I've generally given a lot of notice as an IC, 2-3 months in some cases. and I have to say, I think it's not been appreciated, not even once. I've tried to spend the time wrapping things up, communicating my tacit knowledge to my coworkers, and writing documentation for things that I've done and created and am responsible for; I'm fairly certain that no one has given my opinions and thoughts any more than a cursory amount of attention.
Now, I absolutely loathe the modern corporate culture, which is happy to escort you out of the building the moment your employment is terminated, without giving you a chance to even say goodbye to your colleagues, who you might have been working with extensively for years. It's deeply traumatic and it contributes to an overall sense of fear and "screw teamwork, it's everyone for themselves".
But now when I "give notice" and they don't even let me try to work the next 2 weeks, I'm grateful. I don't want my coworkers to ignore or patronize me while I sit idle or do make-work. I don't want to have to put on a show about how wonderful the company and team are, and why I'm leaving anyways. Nor do I want to expose my true feelings to my co-workers and infect them with my bad attitude--even if the writing is on the wall for the entire enterprise. It's like a breakup: the best thing for everyone is to make it clean and crisp, say "it's not you, it's me", make a sincere statement to the effect of "let's be friends", and then see each other roughly never again.
> But now when I "give notice" and they don't even let me try to work the next 2 weeks, I'm grateful.
Life hack: Put your resignation in writing with a date in the future. In many states, if the employer attempts to move the termination date (without compensation), they will award wages until your resignation date... I've used this twice, and in both cases, I was sent home, but HR told the manager that any severance would start after my resignation date which in one case led to a really awkward call when my manager tried to get me to come back for a month after having me pack up my desk and leave.
I don’t know they’d have to award you wages, but the only alternative to that would be firing you. Some might try to do that out of spite but it would be far worse for them than you.
> Life hack: Put your resignation in writing with a date in the future.
This sounds like such a neat way to deal with it. I wonder if it's legally valid in my jurisdiction (in Sweden.) I have never heard of it but yet again, why not?
This isn’t accurate, might have worked in one-off situations but, given at-will employment, this was at best a confused HR employee trying to help, not a legal conclusion. Note the obvious edge cases
In the U.S., an employee that resigns is not entitled to severance. In this case, you would only have received severance if you had been terminated before your resignation date. If they sent you home but continued to pay you for that month, you would not have been entitled to severance.
Like most things, it depends. I've given employers no time up to 4 weeks. Smaller ones will definitely receive more grace if they have been good to me. And, when I was an employer I tried to do the same for others.
Another note is that I'm always succession planning. Document, share what I'm doing, etc... I learned early on that if I couldn't be replaced, I also couldn't be promoted.
> I learned early on that if I couldn't be replaced, I also couldn't be promoted.
Nailed this on the head.
At the same time, the extra work this requires is often not appreciated by management either - I've seen some (admittedly poor) managers comment on lower productivity due to the documentation efforts.
> I learned early on that if I couldn't be replaced, I also couldn't be promoted.
Even as someone who has zero interest in being promoted, I think this is good practice. It's part of helping to maintain a healthy organization. If anyone is actually indispensable, that's a very dangerous situation for the team and the company.
Something I realized. After you give notice, at most, the business needs about a week to decide what to do with the work you were handling. In tech, most projects can be deferred, and most services can go into KTLO.
After the week is done to figure that stuff out - no one really cares about you anymore. There is likewise a tacit assumption that you won’t deliver anything again (why would you?). As such it’s usually best to let someone out the door after a week.
Typically when I give notice, I simply state that the employer can do whatever over the next 2 weeks. 70% of the time, when given the choice, they will decide on a fast transition of 1 week. There hardly is anything to do the second week.
On the day I give notice, there is a bit if a shock and a "what are we gonna do now?" attitude. On the second day, word has got around and everyone wants to know where you're going, etc. On the third day, i brief whoever will take over my job. On the fourth day I am no longer invited to meetings or really have anything to do for the next several days until I leave.
In practice, even two weeks is more than enough for your role to be taken over by someone. I really see little value in giving more notice that that for either the employer or employee.
After you give notice, at most, the business needs about a week to decide what to do with the work you were handling. In tech, most projects can be deferred, and most services can go into KTLO.
Ideally, sure. In real life the employee needs to do a brain dump of handover documents because no one writes anything down.
I completely agree. I've been asked to stay on an extra week or two and I think it was a terrible decision. Nobody really cared or paid attention in hand off meetings (I'd like to think careful documentation was later appreciated when someone had to take those things on later) and I was interested in moving on.
I've never given less than a month's notice, and the notice has always been tied to the end date of whatever project or current workload I happen to have. My direct bosses have always expressed appreciation for this, but then again, I've only ever left a company once because I was dissatisfied working there.
Culture and relationships are a two way street, and you are always responsible for your own part in building it. You might have a shit boss or work for a shit company and it's not going to end well, and if that's the case and there's nothing you can do, then all that's left is to look out for yourself. I wouldn't ever advocate for that to be the default position, though.
Totally agree. Two weeks for knowledge transfer should be it. Remember that most leadership view all engineers as replaceable cogs. Just wrap up what you can and loop others into the things that can't and move on with life. Big companies probably don't want you around from a liability. Small companies want the knowledge transfer because you have "blind-sided" them. (Despite asking for a raise for the last two years and told no chance.)
I gave 6 weeks on my last one to a fanng, Never again. That was when the project I was working on was slated to finish, and I continued working on it until then. I but it was a bit unexpected for me and I had a 4 day weekend scheduled to take my kids on a school trip.
Came back on Monday, incompetent fuckers had locked me out and terminated me as a no call no show. lol, uh, it's in the fucking time off tool you fucks. The thing that really sucked was that I was a high preforming employee, I canceled a promotion review to give notice. 7 years in and some jerkoff needs your seat and 6 weeks isn't appreciated. The got me reconnected after a couple days and then my manager never talked to me again. that was a long three weeks there at the end.
