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How to Resign Gracefully

cforcoding.com

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You Will Get Yelled At

A lot of comments on TechCrunch revolved around being treated badly. If you’re lucky you have a boss that’s passionate about what they’re doing. If so, such bosses will get heated and yell because they care.

Yeah, right.

I don't work well while being yelled at. I don't want to deal with that. And so I refuse to work in environments where I get yelled at. Seriously, if you're my boss and you yell at me, my resume is being updated that night and I'm going to shop it around. If you're my co-worker then I'll wait until you calm down some, and raise the issue. If I don't get an apology then I'm going to either my or your boss about it depending on the political dynamics of the company. If the company doesn't agree that you were out of line, I'm going to find another job and go.

And yes, there are people I've worked with that have broken this rule which I choose not to work with ever again.

Now I understand that some people, cultures, etc differ. In some yelling is OK. That is fine. I choose not to be in those ones. And I'm far from the only person who feels this way.

So if you're a boss and you yell, take a moment to consider this. No matter what excuses you give yourself for your crappy behavior, are you losing really good employees because they don't agree with you on this issue? After you've thought about it for a while, perhaps you'll find better ways to handle stress than yelling at people below you in the hierarchy.

Expecting to be in a job where there's never any conflict is a lot like expecting to be in a relationship without ever fighting.

He didn't say that.

Actually that's exactly what he said:

> Seriously, if you're my boss and you yell at me, my resume is being updated that night and I'm going to shop it around.

Yell at him once and he's gone. Note: I didn't say you will get yelled at a lot or even often but it will happen.

If you pack your bags the first time you get yelled at well that's a pretty good argument that you should be yelled at sooner rather than later to see what you're made of.

Consider it a filter.

He's not talking about conflict. He's talking about yelling, which is a monkey dominance game for someone who has lost interest in finding the right answer. It's just a hair below shoving on the "cannot control himself, belongs in a cage" scale of warning signs.

What am I made of? I'm a human being, not a slave, so I demand zero tolerance for this in any workplace.

And the relationship analogy still applies: sure most (hopefully) conflict isn't settled more amicably but tempers do blow up and things get said in the heat of the moment. Expecting that to never happen makes you look thin-skinned, naive or both.

I think it can be expected in a professional setting in the US. Given your line of thinking, almost any behavior can be excused.

I'll also add that it depends on the expectation of the job when you applied. Normal white collar work in the US usually doesn't entail being yelled at. Being a football player does. So does signing up to be a Marine.

I've been in a relationship for two years that hasn't involved any yelling. The year-long relationship I had before that didn't involve any yelling. The 1.5 year relationship before that was mostly long-distance, but didn't involve any yelling, either. The one before that had some yelling in it, and I found it unpleasant enough to avoid yell-prone relatioships from that point forward.

I'd be happy to be filtered out by that criterion if my employer thought that was an important filter to test for. See http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1233385 for an admittedly biased description of the person you've just decided you didn't want in your organization.

As for whether yelling happens, of course it does. But not bloody often in healthy organizations. I think I've been yelled at by 3 people in the workplace in the last decade. None of whom I reported to. One of whom apologized fairly rapidly. I accepted it - he had a lot of other stuff going on in his life. The others my manager arranged buffers with so I wouldn't need to have interactions.

In the same period I've yelled at 2. Once at a social event when someone dumped water on me without checking whether I had electronics I cared about on my person. (As soon as the shock passed I apologized for yelling, and the other person apologized about my cellphone. Which luckily was not harmed.) The other case involved someone who physically hit me without provocation or warning. (He had mental problems which I had not known about.)

If your average is significantly worse than that, I suspect you have an issue that is worth looking into.

I think the point is more incendiary conflict, ad hominem, chest thumping than a lack of conflict. Conflict sharpens the mind, conflict examines all the avenues, but that conflict is measured and rational.

If you devolve into a shouting match under any professional circumstances, you have failed. It doesn't matter which side of the table you're on.

I wouldn't be surprised if I have more experience of conflict and relationships than you have.

My experience tells me that it is possible to have conflict without yelling. And that yelling makes conflict more difficult to resolve. Which is important. If you're trying to achieve a shared goal, then the inevitable conflict needs to be resolved so you can return to what is important - the shared goal.

