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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)

#91

Post by microtherion »

scarface74 wrote: post #62
bauerd wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mind providing a source for this? I read this all the time but it doesn't match my experience here in Germany.

1.5 to 3 years doesn’t seem to be too far off the mark. https://insights.dice.com/2016/07/08/how-long-do-tech-pros-s...

Hmm, data compiled from "Public Profiles". I wonder where they got "Public Profiles", listing people's profession and length of tenure. Could it be places like LinkedIn or Dice, and could it be that such places overrepresent engineers inclined to switch jobs?

Personally, I'd be disinclined to interview a candidate with >= 3 jobs on the resumé, none of which lasted longer than 2 years. Taking into account the time spent for them to get up to speed, and the time their successors would have to spend taking over their code, it seems unlikely that their tenure would make much of a positive impact.

Furthermore, a key driver of experience in software engineers is maintaining their own code over multiple product cycles. Job hoppers not only don't acquire that experience, but may actively fall into a habit of bailing as soon as they get sick of their own code.

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

#92

Post by dharmapure »

Speaking of getting hit by a bus, a friend and I are considering a consulting service that could help mitigate bus factor risk - would love any feedback on this idea.

We've both noticed that for nontechnical owners of small businesses that have a heavy software component, that owner is completely at the mercy of their lead developer. If that person leaves or "gets hit by a bus" their company might just die, especially since they don't really know what a Github is or how to log into anything. My friend is such a nontechnical person and hired someone to build his SaaS app. He has felt this risk himself but we wonder if he's just particularly perceptive.

The service would be, for a retainer fee per month a developer sits in on your planning calls, looks over all code committed to your repo, and over time documents how everything works and stores that documentation in a system outside of the company (maybe an external wiki or something). Then if your lead developer leaves, we'd help you find a new one and then train them on the codebase using the documentation created.

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

#93

Post by jacquesm »

wjnc wrote: post #77
jacquesm wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's really tough. Sorry to hear about that. It's all abstract until it actually happens and then suddenly all those lessons bear fruit. You of course hope you'll never need them, but just in case you (or those that take over from you) do you will be very happy (insofar as the situation allows) that you were prepared. It is an interesting phenomenon that I hear several times per year 'but what are the chances of th…

Actuarially, just go with 1 per 1000 employees for bigger companies. Go 1 in 3000 as a lower boundary, but as high as 1/500 or less for companies with older or lower skilled employees. I do agree with other commenters that your procedures should keep you safe in case of regular churn (say 1 in 3 to 1 in 10) or even non-regular churn (say due to a toxic team-lead and a whole team quitting). Ideally procedures should b…

Upper management tend to travel quite a lot and tends to be under high levels of stress. So turnover there, due to buses, disease, burn-out or other mishap is substantially higher than in the population at large. And of course they can simply stop showing up one day for reasons all their own as well. In all of those cases it might as well have been a bus.

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

#94

Post by schoen »

dharmapure wrote: post #92

Speaking of getting hit by a bus, a friend and I are considering a consulting service that could help mitigate bus factor risk - would love any feedback on this idea. We've both noticed that for nontechnical owners of small businesses that have a heavy software component, that owner is completely at the mercy of their lead developer. If that person leaves or "gets hit by a bus" their company might just die, especiall…

Over on the Let's Encrypt Community Forum we get quite a few inquiries from people who say "I'm the site owner and my developer [disappeared|quit|was only hired for a one-time setup task] and my certificate expired; how do I renew it?".

I assume this is a really common pattern for web sites in general. :-(

I don't imagine that this segment would be interested in paying for "continuity insurance", but they might grudgingly hire someone for "tech rescue". I guess that's a very different kind of service; I'm not sure if there's anything in between the two.

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

#96

Post by schoen »

adtac wrote: post #19
hirundo wrote: post #8

> 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?

Unfortunately, they all exist in parallel. So unless we figure out how to cryogenically freeze humans for hundreds of years, we'll run out of Torvaldii (which I think should be the plural for Torvalds) very soon.

Torvalds is a Swedish name (Linus Torvalds is from a Swedish Finn family) and it seems to originate as the genitive (possessive) of the name Torvald

https://en.wiktionary.org/w/index.php?title=Torvald

I think this use of the genitive is a form of patronymic, like if someone named Torvald had a son named Einar, maybe that person could be called "Einar Torvalds" (that is, Torvald's Einar).

So it should probably have a Swedish plural

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_grammar#Plural_forms

I'm not sure which declension it should belong to as a name (and I'll ask a friend to speculate), but the possibilities there seem to be Torvaldsor, Torvaldser, and Torvaldsar.

There are no Latin plurals in -i when the nominative form doesn't end in -us or -um. If you make a Latin plural of Torvalds, it would probably be third declension and something like Torvaldes (compare urbs 'city', urbes 'cities'), unless the consonants change in the oblique cases.

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

#97

Post by dang »

majui wrote: post #84

If Linus Torvalds was hit by a bus, the bus would be a bit damaged but fine after some repairs.

Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments to Hacker News? We're trying to do a bit better than internet default here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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

#98

Post by lucb1e »

dharmapure wrote: post #92

Speaking of getting hit by a bus, a friend and I are considering a consulting service that could help mitigate bus factor risk - would love any feedback on this idea. We've both noticed that for nontechnical owners of small businesses that have a heavy software component, that owner is completely at the mercy of their lead developer. If that person leaves or "gets hit by a bus" their company might just die, especiall…

You should start with convincing people that it is a non-negligible risk and then sell an apt mitigation. Nobody expects to die suddenly, and with a technical co-founder you don't expect them to leave the company to die, either. Depending on the actual risk (which I'm guessing is low), it seems much more efficient to have an insurance that will pay for costs incurred due to their untimely death/departure: pay for a replacement dev (for a reasonable amount of time so they can get to know the product), perhaps hiring costs, perhaps missed income for the company... Like with contents' insurance, I expect there would be a configurable amount that is paid out for all of these things, where lower amounts mean a lower premium.

Having a developer continuously kept up to date might only be affordable for larger companies, which might as well have someone doing that internally. I also don't think a single person can memorize enough about multiple startups to be worth it: either they hear about each customer's tech stack at least once every month (that already seems quite little, but is already relatively expensive so far as insurance-type services go), or they won't be worth more than written documentation.

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

#99

Post by bryanlarsen »

kbenson wrote: post #37
bryanlarsen wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As far as I can tell, "hits by a bus" is actually the euphemism. The highest probability way to lose an employee is just the employee quitting to work somewhere else. But you can't say that because it implies that your current workplace is suboptimal. Whereas "hits by a bus" is out of the control of your employer, so safe to say...

It's hit by a bus because an employee leaving, or dieing of a prolonged illness leaves you time to plan for a departure or possibly ways to retrieve information from them after they are gone. Immediate unexpected death is a worst case, and "hit by a bus" neatly sidesteps a lot of questions such as whether there was someone with them, whether the other party in the accident was hurt, etc which can derail the point.

Perhaps its "hit by a bus" because assuming that an employee will give you a solid 2 weeks of documentation on leaving and will be able & willing to answer questions after they leave is very much not a safe assumption.

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

#100

Post by ThrowawayB7 »

TomK32 wrote: post #13
krapp wrote: post #11

Ok. But what if Richard Stallman gets hit by a falling piano?

Beer-shortage in Redmond?

I doubt anyone in Redmond would really have cared all that much. We were building products to sell and FOSS was* just another competitor.

* And, despite Nadella, it still is.

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