commonly called the bus factor. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus_factor
The article was about the personal impact of a person's death on their coworkers, nothing to do with the bus factor.
What Happens When One of Your Coworkers Dies
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Re: What Happens When One of Your Coworkers Dies
#22I had something like this happen at a small software company I worked about 15 years ago. Our owner had written a specialized program for his wife to sell on the side, but under the company's name. One weekend, after a very big fight, she ended up committing suicide after he'd left the house. The next week, they had me going through her email to get a list of customers she had been working with. I can't begin to tell you the amount of discomfort you feel going through a recently deceased person's email - especially when it was mixed with personal messages. I got in, found all the work related messages, forwarded them to my manager and got out - I couldn't bear to be in there any longer than I had to. No one at the company was very close with her, but it was still a complete shock.
Re: What Happens When One of Your Coworkers Dies
#23When I was working for an Indian out sourcing giant we had a 9 floored building each with a wide gallery. I liked working beyond 8pm and when I was about leave at 9pm I noticed a small crowd near one of the parking entrance. Soon found that someone had jumped from one of those galleries. An sms from the individual to his elder brother blamed the extreme work pressure. Knowing his team and manager, surely that did not…
Pressure isn't like mmHg or N/m^2, but a feeling tied to how your mind is wired.
"it's not the words that are said, it's the words you hear".
Re: What Happens When One of Your Coworkers Dies
#24I worked with someone who joined our development team as a junior. He was a bit aloof, and slightly arrogant. I moved on soon after he started, he IMed me for the contact details of a contractor we worked with, and that was the last I heard from him. I was not surprised to hear, a few months later, that the guy had been fired, because of his attitude.
Fast forward another few years, and I was Googling (or was it Facebook searching?) ex-colleagues who I'd lost touch with. My search led to news articles that referred to his death. He was killed in a bizarre road-rage incident, where he was clearly the aggressor.
His family had created a memorial page on Facebook, but hadn't reported him deceased. I reported his FB profile as deceased, it was memorialized and I moved on.
I spoke to the ex-coworker about what happened (the same one who told me about him being fired a few years earlier), and he pointed out how kind the eulogies were- not really describing the arrogant prick we worked with.
Re: What Happens When One of Your Coworkers Dies
#25Colin’s boss is on vacation this week. He recorded a message by webcam. He’s lying on his side on a hotel bed. He talks about the clarity of Colin’s press releases as palm trees shudder in the wind behind him. “I wish I had gotten to know him better,” he says. “He seemed nice.” Reading this kind of made me rage...and sad. Tragic, but the inequality, and the indifference free market creates, makes me steer clear away…
> you work to fulfill the desires of those above you.
If this is your attitude towards work for hire, then almost anything you do will be unfulfilling. Work to fulfill your own desires. For some, work is a means to an end. To others, the product of their work fulfills them. If you work to earn enough money to see your family thrive, then your work should be fulfilling because your family is provided for. If you work to enrich the lives of the markets you serve, your work should be fulfilling because you know that you are making the lives of others better in some marginal way.
Don't work for your boss. Work for your mission.
Re: What Happens When One of Your Coworkers Dies
#26I've had this happen a few times over the years. It's really tough. In one case it was a very popular and looked-up-to engineer. Out for a jog one day and an unknown heart defect dropped him dead before he hit the ground. People were very broken up over it and donated food and all sorts of things to his widow and kids. I think a small charity was set up in his name. In another, nobody really knew the guy outside of h…
How did those deaths affect your workplace? Do people try to hang out and talk more or do people generally just carry on normally?
An Exec I worked for died. I was fairly new and didn't really know him, so I just kept working. Others were a lot more affected. I remember there being group meetings to talk about his life etc. After about a week, someone said in one of the meetings, "That's enough crying, back to work." Seemed harsh at the time, but everybody went back to work. A room was named in his honor. Life goes on.
Re: What Happens When One of Your Coworkers Dies
#27I walked into work one day, and in my email was a remembrance note about a coworker who had just died. I did not know him, but in the email there was a picture of him fly fishing, and then another picture of him standing by his wife. He was an overweight, balding man in a Wal-mart jacket. Something about his "everyday, average guy" look scared me. I never knew him and if it weren't for the email, I'd never have known of him.
I grew angry, and could not figure out why. Was I sucked back into this reality that we all die when I had been working hard to deny it? Was it that someone could die, and some stranger like me had no interest or comprehension of his accomplishment? Was it that I only judged people by their accomplishment, when hypocritically, I had none of my own? Why did I suddenly hate this man, who I never knew existed, and only knew because of his death?
He was a father. He surely comforted his children on the first day of school. He went shopping for them on their birthdays. He had loved ones who grieved for him. Loved ones who had no talent to describe how great he was to them, but only knew he was great to them.
I still don't understand the oddness of my reaction, or why it still haunts me. We are all born in a blur of a gigantic population, and he was simply deleted from my inbox as my company insisted I delete my emails when it approached 150 mgb capacity.
I kept him new and unread as long as I could.
Re: What Happens When One of Your Coworkers Dies
#28A classmate fell to his death from his apartment's terrace in a skyscraper a few months ago. We were just coming back for our second year of Grad school. He was full of life, working on a startup for which he had won some funding via a competition, spending the summer at an Angel investor group, serving as a favorite TA for a top VC professor. He was a self-made immigrant and the best parts of life were right ahead of him. Nobody knew what happened, but it hit too close to home.
His parents requested that his name was not mentioned on social media until they had a chance to take him home to Europe and tell their family at home. We got together to honor him and express condolences to family and after a week or two, things went back to normal on the outside. On the inside questions still remained, not about what happened, but about the implications it had on us, his classmates, who are just like him in too many ways to count.
Re: What Happens When One of Your Coworkers Dies
#29This has happened in my experience before, and it is one of the strongest reasons for good source control that is infrequently considered. It was a tragedy when a very wonderful and dear researcher in our group died suddenly, especially to his three children and wife that he left behind. It was also a great loss as well that we could never recover some key bits of source code from his computer, and that a very promis…
When I've worked at places that had poor source control and/or poor documentation, I've resorted to trying to push for it by walking around saying, "Suppose I (or fill-in-the-blank) get hit by a bus? You'll all be up a creek."
Re: What Happens When One of Your Coworkers Dies
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
How did those deaths affect your workplace? Do people try to hang out and talk more or do people generally just carry on normally?
In the first case, everybody really took a day or two to come to terms that it had happened. Work really ground to a halt. People showed up to work, but took lots of time out of the office in coffee shops talking and processing the event. We named a room after him and had some ceremonies, everybody showed up to his funeral. It really took a few weeks for everything to get back to normal. In the other two people reall…
Right. What time of year was it in the first case? I would think it's easier to get over if it's the summer or around Christmas when people are going home for vacations.