You still should avoid being too siloed. Bus factor matters; their life problems you might be able to keep them, but you're ensuring you suffer death problems the same time they do.
Well, the software industry seems to believe that, for some reason, we get to live by different rules from every other company on Earth, throughout all of human history.
Depending on key roles is something that every company in history has had to do. It’s a risk, but one that has been paying off for hundreds of years, for millions of companies.
There are ways to reduce “bus factor,” yet still maintain high Quality work. The corporation I worked for, managed this, but the price is extreme levels of overhead and rigidity. That has its own risks. I was treated as a “cowboy” in our company, and was considered to be borderline “reckless.” Most folks here, would have considered me to be destructively conservative and risk-averse. I got the job done, though. Our team consistently delivered high-Quality solutions to difficult problems, for decades.
The “easy answer” is to keep expectations and demands on labor low. Keep quality to a minimum. Rely on “black box” dependencies. Don’t use advanced development techniques. Squeeze your coders like lemons. Treat every employee the same as every other one, and control for the lowest common denominator.
That’s not how I worked.
It's OK. The industry is safe from me, and my radical views. It was made abundantly clear, years ago, that no one wants people like me in their company, so I have been forced to work with people that can't afford even crappy programmers.
