Quitting your job? Here's how not to do it
You can't take it with you... There is a tradition of “off-site backups” for handy bits of code and data that you’ve worked with at your current employer. At most firms you could fit every line of source code together with a complete customer list on the free USB stick you got at a conference. This is a really dumb thing to do …
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I missed this particular resignation but
have to admire the classiness of the woman who did it.
She worked for a manager named "Nigel" (pseudonym) who was notorious for working people into the ground, and doubly so whenever they resigned. So she handed in a leave request for 4 weeks, got it approved then on the Friday afternoon beforehand, gave her notice and exited unscathed. Because it was the public service in the 80s, she could get away with it by having a decent union behind her. Nowadays, not a chance.
Actually, is there a need for an IT union?
Never ever burn your bridges...
...even if they're damaged by the company and dissolved your expectations of them. Of course I'm posting anon because I'd hope the company I have just left would have the decancy to change their attitude and work practises on whatever their next move is to replace me. Working on your own holding up the internal/hosting/projects doing 6 day weeks is not healthy at all.
They only required to hire one extra person to split/share the working load. However, I went on the best terms possible making sure the head of dev knew where all the stuff was for a hand-over to the new person. One of the directors saw how hard I worked to make sure they were in the best position to continue in my absense. This is regardless of the abuse/bullying I received from others within the company. It's life. Water under the bridge.
There's always the chance that said director will move on and maybe one day saw my contribution that wasn't ever recognised. Managers/directors love it when you react negatively if it all turned sour. It gives them the ammo to shoot you down further. My advice: don't!
"Buybacks" can work
I was offered a position at another company when my wife was 8 months pregnant, with a 16% raise, but a longer and more expensive commute.
I ended up taking my employer's offer of a 24% raise, with a £5k training budget. Working for the company still sucked for many reasons, but it meant I could spend more time with my family, and (crucially) meant that I financially wasn't in deficit each month my wife was on maternity leave (whereas I would have been - albeit only slightly - with the 16% raise and more expensive commute).
Eventually, 2 years later, after a further 8% raise, I decided enough was enough, and moved up the ladder to another company - but without the training and additional experience (no matter how damn frustrating it was working for them) I gained, I probably wouldn't be where I am now, earning 50% more than when I started working for them.
Maybe, but this is how to do it. I was a techy for a company and designed a very complex system to run machines. I programmed in a Christmas day code and some 8 months after I left Christmas came along. Everything stopped, never to be run automatically again. There was no body there, nor the manufacturers of the controller that knew exactly how I had designed the program, worse (for them) the whole time the machines were running we were running updates and fine tuning the system, we even had the manufacturers come down to see how I had used the machine, as they wanted to do the same for a car manufacturer.
It had taken me several years to get where the system had got, and to add to their woes, I swapped the "timer" control with the "counter" so every time they tried to access the system they cahnged timers to counters as they got to them.
Ha ha ha, they ended up moving, closing down and then there was none.
In Regards to the "next page" hyperlink
I HATE the F****** EAGLES :@
*gets kicked out of the cab*
Unintended consequences
I was head hunted to work as an IT Manager for competitors in the City of London financial markets. My resignation was on the whole a good natured thing, but they required me to work my 3 months notice period as "gardening leave" with the twist that had to be on their premises, but not my own office. The rational was that they didn't want me to have access to confidential information during my notice period and didn't want me to do any work for my new employers during gardening leave. The process entailed turning up on the Director's floor each morning, finding a seat somewhere and reading a book all day. It was very boring but a good natured process.
The unintended consequence was the secretaries of the Directors used to ask me to visit their desks to help sort out spreadsheet and word processing problems on documents they were preparing for their bosses. I learned a lot more confidential information about the company and its plans in those three months than I'd ever seen in the previous five years of employment. The City of London is a small place though, so I never breached that unintended confidence.
Dominic writes back
Yes, this piece is less accusatory, don't take that as a trend, some topics merit venon, some don't.
I agree that accepting a buyback is often a bad idea, my advice was to make the best of a bad situation. As for "trust", I'd say that a failure of this is in the rop 5 reasons to quit, expressed as "being shafted", "bonus much lower than promised", "no training as promised", "backstabbing boss", "work isn't what I was hired to do", if you told me it was the #1 reason for quitting I wouldn't argue, actually this is the start of one of my more "in your face" pieces to come.
I'm sorry for emailing "anonymous coward", I can't say how I got his email address because umm err, he's anonymous, but finiding people is what I do for a living, sometimes they don't want to be found.
"...money is the best revenge."
Yes, but there's still the choice between gaining more money for yourself and depriving them of money.
Take your revenge well and you could cost them far more than you could ever gain for yourself.
Another Good Article
Thanks, Dominic, Have read a few of your articles and they usually make a lot of sense. Common sense really but techies aren't known for that hence the flaming you get.
Anyone know when the IT Crowd is coming back?
Re: Another Good Article
Sadly Dion, the IT crowd is no more...
My own proposal for a sitcom about City headhunterscalled "Pimps" will not likely see the light of day. I would be played by Robbie Coltrane, but given that Hugh Laurie is now unemployed, I might accept him.
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