My experience is that two weeks is probably about right most of the time--especially for ICs. The company expects it as the norm. And it's either enough time to do a reasonable handoff or no sensible length of time is going to be enough. (And I'll always answer the odd "help!" question for the coming month or two.) Go much beyond that and you're in this odd extended winding down situation where you can't really take anything new on and you're increasingly checked out. And, in a physical office environment, you're probably also increasingly just a distraction.
I completely agree. The part about infecting people with my attitude is especially relevant. It's normal that we talk. And when they ask "why?", it feels awkward. If I tell them all the reasons, it will influence their perception of their situation (which might be quite positive) and I prefer not to do that. But if I avoid answering, I will be perceived as dishonest or hiding something. So usually I invent some excuse so that nobody feels bad.
I once shared an office with someone in order to take on their work because they were retiring early. I got/had to hear about all of their gripes with our employer and within six months I was in complete agreement with them :)
> And when they ask "why?", it feels awkward. If I tell them all the reasons, it will influence their perception of their situation (which might be quite positive)
I find this on itself to be a dysfunction. In well functioning team, they would be able to guess, because they would know your general opinions. And their positive opinions would be known too.
As in, this happens only because the communication within the team or within the corporation is dysfunctional and people dont talk in the first place.
Just lie, but you don't normally have to really lie. Is there ever one single reason for leaving? You don't have to tell them the worst version of your decision.
One time I gave 4 week notice and my lead HR person (~2000 person company) who I have never spoke to before called me very upset and yelled at me for several minutes about how rude I was being by doing 4 weeks instead of 2.
Yeah exactly. The experiences around me agree with you: once someone is "out" most managers will look to "eliminate" that person from the group ASAP. I've even seen someone being asked not to come in from tomorrow, which shocked everyone since that person was well liked, a good performer - even had multiple patents associated with him. It was just a power trip from that manager.
> I've generally given a lot of notice as an IC, 2-3 months in some cases. and I have to say, I think it's not been appreciated, not even once.
I personally think it's the right thing to do, not for the company, but for your colleagues. If staying longer can help your colleagues to take over your stuff, some will be grateful and will remember it if your paths cross again.
IDK. All my colleagues leave after 2-3 weeks, sometimes less. It's just how things are done. My last employer moved my end date so the could claw back several hundred to a thousand off my last pay check, after I stayed a bit longer.
I know now I might have been able to fight this, and may have done that knowing what I know now. On the other hand it might not be worth the effort.
If you're wondering how, I think I didn't "earn" vacation until the end of the month, and was technically using "borrowed vacation". I stayed with that company for 7 years... I can't think of any other reason for them to end my employment two days early, right before the end of the month.
> I absolutely loathe the modern corporate culture[...]
If you've been on the other side of that - having employees sabotage or steal in the process of leaving - you'd at least understand it. Not many people do that, but it's always the bad apples who ruin it for everybody.
I gave several months notice one time. They didn't use any of the time to onboard someone else, and afterwards talked about how I left them high and dry.
From now on I'm giving 2 weeks and getting the fuck out of there.
This is terrible advice. Great that it has worked for the author but it does not mean it's a good idea for everyone. 2 weeks is the standard and as long as you give that you maintain good relations. Most people are not as valuable or important as they like to think they are. I have seen very important people leave / fired and things still go on. (Twitter is still working - isn't it?) Once you tell that you are leaving, everybody's attitude towards you changes. You want to minimize that awkward period. There's nothing to be gained by staying longer than 2 weeks. If you have stock vesting, wait until stock vests before giving 2 weeks notice.
There’s a lot of merit to taking a week or two beyond the standard. 2 weeks isn‘t a lot of time to hand off all your work, go through the usual HR bureaucracy, and make sure you have contact info for anyone you might want to stay in touch with after leaving.
If it’s an amicable departure 3-4 weeks can be a lot less stressful for everyone.
6-8 weeks is kinda weird though, unless you‘re extremely senior and on critical path for a lot of things, or you‘re using up accrued PTO.
> 6-8 weeks is kinda weird though, unless you‘re extremely senior and on critical path for a lot of things, or you‘re using up accrued PTO.
If you're a leader in a team, definitely give more notice. It's the professional thing to do. Something that the post -doesn't- say is that you should have a transition plan written down before you tell your boss, just in case you get cut off.
Of course they can still summarily kick you out the door, but it's a chance for you as a leader to do right by the team.
And 2 weeks could suddenly become a lot shorter. I gave 2 weeks notice once, then had a death in the family (covered by bereavement leave) and then got sick. My 10 business days of handover ended up going down to about 4-5.
Two weeks is all most recruiters have ever offered me, and some did so begrudgingly. Which is weird because if I say yes that actually makes me a worse hire.
Recruiters don’t like people who want >2 weeks because it adds risk that you will renege on the deal, which means they lose out on their payday. But the recruiter isn’t the other party in the negotiation, the hiring manager is.
So don’t negotiate start date until you have an offer and are talking to the hiring manager. Save it to the end and you can say “well, I’m still not 100% sure about this offer, but I think this would work if you could push my start date out a bit…”
Interesting, I was able to get a couple months when I switched jobs a while back. I think recruiters probably figure the longer the window, the more chance you go do something else instead.
I have resigned for two different jobs where I was the highest tech leader, reporting to the CEO (basically CTO role without the title). Both times I gave 1 month of notice. Both times all the "transition" work was done during the first 2 weeks, and afterwards, I basically sat at meeting listening without say (I pushed for my "replacement" to be the one making the decisions as if I wasn't there) and even the CEO asked me to stay at home in one of the two jobs.
My thought is that if that worked for me for 2 weeks, it should also be more than enough for an IC.
I don't know. Not to offend you but in general I consider leadership roles to be more easily replaceable than IC ones. Fundamentally, it's the ICs that usually have all the intricate knowledge of the details. That is something I'd argue cannot be handed over in just two weeks, in particular to just anyone.
On the other hand, the leadership folks I interact with always make only super high level decisions. Rarely does it get intricate. It's more important to know how to quickly assess the big picture and how to communicate. All lot of what a leader does and makes them uniquely leaders is not something that's based on acquiring company specific and product and infra specific knowledge accumulated across several years.
