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Comment by rossdavidh | Hacker News Reader

The first thing I thought was, "what would you do if she died/had to take care of an ailing parent full-time/became a religious mystic/ran off with the person of her dreams/got arrested/whatever. Any given employee is always, potentially, gone tomorrow, whether they "need" the job or not.

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Many managers don't realize the need for redundancy in their workforce. In technical industries you are taught to have machine/system redundancy to ensure no line interruptions...but there is little attention paid to making sure your workforce has the same redundancy.

no shit, I thought covid taught us all that we need some fat on the hog

Which is interesting, as plenty of businesses treat their workers as commodities.

To be fair, people redundancy is hard. Not only is hiring them expensive [0], but you also need to find someone that gets along with you, the company and especially their counterpart. Then this person needs to also have similar competencies and even if you have all of those points checked, you still need to get them to share enough so that they can actually replace each other - which is in itself already a hard problem. And, if they get along too well, you might end up in a situation where they leave together.

Engineering redundancy really is a children's play compared to people redundancy.

[0] It's not too much of a problem for large corporations, but small businesses with less than ten people can struggle quite a bit to hire replacements, especially if they don't have the workload for two people right away.

It _shouldn't_ be too much of a problem for large corporations, but from what I've seen it often is.

The people problems stay, of course, but larger corporations have the advantage that a) hiring an additional employee is not as big of a financial hit and b) they usually have larger teams, where load balancing tasks or filling in for a missing employee is not as big of an issue. That's what I meant by it is easier for them :)

I didn't necessarily mean double the amount of people...but at least have enough cross training that a single person won't cripple your company. I've seen this far too many times that one or two people have too much of the key knowledge for a group and if one or both are all of a sudden gone (for any reason) then the rest of the team is absolutely screwed. Rotating job scopes and responsibilities is one of the best ways to ensure you have knowledge redundancy in my opinion...although depending on the team this may be extremely difficult, but still necessary.

We've spent decades rewarding managers for "cutting the fat", while ignoring that fat is the reserve the body keeps to stay alive in times of stress.

Like a bodybuilder who has cut for competition, we have no reserves for day-to-day living.

The issue isn't just that she's disappearing, it's that she's setting a precedent that she doesn't actually want to be a full-time employee. She's not actually leaving the company; She expects the company to backfill her position for a month and then return the position to her when she decides to come back.

In practice, people are generally quite forgiving and happy to step in to cover for someone who has to leave for family emergencies or a normal vacation. It gets a bit harder when someone has simply decided that they're not working this month.

Unless her work can simply stop, this means other employees will have to pick up extra work. They can't hire someone new to backfill because this person will be returning soon. They could hire someone new to add extra capacity to the team, but then why give this person their job back in a month when they return? Why not just give it to someone else who plans to actually work full-time?

It's actually a much more challenging logistics problem than it sounds, unless the person really does work in a vacuum on work that can be paused for a month without consequence. The impact extends to the rest of the team's workload.

...all true, but from the way they asked the question, it sounds like they're not ready for any of those other scenarios, either.

This was my reaction.

Feel grateful for the time someone gives you. You might not be able to replace them when they move on - but that should make you appreciate what they have given you even more.

Are you better off muddling through when they are gone, or never having them at all?

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