If two people leave after close, what stops working?

Diligence hands you an org chart. An org chart records who is accountable, not who is doing the work, and the two come apart quietly over a few years. Nobody updates a box when the person named in it stops writing the code and someone three levels down starts.

That gap is invisible until it costs you. A retention package aimed at the declared owner buys you the wrong person. An earnout assumes continuity that is resting on one engineer who was never mentioned in a management presentation. You find out in month four, and by then you own the company.

• Single points of knowledge. Which systems have one author, and how long that has been true.
• Owner against author. Where the person named as owner is not the person writing the code.
• Departure impact. For the most load-bearing people, what stops when they leave.
• The record on a deletion clock. Where the explanation of how something works survives only in chat that retention is about to purge.

The findings name systems and the people load-bearing for them, ranked, with the evidence for each one attached.

Git history, a chat export, an org chart, a CODEOWNERS file. Ordinary data room material. No credentials, no agent to install, and no access to the target's live systems, which matters because pre-close you are usually not getting production access and should not ask for it.

Instruments run on a copy you designate, with the network off. Nothing with a path or a line of the target's source leaves the environment you control.

You are reading a measurement of a company whose sellers have an interest in the answer. When the seller says a named engineer is replaceable, you need a record that cannot quietly become more agreeable between issue and close.

What comes back is a report readable without my tooling and the findings as data, both signed with the Strickle Works key. Anyone can check them offline with ssh-keygen, which you already have, independent of the instrument that produced the findings. A finding that has been edited since issue fails verification. The key and the two commands are on the verify page. Your committee, your lender, and your co-investors can confirm that what they are reading is what was issued, without taking my word for it or yours.

• It measures the record, not the person. Someone can carry knowledge that never touched a repository or a chat channel, and this will not see it.
• The inputs are partial by construction. If the real coordination happened somewhere that was never exported, it is invisible here, and the report says which sources it had.
• It is a snapshot, not a prediction. It tells you where concentration exists, not who is going to resign.
• It does not price the risk. What a single point of knowledge is worth against your model is your judgment, not a number I can hand you.

This is not a layoff instrument and I will not sell it as one. Out of scope: individual performance, compensation, anything that ranks people against each other, and any recommendation about headcount.

That is a working constraint before it is an ethical one. A company that believes it is being measured for a reduction stops answering honestly, and the measurement you are paying for is the first thing that breaks.

Price

$15,000, fixed. Scope, price, and the delivery date are agreed in writing before work starts. If the work runs long, that is my cost, not yours.

Time

Five business days from the point the inputs are in hand. The earliest date I can start comes back with the reply, before you have committed to anything.

Who you contract with

A limited liability company, named on the agreement and the invoice. You are invoiced like any other vendor, on your terms.

Confidentiality

I will sign your NDA. The target, the deal, and the findings stay private by default, including from this page.

Douglas Adolph. I designed and built the deployment system behind a fleet of thousands of production Kubernetes clusters at a Fortune 50 company, along with the controllers, authentication path, and secrets tooling around it. I have spent that career reading large codebases written by people who had already left, which is the same act this engagement charges for.

The engineer who scopes your work is the engineer who does it. Longer background, and the public code, at douglasadolph.com.

You do not need to name the target. Tell me roughly what you are looking at and I will tell you whether this answers your question, including when it does not.

• Rough size of the engineering organization.
• Which inputs you can get, and by when.
• The date you are working against.

What comes back is a reply from me rather than a scheduling link.

hello@strickleworks.com

This is one engagement of several. The rest of the practice, and the prices, are at strickleworks.com.