They gave two weeks. Nobody else has ever opened it.
This is the one case where timing is on your side, and almost nobody uses it. There is a window — usually two to four weeks — in which the person who knows everything is still contractually available to tell you. Most of that window gets spent on a farewell lunch and a folder of documents nobody can evaluate.
The risk is not that they leave. It is that nobody can tell whether the handover was any good until months later, when something breaks and the answers are gone.
Before you hire anyone, including us.
These are in order, and none of them cost anything. Working through them will also tell you how serious your situation actually is.
- 01
Get a deploy done by someone else, with them watching.
Not documented — actually performed. Have another person push a trivial change to production while the leaver supervises. Every gap in the process surfaces in an hour instead of in six months.
- 02
Inventory access before anything else.
Every account, key, certificate and third-party service, and whose name it is in. Personal accounts and personal API keys are the usual landmine, and they are invisible until they stop working.
- 03
Ask what they were worried about.
The most valuable thing a departing engineer has is the list of things they knew were fragile and never got to. Ask directly, write it down verbatim, and do not argue with it.
- 04
Find out what only runs because they restart it.
Almost every solo-maintained system has a manual step somebody does on a schedule. Find those now, because they fail silently and nobody else knows they existed.
- 05
Bring the second pair of eyes in before the last day, not after.
An independent read while the author is still reachable is worth several times the same read afterwards. This is the single highest-value thing available in the notice period.
Four questions that settle it.
- Has anyone other than the leaver ever deployed this system successfully?
- Are there credentials, keys or services in their personal name?
- Is there anything that runs on a schedule only they maintain?
- How long could the business operate if the system froze exactly as it is today?
A diagnostic inside the notice period is the cheapest version of this work, because the author is still available to answer questions. It produces a written picture of what you have, what is fragile, and what it would take to operate it without them — which is also the document you hand to whoever comes next.
If you want someone to read it properly.
A paid diagnostic is from $750, two to five days, scoped on a short call before you pay anything. You get what is actually there, what is wrong, what it costs to fix, and a plan you keep — with us or with anyone else.