Quiters and Loosers
I’ve long thought that how a person quits a job is a very good indicator of their personality. When I worked at the hotel in my past life, most of the desk clerk personelle were known for not showing up on their last day - after all, what are they going to do - fire you? This showed a clear lack of professionalism and respect for their commitments, even if the superficial logic was correct. When I showed up for my last shift, my shift coworker was quite surprised. I pointed out that not showing up would have cost me $80.
I’ve also decided that you can judge a company by how it treats its outgoing employees.
At my now previous employer, I provided the customary 2 weeks notice. I was an “at-will” employee. Since I gave notice on Mon, Dec 18, 2006, I assumed that I would either be asked to leave immediately, or be kept on the whole two weeks. After a little thought, I figured that they would probably keep me on until the end of the week; there is usually nobody at work the last week as people use up any PTO which is going to expire. That wasn’t quite what happened.
Monday I spend most of my time doing knowledge transfer to other employees and cleaning up work left on my plate. Tuesday was a little different.
A little background. The company had 3 floors of a small office building. Since we were loosing large numbers of employees it made sense to consolidate to two floors and save approximately $7000/month rent on the third. Fair enough. The people moved desks but failed to clean up the rest of the crap on the floor. That job fell to the system administrator who happens to be a petit 5′ gal. She knows her stuff, but isn’t quite equiped to move desks that are heavier than she is. So when she was told to clear out empty boxes from a room on one of the remaining two floors, I jumped at the chance to be helpful. I said that I’d cut up the boxes and clear the room out so that our SysAdmin could do something slightly less useless. I think that was the most job satisfaction that I’d had at that company in 4 months. I was able to work on a single task for more than 30 minutes uninterrupted.
On Wednesday, when my boss came into the office after a day off, I told him the status of things and that I hoped that in addition to some additional knowledge transfer, I thought I’d be able to move most of the furniture from the floor we wanted to vacate to the empty room I’d just cleared out. I also indicated that if possible, I’d like to finish out the week at least. His response was: “If we need warm bodies to move furniture, I’m sure we can find some”. The problem is, they CAN’T! That or they wouldn’t. Simply put, they were putting a person on charge of moving furniture who was unsuited to the job, and also a professional insult. I was hoping to speed up saving the company a large amount of money and provide at least some dignity to the SysAdmin, but was told no. I would not have been in the office on Thursday but for a meeting which I was scheduled to be at. The CEO later invited me to an additional meeting over lunch (I like free food).
So I was kicked out the door at the end of Thursday. I asked to stay until Friday and would have been able to be a reference resource for transition in addition to getting helping get some unpleasant work done. Instead, I was told to leave. Yes, I’m bitter over this. You see, the company is having a huge attrition problem with engineers. Much of the knowledge base needed to keep the company going has been lost. One of the hopes of rebuilding the engineering department is to attract former employees back. Unfortunately, this requires enticement, and money alone will rarely do it. A day of my salary isn’t that much, but it shows how much consideration the company was willing to provide to somebody they didn’t have to. I was an at-will employee. They were within their rights to kick me out. But not extending one day does nothing but fuel bad will.