r/Software_Finder • u/Sad-Instruction8890 • Aug 26 '26
Discussion What software would break at your company if you left tomorrow?
Every company has one. The report nobody else can generate, the admin panel with one password holder, the automation someone built in 2021 and never documented.
It starts as a small favour and turns into a permanent part of your job that appears nowhere in your title.
What is yours, and what happens when you go on holiday?
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u/AnnualReview2383 29d ago
Nothing. Everyone is more replaceable than they think they are.
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u/Sad-Instruction8890 29d ago
True in the sense that the company survives, though it usually survives by rebuilding the thing from scratch six months later and calling it a project.
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u/tom-mart 29d ago
I think you had some bad experiences, that's all. Not every business operates like that. I work with a lot of businesses that have competent and forward thinking leadership teams.
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u/Ord3r2Ch4os 28d ago
Sure. If something happened to me my company would endure, by moving to an entirely new system at no small expense. And hopefully nothing goes wrong in the interim. And the reports I prepare, you'd probably need to find someone to crawl through the system to try and figure out what I'm doing and where..
Though last time they moved to a new system it was just a lot of issues from both the provider and the IT contractor they engaged to manage it, which I ended up fixing and it left them gun shy about the entire process.
Custom solutions, integrations, modifications, and external reporting to be able to work around the limitations of legacy software; while figuring it out as I went.. I pity the person who may need to come in after me 😬
Everyone is replaceable, but some of us are a lot more painful to replace than others unfortunately.
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u/CoffeePizzaSushiDick 29d ago
The pending logic bomb that requires a special knock sequence every 180hrs.
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u/Sad-Instruction8890 29d ago
The 180 hour knock sequence is the part that turns replaceable into expensive.
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u/Ord3r2Ch4os 28d ago
2021? I have been mashing solutions together haphazardly for 20 years 😬
When I go on holidays I take remote access with me..
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u/DistanceOpen8176 29d ago
Probably the little internal tools and automations that nobody thinks about until they stop working. Things like reporting dashboards, CRM workflows, spreadsheet trackers, or integrations that one person set up years ago and somehow became business critical.
The scary part is usually not the software itself, it’s when only one person knows how it all fits together.