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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'
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.
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
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
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. :-)
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
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
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.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I was getting so down after reading his comment... But then I saw yours. Thanks.
Yes, on the one hand, there is some abuse of maternity and family leave policies. People think they should be able to shrug their work off on others and then still get the credit for it when they return, in terms of advancement, etc. As a single, childless woman, that really irks me. The other side of the issue is that it is in society's best interest for mothers to spend a lot of time with their newborns. It's in society's best interest to have children who feel secure, breast fed when possible, etc., etc. There is a middle ground. It's up to us to find it and to push for it, and not to be completely blind to one side of the issue.
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."
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."