DEV Community: BetterEngineer

The Bus Factor: How to Actually Find It and Fix It on Your Team

BetterEngineer — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 20:37:36 +0000

Your bus factor is not theoretical. It is a business continuity metric, and unlike most culture-y engineering concepts, it's one you can actually pin down with a bit of investigation.

Bus factor = the number of people who, if they disappeared tomorrow (vacation, illness, quitting, not literally a bus), would put your project in serious trouble. A bus factor of 1 means one engineer is a single point of failure. Higher is safer.

Step 1: Find it

You don't need tooling to start finding bus-factor-1 risk. You need the right questions, asked consistently:

For each critical service or system, ask: "If this person took a month off starting tomorrow, who else could operate it?" If the honest answer is "no one," you've found a risk.
Look at your on-call escalation path. If the same one or two names show up as the de facto expert for every incident in a given area, that's a signal.
Check PR review assignments over the last quarter. If one person is consistently the sole reviewer (or sole author with no reviewer who really understood the change) on a critical path, that's concentration.
Ask new hires and junior engineers directly: "What's the part of the system you'd be most nervous to touch, and why?" Their answers usually point straight at the single points of failure, because they've already bumped into them.

None of this requires new tooling. It requires making the exercise a habit instead of something you only discover after someone's already gone.

Step 2: Fix it with this checklist

Once you know where the risk is concentrated, here's a practical checklist to raise bus factor without slowing the team down:

Reassign low-urgency bugs deliberately. When triaging, ask "who does not know this part of the system?" as often as "who knows it best?"
Require a design doc or PR description for non-trivial changes. Even a few paragraphs of "why" saves hours later.
Rotate on-call and deploy duties, not just the pager — the pipeline, the runbooks, the "how do I roll this back" knowledge.
Make PR review mandatory for everyone, including seniors reviewing juniors' code and vice versa.
Pair on the scary stuff. Not everything — but the systems with the highest concentration of risk are exactly where 30 minutes of pairing pays off.
Run a "keys to the kingdom" audit quarterly. Who's the only person with access to that AWS account, that admin panel, that legacy cron job? 7.** Track it over time.** A single check tells you where you are. Repeated checks tell you if you're improving.

The bigger point

Bus factor is one of the few culture/process problems you can actually pin down instead of just sensing. You don't have to guess who your single points of failure are because these patterns, data, and a few honest conversations will tell you. Treat it like a metric, not a vibe: check it, put a number on it, and revisit it every quarter the way you'd revisit test coverage or deploy frequency.

Your bus factor is not theoretical. It is a business continuity metric.

AI Won’t Replace You, But an Engineer Who Knows How to Use It Might

BetterEngineer — Wed, 26 Nov 2025 19:13:38 +0000

Every few months, a new wave of AI panic hits dev Slack:

“Is Copilot going to replace us?”
“Will a tiny team with AI out‑ship our whole org?”
“Do we still need this many engineers?”

From what we see working with engineering teams at BetterEngineer, here’s the pattern: AI doesn’t replace good engineers. It multiplies them.

It just makes it painfully obvious who was coasting.

Give AI to someone who understands users, product, and the system → they move faster, break less, and ship better outcomes.
Give it to someone who only cares about closing tickets → you get more code, more tech debt, and more risk.

So the real question isn’t “Will AI replace devs?” It’s: “Am I becoming an AI‑ready engineer, or just a faster code typist?”

What an AI‑Ready Engineer Actually Looks Like

Boiling it down, the engineers who are thriving with AI tend to:

1. Care about the product, not just the code

They ask:

What problem does this feature actually solve?
Is there a simpler way to deliver the same value?
How will we know if this worked?

They use AI to explore options and speed up experiments, not as an excuse to overbuild.

2. Know AI’s strengths and limits

They’re clear on:

Good fits: boilerplate, exploration, refactors, suggestions
Bad fits: nuanced domain logic, tricky edge cases, security‑sensitive code
Red flags: hallucinations, hidden dependencies, leaking internal code into prompts

They don’t push “AI everywhere.” They pick their spots.

3. Think in systems, not snippets

Instead of just “write me function X,” they think:

Where does this belong in our architecture?
What does this do to performance, reliability, deploy risk?
What happens at 100k users, not 100?

AI helps them move faster, but they still own the design.

