Disclaimer: what you are about to read comes from a white, able-bodied, straight-passing, college-educated cis-woman with no dependents, significant financial obligations, and visible disabilities. I’m an immigrant and I don’t come from generational wealth. If there's a person I can turn to for financial support, that person is me and me alone. I am comfortable with taking calculated risks; I don’t spend all my income and have savings. These privileges and facts will come into play about ten paragraphs below.
I left two jobs in the past three years so I’m writing from my personal experience of leaving and being left. Over these years, I couldn’t help but wonder: how can we leave better than we have been left?
At the same time, I found the topic of engineers leaving their jobs captivating: anywhere from it being “talk of the town” to being taboo in some obvious ways. It is common for HR to never disclose or share the real reasons why people leave, give no direct public feedback on those reasons, and hence offer no communication mechanism to improve things before-it’s-too-late until more people leave. This article won’t even get into the trauma and distress that follows departures of nice-to-work-with engineers - conversation on why retention isn’t valued or fairly compensated, and what we can do about it as an industry is a whole other topic.
This article also makes two major assumptions. First is that you are not leaving due to being a victim of harassment. Second is that you don’t hate your manager or teammates to the extent that you just want to get out and you don’t care to make this experience less painful than it needs to be for those staying.
For those still reading: leaving will be a tumultuous and likely a lonely experience for you. Let’s talk about it.
Implicit offboarding
Whenever you’ve made up your mind to leave, from that point on, sit out critical and visible project planning sessions. Ideally, if you have the bandwidth and desire, you can coach and share knowledge with someone, perhaps a person who joined the team last, or at least, write down recommendations you can think of that can help the team in the future. By now you are likely checked out and/or busy interviewing; in other words, skipping those important quarterly planning meetings is likely the natural flow of things.
For people that you are close with, I recommend sharing that you are leaving - it really saves everyone the shock and eventual hard feelings in the remaining time left. People may offer to connect you with their friends for referrals, suggest and share insights about companies you have or not yet have on your radar.
Offboarding yourself in the most effective way can mean that others can pick things up before you leave and you can be a resource if they have questions while you are still there. Identify your areas of ownership since you are the best person to do it, and consider ramping up others before you work with your manager on the official and explicit offboarding.
Reflections and housekeeping
Before you dive into interviewing, you may find doing the below extra helpful when you are deciding on an offer weeks or months later.
Write down a list of reasons why you are unhappy - these will come in handy when you are choosing an offer, and if you choose to, you can share these with your manager and HR in the exit interview. A bit of personal life advice: repetitive things you don’t like and, likely related, repetitive things that you are looking for reflect your values. Being aware of what you value makes these things easier to find.
Write down a list of what you are looking for next - it may sound obvious and trivial now but it’ll come in handy when you need a basis to eliminate offers. Here’s an article by Lara Hogan I found helpful when leaving my most recent job.
Think of two-five people and ask them to give you references in case you’ll need them. Things will get quite busy once you start interviewing, not to mention people leaving or taking time off. You want to make sure you have your references’ contact information and permission to share their information well ahead of time. Ideally, when you are negotiating multiple offers, you’d want to spread the “reference-giving” load among several people so that you minimize the number of times they are being contacted. Even better if you have more than one manager available since you’ll most definitely need one manager reference per offer. When the time comes to share their contacts, I recommend you make your references’ lives easier and send them a short factual summary of what you worked on and what made you a nice person to work with. A career tip worth repeating: start developing relationships at work with people now, not two months before you are out.
The Search begins
While I am still employed:
I update my resume.
I send my resume out to friends for second and third opinions.
I apply to companies to “A|B test” my resume and understand if I’m getting callbacks.
If I’m not getting moved through the interview process, I go back to step one and repeat until I do hear back from recruiters.
Chronologically speaking, I first apply and interview with companies I am least interested in working at to practice resume walk-throughs and interviews.
After each tech screen, I do a brief retrospective by myself to understand where I could have done better and whether my coding solution was optimal. I always note the question I got; if I didn’t know something I was asked, I spend time learning and understanding so that I’m better prepared next time. After every failed tech screen and/or onsite I email the recruiter asking for feedback; most of the time I got
genericuseless stuff but once the feedback I got was game-changing.I keep interviewing until I get an offer. Getting my first offer is a sign of psychological comfort that I’m likely to get other offers. Meaning I can now relatively safely quit my job.
