> At a large enough company you continuously lose people for natural reasons, like retirement, moving for a spouse, moving to be closer to family. Past a tipping point you're just always hiring.

As an analogy it's kinda like hard drives: when one of my hard drives dies, it's An Event which I need to deal with specifically; I need to order a replacement for that specific drive. At Google's server farms, hard drives dying is just a statistic, you continuously buy hard drives just because you know existing drives are gonna die at some semi-predictable rate.

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Sharlin 4 hours ago | parent [-]

Or a more morbid analogy: military casualties in a war.

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evilduck 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

It's not really an analogy, it's just facts of life. In a large enough company or over a long enough time period at a job or in your career, realistically people actually will eventually die and cause vacancies. I've had two coworkers die, one because of illness, the other because of an auto accident. I stopped using the "bus factor of one" phrase as a result even and use "redundancy or succession planning" since it's not outside the realm of possibility that someone might get hit by a vehicle.

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gchamonlive an hour ago | parent | next [-]

"Lottery factor" works, though it's more of a mouthful

	▲	arcanemachiner 19 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		That, and nobody knows what you're talking about.

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Sharlin 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Sure, but in one many more people leave the workforce by being killed and maimed than in the other.

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vkou 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

More morbidly, military casualties in what the military insists isn't war.

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HeyLaughingBoy 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Even in peacetime, training accidents kill an expected number of military personnel each year.

	▲	vkou 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I'm not talking about training accidents.