What to do when employees quit

<i>Imagine getting punched in the stomach.</i><p><i>And then, instead of recovering in a few minutes, imagine the shock and pain slowly turning into disappointment, anger and dread.</i><p><i>Don’t you realize how important you are to the team?</i><p><i>How could you do this to me?</i><p><i>It was what I felt right then and there. Betrayal. Sadness. Despair about the future.</i><p>Umm, companies pull the plug on employees all the time. In most cases with <i>vastly</i> less forethought and regret than employees engage in when leaving their jobs (even jobs they hate).<p>I guess it can sort of &quot;hurt&quot; on the management side, when employees leave. But given the pain that employees go through (hint: the immediate threat to their own physical safety, as well as that of their families) when they&#x27;re let go, I&#x27;m not sure how one could begin to consider the two situations as remotely comparable. Let alone get so emotional, and feel such a sense of &quot;despair&quot; when an employee (even a particularly valued one) leaves.

If an employee is so valuable that it hurts when they leave, maybe they should have been given more incentives to stay.<p>You can&#x27;t say that an employee is selfish when they&#x27;re the ones doing all the hard, laborious technical work and getting almost nothing out of it aside from a below-average startup salary.<p>This might come as a shock to some, but engineers have feelings and ambitions too. In this highly competitive market, it makes sense to give your employees more equity if you want to hold on to them. When you consider supply and demand, the ratio of founders to engineers is now much higher than it ever was. Great engineers are rare.<p>I&#x27;ve left quite a few companies, even a promising startup - Would I have left if I held even 5% equity in that company? Probably not.<p>If you don&#x27;t give your &#x27;valued&#x27; employee decent equity then you are the selfish one and I hope that they do leave (if only out of respect for the profession).<p>I&#x27;ve seen too many self-important founders who think that they deserve twenty times more equity than their best employee (just because they&#x27;re friends with a rich investor). Taking risks is easy (and kind of fun), doing mind-numbing programming every day for 10 years is not (and working for a single company, in a single problem domain for that long IS mind numbing).<p>Also, let&#x27;s not pretend that engineers aren&#x27;t taking risks. 5 years of a young engineer&#x27;s life is a huge risk especially when you consider that a lot of engineers start to slow down as they get older.

This part is key:<p>&gt; Take the time, on a regular basis, to talk to your employees about their lives, goals and challenges. Ask them what they hope to accomplish, not just in the next week, but in the next year, five years and ten years in their careers. Listen intently to what they say, and think about how you can help them achieve that. And then act.<p>Anyone who asks me those questions will get double the loyalty out of me - they&#x27;ll know before I even think of going elsewhere. I&#x27;ve been at way too many places that just don&#x27;t give a damn, or assume that people will look out for themselves. They will, but probably to another place. But if you want them to be dedicated and loyal to working for you you need to get out in front. Solve the little problems before they become big ones, or lose your best employees (who can easily get a job elsewhere) and let your companies morale and productivity die.

About to do an exit interview tomorrow, and this article resonates with me, in the general case.<p>There are also the cases of pathologically bad employees, or just underperforming.<p>However, in some cases, it <i>is</i> personal. It&#x27;s not some growth stage for the employee--they could well be leaving an early employee role because <i>you</i>, the founder(s), <i>have fucked up</i>. You&#x27;ve found yourself with an employee putting out tremendous amounts of work, transferring their knowledge, coordinating their team even as they&#x27;re leaving, and who generally would be great except for the fact that, for some reason, <i>they&#x27;re leaving</i>.<p>Things you should be asking yourself and your employee:<p>Did you ignore, multiple times, their domain expertise because you {thought you knew better, couldn&#x27;t afford to follow it, felt like it, didn&#x27;t like them}?<p>Did you support them in front of their team? If not, did you support them <i>at all</i>? Did you respect the chain of command, or did you reallocate their resources under them?<p>Did you lie to them? Was it for a good reason, because of {team morale, need-to-know, legal liability}? Whether or not you ever lied to them, <i>did they feel like they could trust what you said</i>?<p>Did you give them information when they requested it? Did you give them resources when they requested it? If you <i>didn&#x27;t</i> give them resources, why not, and was it worth it in the long run?<p>Did you spend enough time with them, communicating not just about work but bullshitting and building a friendship? If you didn&#x27;t, was it because you {were busy, had other leads, didn&#x27;t like them, are an &quot;introvert&quot;}? How did that lack of communication factor into their departure?<p>Did you display <i>any competence at all</i> by some objective metric in your facility as leader? Whether or not you did, <i>did the employee feel like you were competent</i>?<p>And yeah, I think you should feel bad. You&#x27;ve wasted their time and the company&#x27;s resources because of your mismanagement. If you&#x27;re really luckily, maybe you can learn from it and keep from losing anyone else--because if you don&#x27;t, you don&#x27;t deserve to be followed.

Seems like &quot;pay them more&quot; should be at least mentioned as a possibility here.

I know for some people that article may feel like this article talks about them one way or another. It may also seem a little self involved to think that it does if you are an employee.<p>But a word of advice for such talented employee as some of the recommendations go both ways. I&#x27;m 5 weeks away from being done with a 6 months-ahead notice to my employer that I would be leaving because I knew nobody could enter &quot;the kingdom&quot; that I ended up holding the key to. I felt too bad leaving them in that situation especially since I was given opportunities may developers would never expect their current employer to go for. I also know that despite that long transfer of knowledge they&#x27;ll have a heck of a hard time dealing with.<p>You don&#x27;t want to be irreplaceable just as much as they don&#x27;t want you to be, especially in an era where software developers are in such ridiculous demand. And in no way does this mean you can&#x27;t be as good as you work to be.

If a leaving employee is so important, you should ask yourself &quot;Am I really 100x-1000x (whatever ratio your equity is to their equity) more important than this employee?&quot;

The way you treat exiting employees is just as important as how you treat them when they are still there from a recruiting perspective. If you treat someone well when they decide to leave, they are more likely to recommend your company to others looking for a job.<p>There have been places I left for various reasons that were great employers that I still recommend to this day for others looking for a job.....and might even thing about joining if the right opportunity came along.

As good as slack is for communicating I don&#x27;t think it should be used as a &quot;knowledge&quot; store. At a previous employer I found that commit messages were a great way to store information. Maybe commit messages aren&#x27;t as great for question and answers, but searching slack doesn&#x27;t seem very intuitive.<p>Idea: A slack bot that searches for questions and answers and creates a wiki out of the scraped information.

As someone who left, and is now hearing of the rest of the team leaving....<p>1st, if someone is so darn important, it is your job to have a backup plan for when they quit, or for that matter get hit by the proverbial bus. Anything less is managerial incompetence, spend a day or two reading about business continuity.<p>2nd, there are these things called golden handcuffs, if you don&#x27;t understand the concept I refer you to the above.<p>3rd, if you don&#x27;t have the money for 2, then you better not be seen driving around in your brand new lamborghini, or spending all your time at over the top expensive restaurants while your employees have a tiny fraction of the company, and slave away for 70+ hours a week eating crap ass food from the fast food joint they are paying for themselves. (This really happened!)

You can document institutional knowledge and try and make sure nobody is indispensable but ultimately you will still take a huge blow.<p>You should focus most of your attention on improving retention.<p>I left a full 200 page notebook full of product ideas&#x2F;customer notes&#x2F;requirements&#x2F;designs when I left my last job. Hopefully it helps the team but it is only in note form and completely unordered. More likely they won&#x27;t look at it and the knowledge will just be lost.