Good point. I know this as the Mack Truck Theory. For the project I'm working on right now, there's a couple of incredibly valuable people that would cause a pretty significant issue if they disappeared.

Sensitive workplaces (which seems like most these days) have taken to calling this the Lottery Factor (as in team members quit bc they hit the lottery) to spare more delicate types the pain of imagining their peers run over in traffic accidents.

Having been in the situation that a coworker did no longer arrive to work one morning because some person opened the car door when they were passing with their motorcycle, I can assure you that it's not only the more delicate type of people that all of a sudden are a bit more quiet than usual.

It's all fun and lulz until it happens to you.

There's advantages to both terms. Bus factor maintains the (possible) fiction that people care about their coworkers/bosses enough that they'd transition out if they had the choice. Bus factor highlights that there's no way to get that information even if the person is nice enough to help for effectively free.

I work in the EEO/AAP space and can confirm our company calls it the Lottery Factor though it is partially because we do an office lotto pool when it gets big and jokes bled over. However it is much nicer for discussions. What will we do when employee x gets hit by a bus just does not sound good to random people walking by.

The real world isn’t a safe space, we don’t need to modify our language like this to avoid triggering momentary negative thoughts.

Almost lost a co-worker when he got hit by a bus five years ago. He's back at work full time now, with a substantial settlement from the transit agency (nice amount of f** you money). He wasn't an essential employee, but was important to our team in many ways. Fortunately he was always willing to joke about his accident. He'd survived, after all!

Sounds like those people are in strong negotiation positions

>Sounds like those people are in strong negotiation positions

You'd be surprised, but that's not necessarily the case.

One of my friends was such a person in a shoe making company as a designer. Instead of giving her a raise, they fired her.

Cue them re-hiring her a month or two later after they found out the hard way that the less experience subordinate really couldn't handle the job of the two of them on their own.

So she was in a strong negotiating position, it just took 1-2 months for the negotiations to play out. I hope she bumped her rate up before returning.

One of them just got promoted quite nicely, so I guess you're right!

H-1B would seem to belie that.

how would that negotiation go? give us the information we desperately need or we will basically deport you and lose the information anyway!

pretty much, but whatevs.

I know the bus factor is the morbid "how many people can get hit by a bus?" idea, but I actually like to present it as "how wide is the bus?" in terms of people being the conduits along which information and instructions flow; a wider bus provides redundancy. Aside from being more positive I think it's also more accurate for how we want teams to work. The "win the lottery and quit" metaphor is just stupid.

I usually rephrase it as “getting run over by the lottery” or “winning a bus”. Just to be different/humorous/less morbid.

Have I been in a life-long bubble such that the ordinary explanation of "bus factor" seems so mild that until reading exchanges like this a couple times it never occurred to me it might be morbid enough to bother someone? Or is this one of those things where people are looking for something to worry about but it's actually entirely fine? Like, I've seen children's cartoons with jokes that were more morbid than that.

(I do also like the lottery version and use them basically interchangeably, though the shorthand is always "bus factor" for me)

I think it may be that some people have low environmental-sensation barriers.

For them, hearing "bus factor" may make it through the barrier and result in an involuntary creation of imagery in their head of someone getting gruesomely hit by a bus, and then the corresponding emotions they would feel (or simply just the emotions, without the imagery).

Phrasing "getting run over by the lottery" sounds like a good humorous, compromise. But "winning a bus" sounds like you're actively rooting for the person to be hit. I'd stick with the former. ))

I don't think the analogy holds in the same way. To me, the bus factor represents how many people you can lose for an extended period of time before there are no subject matter experts left for a particular topic. If you've got 8 people on the team, but only 2 of them know how to do a particular thing, the bus factor is 2.

It's not about having enough people to do the work even if someone quits, it's about having enough people that know how to do something that we aren't losing chunks of knowledge if someone quits (or dies, or gets fired, or gets sick, or etc).

It doesn't make sense to me to treat people as part of a conduit bus that are interchangeable as long as there are enough people.