4. Review, test, and own AI output

They treat AI like a junior dev:

Good at drafts, sometimes wrong, always needs review
They refactor, test, and document
They’re willing to stand behind the code as if they wrote it line‑by‑line

What This Means for You (and Your Team)

For individual devs:

AI is here. You don’t have to love all of it, but ignoring it completely is a bad bet. The differentiator won’t be “who can prompt best,” it’ll be who can combine product sense, system thinking, and AI as leverage.

For tech leads:

Pay attention to who’s using AI responsibly vs. who’s just generating more code. Reward people who use it to reduce complexity and improve outcomes, not inflate their commit count.

If you’re a developer in LATAM (or anywhere else), this is also where we’re seeing hiring pressure shift: toward engineers who can use AI to build better products, not just engineers who can “use AI tools.”

The Most In-Demand Developer Roles in LATAM for 2026

BetterEngineer — Tue, 25 Nov 2025 16:31:49 +0000

If you’re a developer in Latin America or a U.S. team hiring there, the next couple of years are going to be busy. At BetterEngineer, we see which roles actually get hired, which CVs get replies in days, and where demand is clearly headed toward 2026. Here’s a lean, no‑fluff look at the developer roles we see most in demand and what that means for your career.

1. AI & ML Engineers (Who Can Ship)

By 2026, AI won’t be a side project. It’ll be baked into products.The profiles getting the most interest look like this:

Strong Python + data structures + systems foundations
Experience with LLMs, embeddings, vector search, RAG, or classic ML
Comfort going from idea → prototype → production (monitoring, logging, feedback loops)
Able to explain trade‑offs to product and leadership

Less impressive now:

Only “I built a chatbot with ChatGPT API”
Zero shipped, real‑world use cases

If this is your lane: ship at least one end‑to‑end AI feature (e.g., semantic search, recommendations) and be able to explain how you evaluated it.

2. Cloud / DevOps / Platform Engineers

Most new software ends up on AWS, GCP, or Azure, and remote teams need someone to keep everything running smoothly. Common asks:

CI/CD (GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, CircleCI, etc.)
Containers / Docker / basic Kubernetes
Infra as code (Terraform, etc.)
Observability: logs, metrics, alerts that devs actually use

The job is basically: keep a small, distributed team shipping fast without setting prod on fire. If this is you: own your code from dev → prod, learn enough infra to diagnose issues, and have 1–2 concrete incident/”we fixed this” stories.

3. Data Engineers & Data Scientists

Everyone wants AI; not everyone has data that’s usable. We’re seeing steady demand for:

Data Engineers who build/maintain pipelines (dbt, Airflow, Snowflake, BigQuery, etc.)
Data Scientists who turn that data into models and insights that actually affect churn, LTV, fraud, recommendations, etc.

If you’re here:

Get very strong at SQL.
Do at least one project from raw data → cleaned models → useful metric or prediction.
Be ready to talk about data quality, testing, and how your work changed decisions.

4. Full‑Stack Product Developers

Full‑stack dev is still one of the fastest‑growing roles in LATAM, but it’s less “do everything” and more “own the feature.” What hiring managers look for:

A modern frontend (React / Next.js / Vue)
A solid backend (Node, Python, etc.) + basic DB skills
Ability to deploy and debug your own services
Product thinking: you care about why you’re building, not just what

If this is your path: go deep on one frontend + one backend stack, and describe your work in terms of features shipped and metrics moved, not just tech used.

5. Senior / Lead Engineers

Companies are increasingly comfortable with tech leadership outside the U.S. if:

Time zones overlap
Communication is strong (written + async)
There’s a history of ownership

These roles look like:

Setting direction, reviewing designs/PRs
Mentoring other engineers
Working closely with product/founders across borders

If you’re aiming here: start leading small projects, write design docs, run retros, and track how you multiply other engineers, not just your own output.

Why This Matters (If You’re a LATAM Dev)

A few practical takeaways:

Pick a direction (AI/ML, DevOps, data, full‑stack, leadership) and go deep.
Build evidence: shipped features, problems solved, measurable impact.
Invest in communication: clear English and async updates matter a lot for remote teams.

If you’re curious about the kinds of roles U.S. startups are hiring for in LATAM, or you’re a founder thinking about building a team there, we share more here.