Your best developer isn’t your biggest asset. They’re your biggest risk.
Every scaleup has an Alex. The one who knows where everything is. The one who gets paged at 2am. The one who “just fixes it.”
Alex isn’t the problem. Your structure is.
Research on organizational anti-patterns shows hero developers create code only they can navigate, accumulate tribal knowledge, and become irreplaceable-often without realizing they’re sabotaging team scalability.
The symptoms are predictable:
- Nobody reviews Alex’s code because “Alex knows best”
- Documentation is sparse because “just ask Alex”
- Architecture decisions live in Alex’s head
When Alex leaves or burns out, productivity drops 20-30% in affected teams. That’s not turnover cost-that’s knowledge evaporation.
The fix isn’t hiring more Alexes. It’s making Alex’s knowledge organizational knowledge:
- Document decisions, not just code
- Rotate on-call and critical systems
- Make the bus factor a planning metric
The companies that scale successfully don’t have fewer geniuses. They have less dependency on any single one.
What’s your team’s actual bus factor right now?