I rarely care if my manager leaves beyond the fact that I have to build trust with someone new. But ultimately they aren't super in the weeds on anything mission critical.
An engineer that can jump into an incident and immediately identify the problem on a code path because they have worked on it or around it intimately at some point does make a difference, but also just having a detailed mental model of how the system pieces interact is super crucial. Bus factor is a thing, even though it rarely is catastrophic. Lead time can help here.
Of course leaders leaving also is a challenge, but it's because of their unique charm, ability to grasp issues quickly and make sane decisions. But none of this can be transferred to a new guy, in 2 or 4 weeks or 8.
It is terrible advice and especially if you are an at-will employee. 2 weeks is fine, but as others have mentioned, most of the time you get put into a hermetically sealed jar once you give notice.
In my experience it's really situational and depends on the relationship with co-workers more than managers. I've given as much as a month at places I liked and where knowledge transfer will be useful to those who will pick up my slack. Others, I simply said "I'm done" and spent the remaining days posting GIFs and XKCDs on Slack
No, no, no, no a billion times no to this absolutely not no
The moment you give your resignation, there are good odds your company will say "we accept your resignation effective immediately. Goodbye." Sometimes it's a blanket company policy to do this, sometimes it's because they know you're going to a competitor and they don't want you to start training for your new job, sometimes they were on the fence about you staying anyways.
Do not do this ever end. There is a significant chance you will be instantly fired with no income for months. Don't.
> there are good odds your company will say "we accept your resignation effective immediately. Goodbye."
No, it's not common practice for tech companies to immediately fire anyone who resigns.
A 2 week notice period is basically standard in the US tech industry. Some companies will take resignations and then remove the employee's access to sensitive material (code, chats, documentation, etc.) but require them to be available for 2 weeks to participate in handoff conversations. They continue to be paid, however.
It does happen that companies will immediately fired people. However, companies rarely do it because they stand to lose a lot of transition information and it also poisons the well for any future resignations. It also sets a precedent for remaining employees to not give any notice, which means everyone is going to start quitting without any notice in the future. This is bad, and companies want to avoid it.
Giving extremely long notice periods (e.g. "I plan to quit in a few months") could push the company to move up your departure date, though. The only time long departure notice is really warranted is for executives and truly key employees. Most people over-estimate their importance to their company and their project, IMO, but in some rare cases a single person can be instrumental to a company. It's nowhere near as common as people assume, though.
In practice, it's not really a huge loss even if it does happen. Most people get raises when they change jobs and the new company is often willing to move start dates up if you ask.
It’s a pretty common practice to walk people out the door immediately if they are known to be going to a competitor. They would still be paid for the 2 weeks though
> No, it's not common practice for tech companies to immediately fire anyone who resigns
It doesn't matter if it's a common practice. It's whether you want to deal with the uncommon outcome.
The odds might be long but the stakes are high.
Imagine in the United States giving 2 months notice thinking you're a good guy doing a mitzvah for your employer and then getting walked out the door and having to figure out COBRA insurance and getting by on unemployment and maybe a PTO payout if you're lucky.
Most companies have a standard resignation policy, if you don't know what the policy is at your workplace, you should really find out. Usually, you can also get the big picture by watching other people who have resigned before you.
I have worked at a company where the moment you signal your intention to resign, HR cuts you a check for your remaining PTO, your manager goes to your desk to collect your things in a box, and security escorts you out the door. But this was all well-known to everyone who worked there, so every departing employee made sure to say goodbye to their (trusted) co-workers before telling their manager.
The company I am at now, they let you stay on for basically as long as you want, but one to two weeks is typical. Most people don't make their departure fully public until their last day.
If your current company is the latter, then jumping ship without giving your manager and co-workers any kind of heads-up is a great way to burn bridges you might need in the future.
This doesn't seem correct to me. I've been in the industry coming up on 20 years, and I've never seen a company send someone home after putting in notice of resignation. Perhaps it happened and I didn't know about it, I can't rule that out, but I know that the majority of cases have not worked this way.
It's difficult to imagine why they would do this, since it would remove all the cushion that 2+ week period would provide the company for getting projects closed and documented, and bringing new people on to take over the employee's projects. It turns an unfortunate situation into an immediate crisis.
I have seen (recently) a company say "please, we are begging you not to resign, would you like to take a sabbatical and we can talk about it when you're back?"
> I've been in the industry coming up on 20 years, and I've never seen a company send someone home after putting in notice of resignation.
I have worked at a company that had a blanket policy of always doing this.
Let me be clear: it was a dumb policy. It resulted in employees waiting until their last day to tell the company that they were planning to leave. It created all kinds of havoc with the lack of knowledge transfer and handoff. And if it was intended to prevent exiting employee from taking malicious actions, it was completely ineffective at that since the employee would know about the policy and would choose not to disclose that they were leaving until after the head undertaken any malicious action.
But, I can say with some confidence that there are some tech companies that do this.
I love when someone has an experience which is rather unique to them (or at least definitely not universal) and vehemently shouts in absolutes.
I definitely agree with the article. I've given extended notice for many jobs I've left (again, usually on the order of several months). I had a good relationship with my manager, and I like to leave stuff "tied up with a bow". Similar to the experience in the article, it was good for both me and my employer.
I'm sorry you didn't have a relationship with your employer where you felt this was possible. And to be clear, I don't believe my experience is universal, but I think if most people stop to think about it, they will be able to figure out how their employer will respond.
Nothing about their comment is unique to an experience, yours on the other hand...
Risk isn't just about the likelihood, it's also the outcome.
Even if your manager loves you to death and there's just a .1% chance you misread the situation and your early notice goes wrong... the result of that .1% occurrence could be disastrous.
On the other hand, if a 2 week notice is likely to screw over your team, that's a sign of a bad employer. If 2 full weeks of notice isn't enough to stabilize things enough for you to leave on good terms, what happens if you're injured tomorrow?
