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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.
It smells like...hollow victory
Not to mention possibly career ending. Someone about 10 years ago was leaving a company I worked at, and wrote a blistering goodbye email. A few years later at another company, a fellow ex employee of the first and I were on the interview team. And guess who walked in!
Needless to say, he got a very short interview and absolutely no consideration. When asked why, both myself and my coworker said 'Unprofessionalism'
. . . Good for the managers. Personal problems shouldn't affect their decisions. What, the managers should instead lay off a better employee because they're feeling sorry for this woman?
My sister opened a computer store in Hawaii. She sells C shells by the seashore.
Firing the tech was a mistake. Rehiring him knowing his vengefulness was a bigger one.
I'm an IT consultant - my contract was terminated early, and I wrote a tasteful goodbye email ("was great working with you all" etc. which happened to be true). Good thing I did - 3 days later more funding came through and I was called back!
In response to the article summary, I don't think Shinyung Oh's upper management knew that she had a miscarriage. It's not like they were waiting for the worst opportunity to lay someone off. It sounds more like she had a basically really terrible week. On a side note I think her response was wholly unprofessional. Let your contacts know you are no longer working for said firm and be done with it. Don't make it a personal vendetta. Junk like that only kills your chances later on in the career path.
You might prefer pay cuts to layoffs. Me, I'd prefer the layoffs—either I'm unaffected, or I now know I wasn't valued and can start over somewhere that I will be.
Benford's Corollary to Clarke's Law: "Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced."
It's sad but true. When an employee does something wrong it's unprofessional. When an employer does something wrong it's business.
UNIX/Linux Consulting
You always have the option of starting the job hunt as soon as you're hit by a pay cut - and as a bonus you get to keep some salary during that hunt, AND have a less crowded job market as undoubtedly some people will take the cuts rather than look for a new job. If you're rather start over anew then you don't have to wait for them to forcibly boot you out the door before you start.
Our HR department is kinda slick (or at least they think they are). Last year we didn't receive annual merit raises, but they PROMISED that they'd give them this year. Well, they did, but decided to implement 3 unpaid holidays this year that end up adding up to almost exactly what the increase in pay was. So net change in ACTUAL yearly pay was zero. Strange when as a salaried worker my stated salary is one thing but I'm getting less than that per year. :S
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
The employee is the supplier. The employer is the customer. In most cases, customers can abuse the relationship a lot more than suppliers.
Having said that, I'm sure that employers who abuse their employees pay for it when times are good and good people find better places to work. Usually the people who leave are those who can find other jobs - which are precisely those you want to keep.
-- Support a free market in the field of government
People who can get rehired want layoffs, even if they are among them. Severance turns into a payed vacation and then you pick something else up.
People who are overemployed want pay cuts because they can't.
It seems to me to be more of an exercise in massaging one's own ego. I, personally, find it more productive to use a site like spoke or linkedin to keep connected to my former coworkers. No long winded e-mail necessary.
This is NOT the time to explain who you hate and why. It is imperative to be professional about the process (no matter how bizarre the situation might be). Your co-workers already KNOW to the self-promoting a$$holes are, who is sleeping with whom, the golfers, the entrenched dead wood, etc. There is a time and place to orchestrate a response, but it can wait for more favorable circumstances. If you're really pissed off, help find a new job for everyone who is competent and useful. But help yourself first. It starts with being viewed as a resource within your industry, and you can't do that if you have spent your time bad-mouthing anyone. Besides, you never know who you might be working with in the future.
It takes time, but bad things happen to bad people. Always.
When I quit my job, I was being passed over for promotions by morons, I wrote a nice letter. Thanking those who worked with me and letting people know where to get me. I actually quit two weeks after I got promoted, but because I was passed over three times (one of the guy recently got fired for incompetence) I didn't care.
I would rather not burn bridges - you never know if you may want to work at a company where a previous co-worker is employed at. Leaving with grace is always better then leaving with attitude.
I do not support "The Man". I also do not support your irrational stupidity
Well now the tech knows that he can always threaten to pull another "tantrum" whenever management decides against him. Keeping your friends close and your enemies closer is only a good idea when you're not beholden to your enemies.
We all know what to do, but we don't know how to get re-elected once we have done it
The employee is the supplier. The employer is the customer.
