Don’t Get Hit by the Bus (Alone): Why a Low Bus Factor Will Wreck You

Knowledge hoarding isn't job security—it’s a future disaster.

Let’s get this out of the way:
If your company’s bus factor is 1, your project is on life support.

🚌 What’s a “Bus Factor”?

The bus factor measures how many people can get hit by a bus (or win the lottery or rage-quit via Slack) before your team is screwed.

Bus factor of 1? One person leaves, and everything collapses.

Bus factor of 5? You’ve got backups, cross-training, and the breathing room to not panic when someone’s out.

No, it’s not about buses. It’s about risk and resilience.

⚠️ Low Bus Factor = High Chaos Potential

Here’s what happens when you treat tribal knowledge like job insurance:

🧠 Brain Bottlenecks

If only one person knows how a system works, that person owns the fate of the entire project. And when they leave? Poof—half your app just became an archaeological dig site.

🔥 Burnout City

Being the go-to person for everything sounds good… until you’re working weekends, can’t take time off, and get DMs like:

“Hey, sorry to bother you while you’re literally in surgery, but prod’s down…”

🚫 No Innovation

A team with one “expert” isn’t innovating. They’re firefighting. And worse—everyone else stays stuck, because they don’t feel ownership.

🙃 False Security

Leadership thinks everything’s running fine because nothing’s on fire yet. Meanwhile, knowledge is siloed, documentation’s outdated, and you’re a resignation away from total collapse.

🧯 Real-World “Oh No” Moments

Twitter (2023): Outage caused by a single engineer’s departure.

GitHub (2020): Multi-hour downtime—only a few engineers knew how to fix it.

Apple (2011): Steve Jobs dies, and the company scrambles to find its soul.

When knowledge lives in one brain, your team’s stability is a house of cards.

🚧 Side Effects May Include…

Lower morale: When one person carries the weight, everyone else disengages—or worse, panics.

Limited growth: No one’s learning new things. No one’s challenged. Everyone’s just trying to not break anything.

Toxic hero culture: You glorify the “only one who can fix it” until they break.

Total team breakdown: And then they leave. Cue chaos.

✅ What to Do Instead

Raise your bus factor like your project depends on it—because it does.

🔁 Cross-Train Like It’s a Team Sport

Everyone should know a little about everything. At least one backup for every critical system.

📚 Document or Die

If it’s not written down, it doesn’t exist. Docs are your team’s collective brain. Use it.

🧩 Normalize Pairing & Mentorship

Encourage knowledge sharing. If someone knows something cool, make them show someone else.

📣 Challenge Hero Mentality

Celebrate team wins, not lone-wolf coding marathons.

🔄 Rotate Ownership

Let people lead features they didn’t build. Spread the responsibility (and the learning).

🎯 TL;DR

A low bus factor isn’t job security—it’s a future fire.

If knowledge lives in one person, your team’s fragile.

Raise your bus factor with cross-training, documentation, pairing, and culture.

Avoid becoming the “only one who can fix it” because one day… you won’t.

✊ mullins.io
If I get hit by a bus tomorrow, at least someone else has the damn deploy keys.