Lorin Hochstein argues that while high-profile engineer attrition is often speculated to contribute to major outages, it is universally absent from public Root Cause Analyses (RCAs). This exclusion occurs because public RCAs aim to reassure customers by focusing on technical fixes, whereas attrition is a complex, business-related organizational issue.
Internally, attrition may be discussed as a risk factor, but it is rarely documented as a direct cause, as traditional RCA methods fail to account for systemic, risk-increasing contributors. Ultimately, organizational factors like attrition play a role in every major incident, but remain unstated due to the narrow focus of formal incident reviews.