That's a good point, but I don't think it's the only issue at play. There's also the issue of power, and big companies have much more power than individual people. When I buy something from Best Buy, I'm forced to agree to their terms, take it or leave it. If I work for Best Buy, then I'm pretty much forced to agree to their terms, take it or leave it. It's not a negotiation between equals.
And also businesses can hide behind an organization. When a company acts, it's not always entirely clear whether it's the decision of "the company" or the individual within the company. If I'm a manager and I want to make someone's life miserable, I can do that while justifying it as "policy" or "good for business". I can say, "Sorry, it's out of my hands. It's just policy." If the employee turns around and tries to make my life miserable, he can't hide behind his actions as easily.
That's not to say there's nothing you can do. There are strategies for managing relationships where you're the weaker party. But let's not pretend that power doesn't come into play.
The problem with your logic is that with the economy in the toilet, one never knows which category one falls into. While you could find another job, there's no guarantee you could find one that pays as well for a company that you would be reasonably happy working for that is within a reasonable driving distance from your home. And before you say "move somewhere else", in this economy, being able to sell one's home in a reasonably short amount of time is also not a given.
In short, your notion fails to take into account that some people actually like their jobs and like working for their employer. At some point, after working somewhere for a few years, it is no longer just a job that can be so easily discarded. Where I work, there's a startling tendency for laid off employees to end up working there again for a different team within just a handful of years.
The notion of pay cuts to avoid layoffs seems perfectly reasonable to me. If anything, it means that the company values their employees enough that they hope to keep all of them. In my book, that says a lot about the company and its management. Either it means that they genuinely care about their employees (in which case you'd have a hard time finding a comparably good company to work for) or it means that they are barely able to stay out of bankruptcy and are too scared that the hit on their stock from announcing layoffs will put them over the edge. One is very positive, the other very negative. Use your own judgment on a case-by-case basis. :-)
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You must be joking.
The average person only has one email address, their work email address. They don't have Hotmail or Gmail or Yahoo or anything else, they have one email address and that's their work email address. And when they switch jobs, they switch email addresses and everyone has to update their lists.
And when they're not at work, email does not exist. You send them something at 5:01 PM on a Friday and you're not getting a response from them until Monday morning.
And they only know how to use one button, "Reply All". They don't know what the difference between "Reply" and "Reply All" is, all they know is that they once used "Reply" and the person they intended the message for didn't get it, so they just use "Reply All" because that works every time.
So no, I don't doubt for one minute that this story is newer than ten years old because I work with people dumb enough to do this every day. Here at Slashdot we nailed this whole "email" thing back in the 90's. The average person hasn't and they also don't care. Some of them even view email as a nuisance they were better off without.
Schnapple
I hate people that think like you do.
Was he a good employee at the previous job? Do you know EXACTLY why he REALLY got fired? Did he deserve it?
Being unprofessional is one thing, but sending a pissed off email because you were wronged doesn't really bother me, and 9 times out of 10 due to politics you really don't know why someone was fired. You may hear 'because they did XX', but thats likely just an excuse for 'he made me or my boss look stupid, which we are, but don't want anyone to know'.
So if you guys know for a fact that he was wrong and that he was a bad employee at the previous company, then fine. But giving him a crappy interview for something ten years ago that you don't know the full details of is unprofessional of you. Either way, 10 years is a long time and people do grow up sometimes. You could have just cheated yourself out of an excellent employee because you're unable to look over mistakes people have made in the past.
Like I said though, its entirely dependant on the situation, but I'm gonna go out on a limb and assume from the way your stating it that you really don't know what truely happened to him.
For the record though, your bragging about handling the interview the way you did, is extremely unprofessional, and pretty damn childish. You didn't even have the balls to tell them why you blew the guy off.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
Your boss loves it when you write a stupid, vengeful email after being made redundant.
No-one likes laying someone off, unless they're incompetent or have it coming. So receiving the FU email after breaking the bad news makes the task that bit easier. They can go home thinking "Yeah, we made the right decision there, that guy really was a real douche and we never knew it until now", and sleep guilt-free in their beds.
So go ahead, write that email that tells all your colleges what you really think of them. Your boss will thank you for it and everyone else won't miss you once you're gone.