2 weeks notice is good. The most you should do earlier than 2 weeks is start documenting the unwritten parts of your process and start getting others to understand those. A good manager will enable that without you saying you're walking out the door.
Sounds like you don't have a good relationship with your company and/or manager, and a lack of trust and thats whats driving your "no, no, no...".
What i've learned is if I can't have some kind of conversation with my manager about possibly leaving or being unhappy in the role, unhappy with compensation, etc.. then that is partially on me having let that relationship sour.
Obviously a lot of this depends on the kind of manager you have, and situation with the company and loads of other factors.
The moment you give your resignation, there are good odds your company will say "we accept your resignation effective immediately. Goodbye."
Genuine question; is this a US thing? I've never, ever seen this or heard of it happening. I don't think I've ever worked at a company that didn't state in the contract the notice period. I have seen companies decide they don't want that person on site anymore when someone quits, but they gave "gardening leave"; the person goes home and is effectively on holiday, paid as usual, for their notice period.
There is a significant chance you will be instantly fired with no income for months.
I did this in my first job, giving two months of notice because it was the right thing to do for my colleagues and the company since it'd allow transition time and continuity.
Then I was let go immediately. Which was an unexpected hit, though luckily the new company let me move my start date up. This was a tech company with around one hundred employees, and I was in good standing (my then manager later recruited me for a position at a different company).
The best approach is to always give two weeks formal notice on a Friday morning, with the expectation that there's a chance you'll not be coming back on Monday. Best to do all the transition preparation work before that moment. If I've got a manager that I trust, I let them know with a bit more informal advance notice.
ETA: on the other hand, I gave a month or two advance notice to Google, and they were happy to have me stay until my resignation date. My sense is that it's smaller companies that tend to do the immediate layoff.
US person here who has participated in a lot of online advice/mentoring forums. I've never once seen a tech company immediately "fire" someone who says they're resigning like the parent comment claims.
The only exceptions I can think of were when people gave multiple months of notice that they were going to quit and already had declining performance due to e.g. unhappiness about the job. If you're not performing well and you tell your employer that you're quitting in a few months, they're not really interested in giving you more paychecks to perform poorly. IMO, that's not exactly unreasonable either.
Some companies will restrict the employee's access for the notice period and remove their work as a way of protecting company information from last-minute exfiltration (it happens a lot more than you'd think), but those employees are still paid during this time period. They're also obligated to answer questions and attend meetings about handoff, although in some cases this may amount to zero work.
But no, it's not common for US tech companies to fire employees immediately for resigning. I don't know where the parent commenter got the idea that this is common.
I've never had it happen to me, though in particular circumstances I've seen it happen with other people. But not with an immediate termination, just walked out the door -- they still got paid for the two weeks of notice they gave.
Mostly it was so we could find out if any ostensibly automated tasks were in fact dependent on their ongoing work, while they were still reachable to answer questions. Perhaps related, this was all during my time as a unix admin, before I officially converted to a pure software development role. I've never personally seen a developer walked immediately out the door.
It generally only happens in exceptionally paranoid companies in sensitive industries or government organizations, which clearly exist but are already atypical workplaces.
I've never seen the point in treating your employer as an adversary, as the OP of this thread clearly does.
For some companies, when you give notice, you are flagged as a security risk. e.g., high chance you will take/steal IP. They will lock down your account, investigate your recent activities, and escort you out the door.
Here in Norway, if they "let you go" immediately they still have to pay you for your contract notice time which is usually three months.
There are some with six (my last job) or some with one. In my last job I was able to negotiate it down though as I wanted to quit earlier, it was the employer that wanted the six months in my contract. I was a key person in a start up bank so it's not a normal term to have.
> > The moment you give your resignation, there are good odds your company will say "we accept your resignation effective immediately. Goodbye."
> Genuine question; is this a US thing?
At least in California/Silicon Valley I have never seen or experienced such a thing in almost 30 years, so I can say confidently it is not common.
Of course it can happen, there are zero employee protections in the US. But it's not common.
People generally give 2 weeks notice and keep coming in to the office (pre-pandemic) for those two weeks to meet with others and help transfer knowledge, hang out, do farewell lunches etc. Only on the end of the last day is your account access revoked. That's the expected convention.
Depends on the company but this is the default most client-facing jobs. It removes the possibility of a representative from passing along info to company clients and also eliminates the ability of reps to copy client data to take with them to new jobs.
You are not technically fired. At the company I worked for, you are immediately walked to the door and you will not be able do any more work for the company. You will get your two weeks pay.
I am not sure what happens when you try to give more than two weeks notice.
You never let someone who gives notice keep their badge. You just say, "Congrats, there's the door. Cheers!"
You have no control over someone who has given notice. If they do good work... that's great. But if they do shit work, what are you going to do, fire them?
The liabilities are outrageous, and the payoff is only 2-weeks dev time (if you're lucky)... at the regular rate... Nah, not worth it.
And you have that person in the office talking about how they're moving on to a better role, with more pay, and it can quickly turn into a cancer for team morale.
I have never seen an article with such horrible career advice on Hacker News. This is bad advice.
What is cancer for team morale is that their coworker, Bob, was here yesterday and today he's gone. Was he fired? Did he rage quit? Neither one makes the employer look good or gives me confidence I should stick around.
I've always paid close attention to how my employers behave when someone gives notice: how you treat people/are treated when conditions aren't ideal shows you the true character of those involved. If the employer acts like a jerk, I know I'll get equal or worse treatment. I won't extend them any curtesy when I leave, which will likely be sooner rather than later based on their approach.
That said, I disagree with the article. In the US, we're lucky to have a common expectation: 2 weeks. I've added an additional week for small companies, but I'd never do more than that. 2 weeks is plenty, and quickly feels like being persona-non-grata.
Yeah, because people magically become mischievous spies for the competitor the moment they give notice.
All this time they were job-hunting, doing interviews, and negotiating offers, it was just for fun, and they were still the "good guys". But the moment they communicate a decision to leave that they actually made a long time ago, when they started looking for another job, they automatically become Osama Bin Laden.