And I do! 🎉 I quit my job with a standard two weeks notice. At some point during the above, I use the remaining PTO and/or visit doctors while insurance is still valid, and once I bought a lifetime supply of sunscreen with the remaining FSA balance.
Take time to draft a decent goodbye email with your contact details and organize a farewell if you wish. Keep in mind that after you officially announce that you’re leaving some people would like to get 1:1s with you - account for those taking a lot of time in your last week(s).
Note regarding burnout: if burnout is the or one of the reasons you are leaving (like it was for me, both times), I recommend you consider taking however long you need to feel present again before continuing with the next step.
The Search continues
Having an offer doesn’t mean you need to accept it. I have never accepted my first offer and I’ll go over gracefully declining offers in a separate post. My privileges really matter in what you will read in this section because I left my jobs without having accepted an offer.
While funemployed I
apply to companies I’m most interested in. Typically, this number is under five. I know my resume should pass the recruiter screen (but you really never know) and I feel much more confident about my interview skills (same applies: can never really know the way tech interviewing is).
schedule interviews so that initial phone screens happen within a week, at most two weeks.
time onsites to happen within a one-two week period. I may fail some tech screens and end up with two-three onsites which is fine since I can accept only one offer eventually.
Why do it this way? Why may this unpopular take of interviewing without a job work out better than interviewing with a job? It’s undoubtedly risky but it worked for me and can work for you because:
the way tech recruiting is, you can never time interviews and offer negotiations well. Some recruiters will get back to you later than others, and some recruiters will never get back to you. Once, it took me two weeks to get a written offer after I had a verbal one from a big company. I also believe that it’s not the recruiter's responsibility to schedule things perfectly for you and speed things up or give extensions however those may work best for you; it’s your responsibility to be strategic to the best of your ability during your job search.
I assume that you will negotiate your offer and I highly encourage you to do so. Negotiations take extra days and work best if you have multiple offers in hand.
Timing and getting strong offers directly affects your compensation for years to come. Switching jobs is the proven way to increase your compensation, short-term and long-term. You don’t want to have to accept a job that may not be best for you simply because the offer expires this week and you didn’t think your job search strategy through.
You won’t have to juggle work handoffs and interviews, like not at all. You are not only mentally gone, you are as gone as gone goes and can focus on only one thing: finding a better job. You don’t need to stress about working or pretending to be working while you are scraping Glassdoor or grinding Leetcode. No more standups, retros, sprint plannings, all hands, none of that. You are free to spend your time however you like.
It can work for those you are leaving behind because:
there’s no need for cheap comedy and/or a circus of constantly stressing about taking time off to interview and being able to squeeze in only so many interviews not to look “suspicious.” No need to
liecome up with a sudden influx of doctor appointments or my-hamster-has-an-aesthetician-appointment excuses, and having to explain those to your team with a straight face. Why add awkwardness to relationships that deserve more dignity?
Negotiations and deciding what offer to take warrant further article(s). I’ll leave you with one more idea: while you are negotiating the offer you’ll end up accepting, consider extending the start date to whenever you’d feel ready to start your new job. Previously, I took two-three months off in between jobs. Take time to rest, recharge, reflect, and maybe even start to miss whatever you enjoy about your work the most.
Many thanks to those who shared with me what it was like when a teammate was leaving, all those who left their jobs the way they did, some better than others, and thus inspired this article. May this give us all ideas to leave better next time.
Thank you, [in no particular order] Gene, Natalia, Michalina, Priya, William, Anam, Amir, Noam, Michelle & Ginette, Leah, Cameron, and Delaney for being my rocks during both burnouts and job searches. Friends like you are one of my favorite things about being alive.
Thank you, Selene, Monica, and Marie-Claire, for proofreading.
Thank you, Silvia, for too much to list and, in short, changing everything for me at Github and beyond.
Jason will get an extensive shoutout in my next post. For now, thanks for listening, making me laugh, and making me feel seen in 2021.
Thanks for reading.