Am I missing something? Was the book somehow related to management, or retaining employees, or...? Because I find it odd to think that he'd sent, say, the first book of Wheel of Time to everyone while commenting on how management might benefit from a little reading.
Actually, it was two or three years after he left the company to go to a dot.com startup. His email on the way out was something along the lines of 'so long suckers, I'm going to get rich while you idiots work here, you all suck.." and insults to everyone he worked with. It was like he finally got to say what he had been dying to say for years.
Technically, he was competent, but not stellar. He was about average for the role he was applying for, but his past history was a mark against him. There were better candidates.
You have an odd idea of what professionalism is if you think it relates to perks for the company. Professionalism is not getting angry with people because they disagree with you no matter which method they choose to employ to persuade people. It's arriving at work on time and in proper attire. It means doing what you say you will do and when you say you'll do it. These are not unpaid perks that the company enjoys, they make for a work atmosphere which gets a lot more work done so I guess you could say you are doing more work without getting extra money but its all work you should be doing instead of arguing about stupid things.
Professionalism has a lot of characteristics that obviously vary from profession to profession so I'm mainly focusing on professionalism in an IT position. You need to intelligently be able to defend your position at all times even when someone that has no business making decisions is voicing an opinion and just happens to have the ear of the CTO or CEO in my case. You must be able to illustrate the lack of common sense those that would disagree with you would clearly have through polite means often with careful politicking. You need to be able to demonstrate the business sense in your goals and what you are proposing, how will this help the company make or save money? It's mastery of a craft, confidence that can't be shaken when the wind turns the wrong way which it inevitably does. It almost means consistency in behavior.
In the context of this discussion professionalism is a warm goodbye email that talks about what you enjoyed at the company and most times includes alternate ways to contact you.
Try telling that to a woman who just had a miscarriage, and she'll rip your still-beating heart of your chest and choke you with it.
Seriously - way to be a dick.
I call shenanigans.
No way a company would rehire someone who just maliciously changed all of the passwords and sent an insulting email. The employee clearly demonstrated a bad attitude and you would have to be insane to hire or especially rehire someone like that.
I would rather not burn bridges - you never know if you may want to work at a company where a previous co-worker is employed at. Leaving with grace is always better then leaving with attitude.
Indeed. This is certainly a case where honesty is NOT the best policy. Because I generally leave on good terms I've been offered consulting gigs with old employers and I get good recommendations. I also have been offered full time employment by former employers and former co-workers.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I knew Carly was bad, but I never know anyone who worked for her personally.
PS - they did finally get rid of her, but I heard she's found an organization which matches her personality. I hope the Republicans have plan to get rid of her.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
I think this all started with Neutron Jack Welch. The thing about good ole Jack is that his purpose, basically was to eliminate American manufacturing jobs and turn his company into something else that didn't do manufacturing. In fact, he turned it, General Electric, into yet another useless financial company, while the jobs that generated the real national wealth shifted overseas. In the future, I think he'll be seen for what he was, a parasite who reduced America to third world status and made billions doing it.
The thing is, if you are essentially just cutting your losses and planning on eliminating business divisions completely, you have no reason to care about the years of experience walking out the door. He's considered a success because he "made money," but he didn't make G. E. competitive with the Japanese. Here's a quote from an article, "I came into a company that had at least an extra 100,000, maybe 150,000 extra people. It was the early '80s. We were making television sets in Syracuse, N.Y., and the Japanese were selling them at the mall cheaper than we were making them." Jack Welch: 'I Fell In Love' So, essentially, he made money from failure.
Well, we've had years of this as the U. S. transformed into a nation of middlemen, shady accountants, lawyers, and "would you like fries with that" type jobs. The U. S. is basically the B-Ark from Life, the Universe, and Everything, with all the thinkers and doers being in the Eastern part of the world now. Good for them, not so good for us.
"MIT betrayed all of its basic principles."
Too short, wrong tone. Any "Farewell" e-mail should be looked at as advertising for your now forced move to self-employment (I don't care if you're officially laid-off and unemployed, everybody on slashdot has skills that friends and family use for free that can be marketed to strangers to meet the difference between paying the mortgage and eating). It should be relatively upbeat, thank people for the privilege of working on their team, contain a very short skills list of what you did for the team to remind them to think of you in the future, then include all appropriate private contact information and/or your contracting company's contact information.
