[thedougd]

It's even worse when you start finding you're staffing specialized skills. You have the Postgres person, and they're not quite busy enough, but nobody else wants to do what they do. But then you have an issue while they're on vacation, and that's a problem. Now I have a critical service but with a bus factor problem. So now I staff two people who are now not very busy at all. One is a bit ambitious and is tired of being bored. So he's decided we need to implement something new in our Postgres to solve a problem we don't really have. Uh oh, it doesn't work so well, the two spend the next six months trying to work out the kinks with mixed success.

[arcbyte]

Slack is a necessary component in well functioning systems.

[zbentley]

And rental/SaaS models often provide an extremely cost effective alternative to needing to have a lot of slack.

Corollary: rental/SaaS models provide that property in large part because their providers have lots of slack.

[thedougd]

Of course! It should be included in the math when comparing in-housing Postgres vs using a managed service.

[satvikpendem]

This would be a strange scenario because why would you keep these people employed? If someone doesn't want to do the job required, including servicing Postgres, then they wouldn't be with me any longer, I'll find someone who does.

[sixdonuts]

No doubt. Reading this thread leads me to believe that almost no one wants to take responsibility for anything anymore, even hiring the right people. Why even hire someone who isn't going to take responsibility for their work and be part of a team? If an org is worried about the "bus factor" they are probably not hiring the right people and/or the org management has poor team building skills.

[satvikpendem]

Exactly, I just don't understand the grandparent's point, why have a "Postgres person" at all? I hire an engineer who should be able to do it all, no wonder there's been a proliferation of full stack engineers over specialized ones.

And especially having worked in startups, I was expected to do many different things, from fixing infrastructure code one day to writing frontend code the next. If you're in a bigger company, maybe it's understandable to be specialized, but especially if you're at a company with only a few people, you must be willing to do the job, whatever it is.

[stackskipton]

Because working now at what used to be startup size, not having X Person leads to really bad technical debt problems as that person Handling X was not really skilled enough to be doing so but it was illusion of success. Those technical debt problems are causing us massive issues now and costing the business real money.