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The Art of The Farewell Email
With so many people losing their jobs, the farewell email, letting colleagues and contacts know where you are moving and how you can be reached, has become common. Writing a really good one, whether it be funny, sad or just plain mad is an art form. Chris Kula, a receptionist at a New York engineering firm, wrote: "For nearly as long as I've worked here, I've hoped that I might one day leave this company. And now that this dream has become a reality, please know that I could not have reached this goal without your unending lack of support." In May, lawyer Shinyung Oh was let go from the San Francisco branch of the Paul Hastings law firm six days after losing a baby. "If this response seems particularly emotional," she wrote to the partners, "perhaps an associate's emotional vulnerability after a recent miscarriage is a factor you should consider the next time you fire or lay someone off. It shows startlingly poor judgment and management skills — and cowardice — on your parts." Let's hear the best and worst goodbye emails you've seen.
Executive Summary:
Mrs. Oh was excoriating the law firm's (more precisely the elite senior partners) campaign to blame law associates with a record of _excellent_ reviews for the associates' firing.
Why? She alleged the law firm was not bringing in sufficient business to grow (a partner's raison d'etre), that the firm did not want to publicly admit the fact, BUT, it wanted to maintain an illusion of grandeur so as to entice new elite-law school graduates to continue to apply as new associates.
The miscarriage, her exemplary reviews, one partner's unsolicited glowing! praise days earlier, his about face, her firing, her presentation of an NDA type document for severance pay at the last minute firing, her emotional rawness, her refusal to be stampeded at such a vulnerable moment, her outrage and refusal to submit to the law firm's fig leaf for its own hiring duplicity, her email to "the" partner, et al all make up the rest of the story.
Last heard, months ago when this broke, she had committed major corporation career suicide but she apparently did not let that stand in her way. She's of Korean ancestry and cute though married.
Falling stock prices often contribute to bankruptcy because of lot of debt structures are at least partly short-term, requiring it to be rolled over from time to time, and creditors are less willing to roll over the debt when the stock price is tanking. They get nervous.
And layoffs announcements often cause a bump in share price when times are good or just okay, because it signals lower future expenses. But in times like these, when investors are nervous, unexpected layoff announcements can be taken as a signal that things are the company are worse than people thought. It signals that management thinks future revenues are likely to be lower, and that they are trying to cut expenses to help compensate.
My appologies for not being clear, but the SA in question was not fired, he quit to go work for a dot com startup.The email he sent out was basically bragging about how great his new company was going to be, how we all sucked and were stupid, and he listed every slight and fault everyone on his team had. About two or three years later (2001 I think) is when I was on the interview team with another ex employee. He was not a bad SA, but he was not a fantastic one either.
So he burned his bridges and paid the price for it. Do I regret it? Not one bit.