Having been in the situation that a coworker did no longer arrive to work one morning because some person opened the car door when they were passing with their motorcycle, I can assure you that it's not only the more delicate type of people that all of a sudden are a bit more quiet than usual.

It's all fun and lulz until it happens to you.

There's advantages to both terms. Bus factor maintains the (possible) fiction that people care about their coworkers/bosses enough that they'd transition out if they had the choice. Bus factor highlights that there's no way to get that information even if the person is nice enough to help for effectively free.

I work in the EEO/AAP space and can confirm our company calls it the Lottery Factor though it is partially because we do an office lotto pool when it gets big and jokes bled over. However it is much nicer for discussions. What will we do when employee x gets hit by a bus just does not sound good to random people walking by.

The real world isn’t a safe space, we don’t need to modify our language like this to avoid triggering momentary negative thoughts.

Almost lost a co-worker when he got hit by a bus five years ago. He's back at work full time now, with a substantial settlement from the transit agency (nice amount of f** you money). He wasn't an essential employee, but was important to our team in many ways. Fortunately he was always willing to joke about his accident. He'd survived, after all!

>Sounds like those people are in strong negotiation positions

You'd be surprised, but that's not necessarily the case.

One of my friends was such a person in a shoe making company as a designer. Instead of giving her a raise, they fired her.

Cue them re-hiring her a month or two later after they found out the hard way that the less experience subordinate really couldn't handle the job of the two of them on their own.

One of them just got promoted quite nicely, so I guess you're right!

H-1B would seem to belie that.

Have I been in a life-long bubble such that the ordinary explanation of "bus factor" seems so mild that until reading exchanges like this a couple times it never occurred to me it might be morbid enough to bother someone? Or is this one of those things where people are looking for something to worry about but it's actually entirely fine? Like, I've seen children's cartoons with jokes that were more morbid than that.

(I do also like the lottery version and use them basically interchangeably, though the shorthand is always "bus factor" for me)

Phrasing "getting run over by the lottery" sounds like a good humorous, compromise. But "winning a bus" sounds like you're actively rooting for the person to be hit. I'd stick with the former. ))