[ChuckNorris89]

>He wrote most of the trade engine himself, the firm would fall apart if he left.

I get that he's probably good at what he did, but to be fair, if you as an organization leave such a high bus factor open, having the company's livelihood depend on one developer, you're dysfunctional at best and asking for trouble at worst.

Ideally good leadership should want that knowledge spread around or just not let it get to that point from the start.

[dxbydt]

> having the company's livelihood depend on one developer, you're dysfunctional at best

This is the sort of banal nonsense that seems to be obviously true on its face but bears no semblance to reality. In fact, it illustrates the classic East coast vs Valley divides. The original team of secdb was half a dozen people. Each of them was invaluable & their code managed literally a few trillion USD of the world economy. person who wrote the proprietary graph language & compiler for that system was 1 single hotshot c++ guy on the standards committee, who also wrote a chapter in the programming pearls book. gs continues to use secdb & the firm is over 150+ years & counting. Meanwhile, the Valley startups I worked for since - they had this idea that everybody must know everything, all knowledge is diffuse etc. Lot of time taken in teaching backend programmers javascript, frontend guys system infra...all out of goodness of their heart. End result, neither the startup nor the programs we wrote lasted even a decade, even in the best case. In fact, median tenure in these places was under 2 years, whereas most east coasters are lifers.

[ChuckNorris89]

>In fact, it illustrates the classic East coast vs Valley divides.

I don't live in the Valley neither on the East Coast, I'm from Europe which is where my vantage point for my argument lies. Maybe Valley companies can afford to do that because they pay the highest salaries in the world therefore they can always fix any problem because they can throw enough money at them.

>Lot of time taken in teaching backend programmers javascript, frontend guys system infra...all out of goodness of their heart.

That's equally dysfunctional. Reducing the bus factor doesn't mean that the front desk lady must know your codebase, it just means that there shouldn't be any master in the team who holds the keys to the knowledge kingdom and doesn't sahre his knowledge with the rest of the team.

[dxbydt]

> there shouldn't be any master in the team who holds the keys to the knowledge kingdom

that's exactly what i'm disagreeing with. It sounds like a good feature on paper. In reality, it seldom is. Most east coast companies of significant size, if they do anything sufficiently complex, will have 1, sometimes 2-3 guys, who hold the keys to the kingdom & know everything. The kind of domain knowledge that cannot be transferred in kt sessions. In all the IBs I've worked at, there was always the point person who knows everything about one thing, & if he got hit by a bus, man you were in serious shit. Its just the cost of doing business in that domain, can't really derisk it by writing everything down. otoh most Valley firms do very generic shit, with young troops recruited every so often, who stay just long enough to make the jump to the next faang. Even in the Valley, you have L8,L9s whose disappearance can cause significant damage. Its simply not possible to transfer all knowledge to rank and file. some things are just very hard. Code has a way of getting very convoluted very fast. End of the day, SWeng is a very young field. There are no rules like multiple people must know your codebase. There are actual prop funds in chicago running out of 1 big R file written by the cofounder. Whole fund runs out of a single R program! No joke. Big world out there.

[cristiancavalli]

I think the point you are missing here is documentation. There’s no reason to have all the bus-factor — it’s just laziness on the part of organizational structuring and lack of mandate to create quality infrastructure with good documentation, you don’t need to be a Fortune 500 to do this. Spoken as a catfish programmer who spent many years repairing the products of “rockstars” after they fucked off to wherever they went. Also if your stuff is too “complicated” to write down that’s a smell — people have documented far more complex pieces of tech than any software only shop has created look at medicine field or any mechanically engineered system. People love to make excuses about not writing stuff down, turns out you only have yourself to blame once you pull the trigger on your foot gun. Also your characterizations of the East and west coast are criminally juvenile — I’ve worked on both coasts and in Europe, sure there are a few orgs like you say all over the world, those are the ones where the contract is not worth the headache of dealing with an org that can’t tell their own asshole from a hole in the ground because “it’s in jimmys head”

[bluepizza]

I worked at a similar company before. Management don't care about that at all. We had our fundamental stone quit due to getting married and moving abroad. They just found another heavily specialized engineer and made him an obscene offer. Didn't take long for him to be on top of the systems either.

The one thing that I am still in awe is that the new engineer had his PhD in chemistry, and never attended a CS class once, but was nevertheless a world class engineer and hacker. Miss working with him.

[ChuckNorris89]

>They just found another heavily specialized engineer and made him an obscene offer

That's unfortunately not something that most smaller companies can afford to replicate and still be alive.

If you've got unlimited money sure, everyone's replaceable as the problem boils down to having enough money to poach the next best replacement, but hiring the best of the best with guarantee they can take over the most complex codebases quickly without impacting operations, is an endeavor that can sink small companies if the bus factor hits their core.

[renewiltord]

HFT prop shops are different. The usual tech company stuff doesn't apply because if you can't afford the best guy you're dead in the water anyway.

[ChuckNorris89]

Sure, but not all SW companies are HFT shops yet too many SW companies have open bus factors.