Sure, it makes a lot of sense...
They even get the smell you might be shopping around and you are toast. This article is shit advice. I had Google recruit me for L6/7 and I was exuberant about it on LinkedIn, really really really bad idea to even mention it.
Am I missing something, or is this simple? You give the standard 2-week notice (or whatever your contract said), that's it. Up to you and them how you spend the final two weeks.
Idk what the alternative is. You tell them you want to quit in 2 months? Nobody does that.
LOL, I tried that at Apple, was immediately made to pack my stuff after watch of a security guard and escorted off premises. As if I couldn't copy their stuff first and give notice later if that was my intent.
Now obviously, in a mom and pop shop, I would discuss my desire to leave before I even started looking and help find/train my replacement, while they would likewise help me find a new job that better fits my life situation. But that's just not how corporate America works.
Same thing happened to me - told my boss on a Friday that I had received a job offer with a 55% pay raise and was probably going to take it, so we should think about off-boarding. Later that day my admin rights to the gitlab org were removed, was told that "it was a mistake", and was fired the following Monday.
They also took my $20k bonus that I was supposed to receive months earlier and used it as a carrot on a stick to get me to sign a bunch of legal paperwork releasing all my rights. At least I got the much needed money. I was really underpaid there.
I also lost my best friend who also worked there that decided to side with my boss and the company. lol It was a bad time.
I love the "it was a mistake" "we're looking into it" "not sure what happened..." responses.
Not even just in this context, but in the context of everything. Corporate America is absolutely about deception and politics now, it isn't about working at all.
Yep. This is how it works in any corporation that has higly sensitive secrets -- regulatory, risk, trade, or otherwise -- that they are highly keen on keeping safe. As soon as you signal your intent to quit, if you were privy to any of those, you are a risk, and the priority is getting you off-boarded and your access revoked ASAP. That's just how it goes
Absolutely. I've been at places where I was escorted out five minutes after I gave my notice, and at places where 10 years later they still call me every 8 months or so.
^ this is it. The advice of this post is so dumb. Unless you have a good relationship with your manager and your skip and maybe skip skip you’re looking for trouble by giving any notice.
This is highly subjective as in it depends tremendously on the role, employer, and the given employee:employer relationship.
At one startup where I played workaholic for several years establishing substantial leverage and dependency on my presence, I didn't just give heaps of notice; I plain asked the CEO how to gracefully exit the company.
Right thing to do, yeah?
Except he disastrously mishandled the situation by insisting I stay "until the end". Neglecting to take advantage of the opportunity to tell me exactly for how long and with who the knowledge transfers should occur. Instead it just turned into a sort of pissing match where leadership was acting like they owned my autonomy/called my bluff, insisted on paying me for a month+ without coming in "for me to think about it". It was just a ridiculous calamity on their part, culminating in my leaving anyways without any transfer at all. (They eventually went bankrupt after burning >$100M, go figure)
In hindsight that experience alone discouraged me from ever letting myself work hard into such a role again.
And if you're not in some high-impact, difficult-to-replace, bus-factor role, giving notice really isn't all that important IMO.
I also categorically disagree with this advice. The people who benefit are not the ones in charge of the decision, and the benefit to your reputation for the ~5 people it really impacts does not outweigh getting to take a stress-free, risk-free sabbatical in between jobs. I have always asked to extend my start date out as far as possible and the new company always pushes back and I end up taking off a few weeks between jobs at most. I am not sacrificing that time for the potential of better parting feelings for a handful of coworkers who take over my stuff, when you should be working toward that lowered bus factor day-to-day, regardless of whether you are planning to leave.
One specific challenge comes as tech companies push more and more compensation to bonuses and other must-be-present-to-win approaches (RSUs, etc). If you leave shortly before a trigger date, you've essentially been working the entire previous year at a discount, since your contractual bonus for the time you worked will never be paid. If you continue significantly past a cliff, then your transition time is being worked at a discount.
If you give significant notice, one of two things can happen. If you give notice before the cliff, planning to depart after the cliff (that is, maximizing the percentage of the time worked where the company actually pays you what they agreed you were worth), the company can accelerate the departure schedule and avoid paying out; if you give notice after the cliff, you're inherently volunteering for discount work for a company you didn't even want to work for at full price!
In practice, I think at this point that companies that choose to put a large amount of compensation behind a cliff this way are responsible for understanding the consequences of that choice. If you pay 30% or my annual comp, and that of all my peers, on Monthuary 15th, then you should assume that you will get a cluster of resignations on Monthuary 16th each year, that those departures will happen in the standard two weeks, and that because they are clustered you will be unlikely to hand off as easily and fully as if they were scattered. But hey, you managed to screw some of my coworkers who had to leave mid-year for family reasons out of a few bucks!
I've heard of employers paying signing bonuses to make up for the fact that an employee is leaving a partially-accrued bonus on the table at the employer he's leaving.
Sure, getting your bonus bought out provides some superficial relief for this problem. But if your next employer thinks that your value is high enough to buy out your bonus, they likely think that independent of the current date (modulo a special case where your value /now/ is significantly higher than it would be in another quarter or whatever). Your next employer gets no value from the fact that you're leaving previous money on the table; if they offer to buy out a bonus, stay, get that bonus, then remind them that they thought you had that additional value and you'll take at as a signing bonus now, thank you very much.
How many times has David resigned this way? Twice!
I have seen probably close to 100 people give notice in my life. Many get the door as soon as they resign. Many get 2x the workload while the wrap things up. This is straight up naive advice.
One guy gave his 6 weeks notice, his last day would be two weeks after bonus payout. He was a super critical eng on a component in a system that brought in a couple hundred million in revenue. He had started documenting the systems, setting up meetings. HR informed the team that his last day would be the following friday. In 5 working days. It screwed the team and it screwed him. There was no backsies.
Why anyone would trust a corporation not to fire them immediately is being willfully naive. If one does do this, have all your ducks in a row and expect your last day to be the moment you submit your resignation.