Here's my last one (with some redactions):
[redacted, project and engagement specific info]
However, it has been great working with all of you. Keep [Consulting company] and myself in mind for future projects, we are an [big company] Partner Vendor and we have contracts with other companies outside of [big company], so I am sure we are not going anywhere soon. My services should be available through [big company] IT Flex & [Consulting company]- contact [big company liaison] or [consulting company manager].
[redacted, introductions for people who have never met or communicated with liaison or manager & more project related resource management stuff]
Once again, it was nice working with all of you, and hopefully I will get to work with you again in the future.
[redacted, contact info]
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Translation: blah blah blah I made a lot of money blah blah blah people are stupid (except me) blah blah blah I'm a pothead.
Could have saved a lot of people a lot of time with just the summary.
"Farewell notes", unless specific, positive, and heartfelt - (Dear George, you were really a fantastic coworker, and I'm proud to have worked with you...) are simply ego masturbation of one form or another. Long-winded erudition just means you're boring AND egocentric.
-Styopa
How is it "failure" that he stopped making TVs that were overpriced and fired people who were not adding value? Where I come from that's called "success."
everything in moderation
Does it matter? Is the globally-sent rude email ever justified?
Professionals can resist the urge to vent publicly.
And he told the guy the reason they blew him off -- he acted unprofessionally in a previous position. That's a real insight to an applicant's character that is rarely available. They'd bee idiots to ignore it.
everything in moderation
If you're suggesting that had GE stayed in the TV business their stock would not have fallen recently (unlike just about every other stock in this depression/recession) then you're pretty ignorant.
Riiiight. Massive failure there.
everything in moderation
How is it "failure" that he stopped making TVs that were overpriced and fired people who were not adding value? Where I come from that's called "success."
Hence, you're part of the problem.
This sig. intentionally left blank.
Who uses a mail store that doesn't single-instance attachements these days? A 9MB email to 1000 recipients should take ... 9MB in the email store!
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Hi, big strong alpha Silverback male, father of large family, here. Have work gloves, will lift heavy things.
Sorry to put it this way -- cruel to be kind and all that -- but if you're sacrificing family for your career, you're a damn fool. If you're living to work -- and your job doesn't involve healing the sick, feeding the hungry, saving children, etc. --
then you have missed the point.
Your job title will not cry with you in the night. It won't watch the sun with you in the morning. The company car won't care that your parents just died. Your subordinates won't look up to you, and the responsibility you have for them won't grow your soul.
Apart from that, I'm shocked at the callousness of the some of the posters here. Sometimes, it's just a matter of basic humanity. I'm a big strong guy. I don't mind pulling a double-shift if someone's wife just went into labor. I'm not made of spun sugar. Some poor woman has a miscarriage, I don't mind covering for her until she can get her head back together, and yeah, that might take a while. Some single Mom's kid falls out of a tree and breaks his arm, I don't mind watching her keeping her network in one piece while she runs to the emergency room. I'm not a helpless little girl -- I can carry a little bit more of a load for a good cause.
Listening to some of the thin reedy voices of the Ayn Rand acolytes on this board, I can tell they're just not ready to be husbands and fathers. I pity them for their loneliness, and I know if they don't dig deeper and find their hearts and testosterone, they'll never be ready.
He put his boots up on the table and made a face. "The sig," he smirked. "You can waste your life in search of the sig."
Why is a picture of Ron Paul being used? He's not gone, and we're not finished with what he started.
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"Leaving with grace is always better then leaving with attitude."
Generally. But if you are going to burn bridges, why not nuke them? :)
Who cares if he's competent? Nobody wants to work with a jackass.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
No, a good portion of people haven't had one, but unless the same good portion of people find it within themselves to *decide* to make their family lives better than the ones they were not-so-blessed with growing up, we'll continue the cycle of abuse, hatred, callousness and violence, and ensure that the next generation of people also have shitty family lives, and the next generation after that. Stand up and break it whenever you want. It takes more guts if you don't have a role-model, for sure, but that makes it even *more* rewarding in the end :)
-=[You cannot consistently judge this statement to be true.]=-