What do you do to keep the team from depending too heavily on one person?

Question

Accepted Answer

**A low bus factor is a risk I manage deliberately, the same way I manage any single point of failure.** If only one person can deploy, debug the payment service, or touch the legacy module, the team is one resignation or vacation away from a crisis. The goal is to spread knowledge without slowing everyone to a crawl.

## Practical mechanisms

- **Code review with intent.** Reviews aren't just gatekeeping; they're knowledge transfer. I make sure no area is reviewed by only the person who wrote it.
- **Pair and rotate on critical systems.** I deliberately assign work in the high-risk areas to a second person, even when the expert could do it faster. Short-term cost, long-term insurance.
- **Documentation that earns its keep.** Not exhaustive wikis nobody reads, but the load-bearing things: runbooks, architecture decisions, "how to deploy," "what to do when X breaks."
- **On-call rotation.** Nothing spreads operational knowledge faster than everyone taking turns being responsible for production.
- **Internal talks / brown bags.** The owner of a tricky subsystem walks the team through it.

## How I find the risk

- Map ownership honestly: for each critical system, ask "who else could handle this if X were out for two weeks?" If the answer is "nobody," that's a flagged risk.
- Watch for the **hero pattern** — the person who is always the one paged, always the answer. That's a warning sign, not a strength.

## Pitfalls

- **Hoarding as job security.** Some engineers (and some managers) like being indispensable. I reframe it: being the bottleneck blocks your own promotion and your time off.
- Over-correcting into "everyone does everything," which destroys depth. The goal is no single point of failure, not zero specialization.
- Writing docs once and letting them rot; stale docs are worse than none.

## Why it matters

Reducing bus factor protects delivery against illness, vacations, and resignations, and it frees your strongest people to grow instead of being trapped maintaining the thing only they understand. It also makes the team healthier: shared ownership beats fragile heroics.