Check with local labor laws and structure your resignation for maximum "impact" for whatever your definition of that word is.
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Now, I absolutely loathe the modern corporate culture, which is happy to escort you out of the building the moment your employment is terminated, without giving you a chance to even say goodbye to your colleagues, who you might have been working with extensively for years. It's deeply traumatic and it contributes to an overall sense of fear and "screw teamwork, it's everyone for themselves".
But now when I "give notice" and they don't even let me try to work the next 2 weeks, I'm grateful. I don't want my coworkers to ignore or patronize me while I sit idle or do make-work. I don't want to have to put on a show about how wonderful the company and team are, and why I'm leaving anyways. Nor do I want to expose my true feelings to my co-workers and infect them with my bad attitude--even if the writing is on the wall for the entire enterprise. It's like a breakup: the best thing for everyone is to make it clean and crisp, say "it's not you, it's me", make a sincere statement to the effect of "let's be friends", and then see each other roughly never again.
Life hack: Put your resignation in writing with a date in the future. In many states, if the employer attempts to move the termination date (without compensation), they will award wages until your resignation date... I've used this twice, and in both cases, I was sent home, but HR told the manager that any severance would start after my resignation date which in one case led to a really awkward call when my manager tried to get me to come back for a month after having me pack up my desk and leave.
This sounds like such a neat way to deal with it. I wonder if it's legally valid in my jurisdiction (in Sweden.) I have never heard of it but yet again, why not?
Everyone else: please talk to a lawyer in your state familiar with employment law before banking on this.
Another note is that I'm always succession planning. Document, share what I'm doing, etc... I learned early on that if I couldn't be replaced, I also couldn't be promoted.
Nailed this on the head.
At the same time, the extra work this requires is often not appreciated by management either - I've seen some (admittedly poor) managers comment on lower productivity due to the documentation efforts.
Even as someone who has zero interest in being promoted, I think this is good practice. It's part of helping to maintain a healthy organization. If anyone is actually indispensable, that's a very dangerous situation for the team and the company.
benefit from it, sure.
After the week is done to figure that stuff out - no one really cares about you anymore. There is likewise a tacit assumption that you won’t deliver anything again (why would you?). As such it’s usually best to let someone out the door after a week.
Typically when I give notice, I simply state that the employer can do whatever over the next 2 weeks. 70% of the time, when given the choice, they will decide on a fast transition of 1 week. There hardly is anything to do the second week.
In practice, even two weeks is more than enough for your role to be taken over by someone. I really see little value in giving more notice that that for either the employer or employee.
Ideally, sure. In real life the employee needs to do a brain dump of handover documents because no one writes anything down.
Culture and relationships are a two way street, and you are always responsible for your own part in building it. You might have a shit boss or work for a shit company and it's not going to end well, and if that's the case and there's nothing you can do, then all that's left is to look out for yourself. I wouldn't ever advocate for that to be the default position, though.
Came back on Monday, incompetent fuckers had locked me out and terminated me as a no call no show. lol, uh, it's in the fucking time off tool you fucks. The thing that really sucked was that I was a high preforming employee, I canceled a promotion review to give notice. 7 years in and some jerkoff needs your seat and 6 weeks isn't appreciated. The got me reconnected after a couple days and then my manager never talked to me again. that was a long three weeks there at the end.
So you avoid the perception of being dishonest and hiding something by actually being dishonest and hiding something?
I find this on itself to be a dysfunction. In well functioning team, they would be able to guess, because they would know your general opinions. And their positive opinions would be known too.
As in, this happens only because the communication within the team or within the corporation is dysfunctional and people dont talk in the first place.
This mirrors my experience, but for one time where my manager had been a friend for some years prior to me reporting to him.
I personally think it's the right thing to do, not for the company, but for your colleagues. If staying longer can help your colleagues to take over your stuff, some will be grateful and will remember it if your paths cross again.
I know now I might have been able to fight this, and may have done that knowing what I know now. On the other hand it might not be worth the effort.
If you're wondering how, I think I didn't "earn" vacation until the end of the month, and was technically using "borrowed vacation". I stayed with that company for 7 years... I can't think of any other reason for them to end my employment two days early, right before the end of the month.
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If you've been on the other side of that - having employees sabotage or steal in the process of leaving - you'd at least understand it. Not many people do that, but it's always the bad apples who ruin it for everybody.
From now on I'm giving 2 weeks and getting the fuck out of there.
If it’s an amicable departure 3-4 weeks can be a lot less stressful for everyone.
6-8 weeks is kinda weird though, unless you‘re extremely senior and on critical path for a lot of things, or you‘re using up accrued PTO.
If you're a leader in a team, definitely give more notice. It's the professional thing to do. Something that the post -doesn't- say is that you should have a transition plan written down before you tell your boss, just in case you get cut off.
Of course they can still summarily kick you out the door, but it's a chance for you as a leader to do right by the team.
So don’t negotiate start date until you have an offer and are talking to the hiring manager. Save it to the end and you can say “well, I’m still not 100% sure about this offer, but I think this would work if you could push my start date out a bit…”
My thought is that if that worked for me for 2 weeks, it should also be more than enough for an IC.
On the other hand, the leadership folks I interact with always make only super high level decisions. Rarely does it get intricate. It's more important to know how to quickly assess the big picture and how to communicate. All lot of what a leader does and makes them uniquely leaders is not something that's based on acquiring company specific and product and infra specific knowledge accumulated across several years.
I rarely care if my manager leaves beyond the fact that I have to build trust with someone new. But ultimately they aren't super in the weeds on anything mission critical.
An engineer that can jump into an incident and immediately identify the problem on a code path because they have worked on it or around it intimately at some point does make a difference, but also just having a detailed mental model of how the system pieces interact is super crucial. Bus factor is a thing, even though it rarely is catastrophic. Lead time can help here.
Of course leaders leaving also is a challenge, but it's because of their unique charm, ability to grasp issues quickly and make sane decisions. But none of this can be transferred to a new guy, in 2 or 4 weeks or 8.
