surrealization.com

I can't even remotely explain how important I feel the "hit by a bus and now we don't have any who knows [x]" behavior in companies is (or rather, the lack of said behavior). I think it's just a common behavior when you have a single person work from start to finish on a given section of a software application: you have the guy who wrote the interface, the girl who wrote the server application, the guy who built the installer. Ask one of them to take over for someone else during a vacation period, and you'll likely get a blank stare and a "it's not my code so I'm not comfortable working on it", or perhaps the work will get done but get done incorrectly, thus requiring the originator of the code to re-implement it correctly.

I've experienced this at every job I've been at. I'm the ALE (Application Level Events) "master" in our product. Aside from Daniel, I'm the only engineer who thoroughly knows the specification. Aside from some coworkers' spelunking through my code, I'm the only one who really knows the server-side code. There are two coworkers who could pick it up really easily though, so the ALE service will be maintainable if I get hit by a bus.