usually get two weeks to hurriedly start documenting things, and with the current state of employee/employer relations you might easily get less. Or they might have several days of vacation saved up.

Re: What If Linus Torvalds Gets Hit by a Bus? (2000)

#8

Post by hirundo »

> Our sample consisted of 200 Linus Torvaldses

If there were 200 Linus Torvaldses then after one gets hit by a bus there would be 199 left. Even after the experiment there were at least 108.9 remaining. That should be plenty to keep Linux going. So what's the problem?

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