The moment you give your resignation, there are good odds your company will say "we accept your resignation effective immediately. Goodbye." Sometimes it's a blanket company policy to do this, sometimes it's because they know you're going to a competitor and they don't want you to start training for your new job, sometimes they were on the fence about you staying anyways.
Do not do this ever end. There is a significant chance you will be instantly fired with no income for months. Don't.
No, it's not common practice for tech companies to immediately fire anyone who resigns.
A 2 week notice period is basically standard in the US tech industry. Some companies will take resignations and then remove the employee's access to sensitive material (code, chats, documentation, etc.) but require them to be available for 2 weeks to participate in handoff conversations. They continue to be paid, however.
It does happen that companies will immediately fired people. However, companies rarely do it because they stand to lose a lot of transition information and it also poisons the well for any future resignations. It also sets a precedent for remaining employees to not give any notice, which means everyone is going to start quitting without any notice in the future. This is bad, and companies want to avoid it.
Giving extremely long notice periods (e.g. "I plan to quit in a few months") could push the company to move up your departure date, though. The only time long departure notice is really warranted is for executives and truly key employees. Most people over-estimate their importance to their company and their project, IMO, but in some rare cases a single person can be instrumental to a company. It's nowhere near as common as people assume, though.
In practice, it's not really a huge loss even if it does happen. Most people get raises when they change jobs and the new company is often willing to move start dates up if you ask.
It doesn't matter if it's a common practice. It's whether you want to deal with the uncommon outcome.
The odds might be long but the stakes are high.
Imagine in the United States giving 2 months notice thinking you're a good guy doing a mitzvah for your employer and then getting walked out the door and having to figure out COBRA insurance and getting by on unemployment and maybe a PTO payout if you're lucky.
I have worked at a company where the moment you signal your intention to resign, HR cuts you a check for your remaining PTO, your manager goes to your desk to collect your things in a box, and security escorts you out the door. But this was all well-known to everyone who worked there, so every departing employee made sure to say goodbye to their (trusted) co-workers before telling their manager.
The company I am at now, they let you stay on for basically as long as you want, but one to two weeks is typical. Most people don't make their departure fully public until their last day.
If your current company is the latter, then jumping ship without giving your manager and co-workers any kind of heads-up is a great way to burn bridges you might need in the future.
It's difficult to imagine why they would do this, since it would remove all the cushion that 2+ week period would provide the company for getting projects closed and documented, and bringing new people on to take over the employee's projects. It turns an unfortunate situation into an immediate crisis.
I have seen (recently) a company say "please, we are begging you not to resign, would you like to take a sabbatical and we can talk about it when you're back?"
I have worked at a company that had a blanket policy of always doing this.
Let me be clear: it was a dumb policy. It resulted in employees waiting until their last day to tell the company that they were planning to leave. It created all kinds of havoc with the lack of knowledge transfer and handoff. And if it was intended to prevent exiting employee from taking malicious actions, it was completely ineffective at that since the employee would know about the policy and would choose not to disclose that they were leaving until after the head undertaken any malicious action.
But, I can say with some confidence that there are some tech companies that do this.
only for people really underperforming, or going to a competitor
I definitely agree with the article. I've given extended notice for many jobs I've left (again, usually on the order of several months). I had a good relationship with my manager, and I like to leave stuff "tied up with a bow". Similar to the experience in the article, it was good for both me and my employer.
I'm sorry you didn't have a relationship with your employer where you felt this was possible. And to be clear, I don't believe my experience is universal, but I think if most people stop to think about it, they will be able to figure out how their employer will respond.
Risk isn't just about the likelihood, it's also the outcome.
Even if your manager loves you to death and there's just a .1% chance you misread the situation and your early notice goes wrong... the result of that .1% occurrence could be disastrous.
On the other hand, if a 2 week notice is likely to screw over your team, that's a sign of a bad employer. If 2 full weeks of notice isn't enough to stabilize things enough for you to leave on good terms, what happens if you're injured tomorrow?
2 weeks notice is good. The most you should do earlier than 2 weeks is start documenting the unwritten parts of your process and start getting others to understand those. A good manager will enable that without you saying you're walking out the door.
What i've learned is if I can't have some kind of conversation with my manager about possibly leaving or being unhappy in the role, unhappy with compensation, etc.. then that is partially on me having let that relationship sour.
Obviously a lot of this depends on the kind of manager you have, and situation with the company and loads of other factors.
Genuine question; is this a US thing? I've never, ever seen this or heard of it happening. I don't think I've ever worked at a company that didn't state in the contract the notice period. I have seen companies decide they don't want that person on site anymore when someone quits, but they gave "gardening leave"; the person goes home and is effectively on holiday, paid as usual, for their notice period.
There is a significant chance you will be instantly fired with no income for months.
US "at will" kind of thing? Must be.
Then I was let go immediately. Which was an unexpected hit, though luckily the new company let me move my start date up. This was a tech company with around one hundred employees, and I was in good standing (my then manager later recruited me for a position at a different company).
The best approach is to always give two weeks formal notice on a Friday morning, with the expectation that there's a chance you'll not be coming back on Monday. Best to do all the transition preparation work before that moment. If I've got a manager that I trust, I let them know with a bit more informal advance notice.
ETA: on the other hand, I gave a month or two advance notice to Google, and they were happy to have me stay until my resignation date. My sense is that it's smaller companies that tend to do the immediate layoff.
The only exceptions I can think of were when people gave multiple months of notice that they were going to quit and already had declining performance due to e.g. unhappiness about the job. If you're not performing well and you tell your employer that you're quitting in a few months, they're not really interested in giving you more paychecks to perform poorly. IMO, that's not exactly unreasonable either.
Some companies will restrict the employee's access for the notice period and remove their work as a way of protecting company information from last-minute exfiltration (it happens a lot more than you'd think), but those employees are still paid during this time period. They're also obligated to answer questions and attend meetings about handoff, although in some cases this may amount to zero work.
But no, it's not common for US tech companies to fire employees immediately for resigning. I don't know where the parent commenter got the idea that this is common.
Mostly it was so we could find out if any ostensibly automated tasks were in fact dependent on their ongoing work, while they were still reachable to answer questions. Perhaps related, this was all during my time as a unix admin, before I officially converted to a pure software development role. I've never personally seen a developer walked immediately out the door.
It generally only happens in exceptionally paranoid companies in sensitive industries or government organizations, which clearly exist but are already atypical workplaces.
I've never seen the point in treating your employer as an adversary, as the OP of this thread clearly does.
There are some with six (my last job) or some with one. In my last job I was able to negotiate it down though as I wanted to quit earlier, it was the employer that wanted the six months in my contract. I was a key person in a start up bank so it's not a normal term to have.
> Genuine question; is this a US thing?
At least in California/Silicon Valley I have never seen or experienced such a thing in almost 30 years, so I can say confidently it is not common.
Of course it can happen, there are zero employee protections in the US. But it's not common.
People generally give 2 weeks notice and keep coming in to the office (pre-pandemic) for those two weeks to meet with others and help transfer knowledge, hang out, do farewell lunches etc. Only on the end of the last day is your account access revoked. That's the expected convention.
I am not sure what happens when you try to give more than two weeks notice.
You never let someone who gives notice keep their badge. You just say, "Congrats, there's the door. Cheers!"
You have no control over someone who has given notice. If they do good work... that's great. But if they do shit work, what are you going to do, fire them?
The liabilities are outrageous, and the payoff is only 2-weeks dev time (if you're lucky)... at the regular rate... Nah, not worth it.
And you have that person in the office talking about how they're moving on to a better role, with more pay, and it can quickly turn into a cancer for team morale.
I have never seen an article with such horrible career advice on Hacker News. This is bad advice.
I've always paid close attention to how my employers behave when someone gives notice: how you treat people/are treated when conditions aren't ideal shows you the true character of those involved. If the employer acts like a jerk, I know I'll get equal or worse treatment. I won't extend them any curtesy when I leave, which will likely be sooner rather than later based on their approach.
That said, I disagree with the article. In the US, we're lucky to have a common expectation: 2 weeks. I've added an additional week for small companies, but I'd never do more than that. 2 weeks is plenty, and quickly feels like being persona-non-grata.
Idk what the alternative is. You tell them you want to quit in 2 months? Nobody does that.
Now obviously, in a mom and pop shop, I would discuss my desire to leave before I even started looking and help find/train my replacement, while they would likewise help me find a new job that better fits my life situation. But that's just not how corporate America works.
They also took my $20k bonus that I was supposed to receive months earlier and used it as a carrot on a stick to get me to sign a bunch of legal paperwork releasing all my rights. At least I got the much needed money. I was really underpaid there.
I also lost my best friend who also worked there that decided to side with my boss and the company. lol It was a bad time.
Good luck seriously in finding new and more quality friends! You'll find some!
Not even just in this context, but in the context of everything. Corporate America is absolutely about deception and politics now, it isn't about working at all.
I signaled I was on the way out for quite a while ahead of putting in two weeks, and it was abundantly clear they'd take me back quite readily.
But that situation doesn't generalize.
Absolutely. I've been at places where I was escorted out five minutes after I gave my notice, and at places where 10 years later they still call me every 8 months or so.
At one startup where I played workaholic for several years establishing substantial leverage and dependency on my presence, I didn't just give heaps of notice; I plain asked the CEO how to gracefully exit the company.
Right thing to do, yeah?
Except he disastrously mishandled the situation by insisting I stay "until the end". Neglecting to take advantage of the opportunity to tell me exactly for how long and with who the knowledge transfers should occur. Instead it just turned into a sort of pissing match where leadership was acting like they owned my autonomy/called my bluff, insisted on paying me for a month+ without coming in "for me to think about it". It was just a ridiculous calamity on their part, culminating in my leaving anyways without any transfer at all. (They eventually went bankrupt after burning >$100M, go figure)
In hindsight that experience alone discouraged me from ever letting myself work hard into such a role again.
And if you're not in some high-impact, difficult-to-replace, bus-factor role, giving notice really isn't all that important IMO.
One specific challenge comes as tech companies push more and more compensation to bonuses and other must-be-present-to-win approaches (RSUs, etc). If you leave shortly before a trigger date, you've essentially been working the entire previous year at a discount, since your contractual bonus for the time you worked will never be paid. If you continue significantly past a cliff, then your transition time is being worked at a discount.
If you give significant notice, one of two things can happen. If you give notice before the cliff, planning to depart after the cliff (that is, maximizing the percentage of the time worked where the company actually pays you what they agreed you were worth), the company can accelerate the departure schedule and avoid paying out; if you give notice after the cliff, you're inherently volunteering for discount work for a company you didn't even want to work for at full price!
In practice, I think at this point that companies that choose to put a large amount of compensation behind a cliff this way are responsible for understanding the consequences of that choice. If you pay 30% or my annual comp, and that of all my peers, on Monthuary 15th, then you should assume that you will get a cluster of resignations on Monthuary 16th each year, that those departures will happen in the standard two weeks, and that because they are clustered you will be unlikely to hand off as easily and fully as if they were scattered. But hey, you managed to screw some of my coworkers who had to leave mid-year for family reasons out of a few bucks!
I have seen probably close to 100 people give notice in my life. Many get the door as soon as they resign. Many get 2x the workload while the wrap things up. This is straight up naive advice.
One guy gave his 6 weeks notice, his last day would be two weeks after bonus payout. He was a super critical eng on a component in a system that brought in a couple hundred million in revenue. He had started documenting the systems, setting up meetings. HR informed the team that his last day would be the following friday. In 5 working days. It screwed the team and it screwed him. There was no backsies.
Why anyone would trust a corporation not to fire them immediately is being willfully naive. If one does do this, have all your ducks in a row and expect your last day to be the moment you submit your resignation.
Check with local labor laws and structure your resignation for maximum "impact" for whatever your definition of that word is.