My opinion on relationships is similar. I've been married for 20 years. And in that time I've learned the importance of finding ways to recognize conflict, de-escalate it, then re-engage and deal with the source of the conflict. Furthermore I firmly believe that if I hadn't learned that lesson, I wouldn't still be married 20 years in.

For both cases, what are the key steps to turning theory into practice?

Step 1 for both cases is realizing that you have a choice. Realizing that you do is the first step in making the choice you want.

Step 2 is recognizing that while you're in the grip of strong emotion you don't have much control. That's why you need to develop the habit of disengaging when you go off the rails. And since the same holds for other people, choose to be around people who have learned that lesson as well.

Step 3 is returning to the underlying issues and actually addressing them. If you don't do that, you'll find yourself back at step 2 repeatedly until you do. (Even so you'll wind up at step 2 from time to time. But with less frequency.)

There is a big difference between a heated debate between passionate enough individuals that grows into an yelling match, which then somebody tries to break ("Stop arguing!!") when both actors turn on the mediator ("WE'RE NOT ARGUING!!!").

Or on the other hand - a straightforward domination attempt - where individual A (with possibly higher socio-economic rank) approaches individual B and proceeds to tear them a new one without any forewarning.

Case 1 - Good: indicates passion and willingness to break stalemate.

Case 2 - Bad: me big gorilla approach.

Personally when situation 2 arises, I kindly notify the would-be Alpha. Just like the parent. That nobody and really nobody yells at me and gets away with it. I'm prepared to go extraordinary lengths to satisfy people or to avoid mistakes or even make them up - just to avoid getting yelled at - so whenever situation 2 arises there are only 2 options:

1. Somebody needs somebody else to release their steam on.

2. Somebody wants to prove a point that I'm a looser without even giving me option of proving them wrong.

In any case - yelling at (not with) people is bad, really really bad.

> I don't work well while being yelled at. I don't want to deal with that. And so I refuse to work in environments where I get yelled at.

Completely agree. I have a very simple philosophy: Nobody yells at me. Ever. Nobody has that right - not my parents, not my wife, not my boss, not my friends, NOBODY. I am very compassionate and understanding. If you are nice to me and reason with me, I will climb mountains for you. If I make the smallest mistake, I will man up and apologize before you even know something's up. But if you yell at me, I walk away regardless of whose fault it is. I am an adult, treat me as such with respect and dignity.

Also, I've noticed that yelling is a VERY good indicator of the morale of an office environment. I can't much speak for warehouse/construction-type jobs where yelling might in fact be the rule but I have not once seen happy employees in a place where managers or CEOs can yell at anyone they so choose. This is a free country. A salary does not entitle anyone to belittle me, regardless of fault.

Once I resigned from one ad agency to go work for another agency, my boss started screaming that I was a traitor and that the other CEO (they were on the same board of an association) was stealing his employees. The guy didn't talk to me for an entire week... in a 8 people company.

Now we are still in contact, he periodically call me or chat to me to see how I am doing and how is life, he still call me meatball just like when I was working there and everything is good.

After reading tons of comments from people with varying viewpoints, I still can't comprehend how someone could say this to their employee:

"... Good luck being employee 4,367 at a dying company....Horribly disappointed in you."

I don't care if the employee only sent out an email without a face-to-face conversation or resigned in person and then sent an email for documentation purposes. I don't care if the employee was horrible, mean-tempered, or terrible at programming. I don't care if he was core to the entire startup, without whom the company is bound to fail. None of it matters. His email was very polite and I can absolutely see myself in his shoes. Sure he called his next opportunity "amazing" but so what? In next paragraph he commends his ex-coworkers/teams and thanks everyone. What else could he have said in a resignation email?

I just can't believe someone in CEO-level position replied to a resignation email like this. Not every email should be treated the same. "Hey I'm sick today, can't make it to work" or "Sorry! I haven't fixed the bug yet" are very different from "This isn’t an easy email to write..." As a manager, you do not treat those emails lightly or brush them off as good riddance.

I wish your reply hadn't been deleted, I was about to reply with:

http://www.watergate.info/images/resign.jpg

I don't know which reply of mine you say was deleted. I haven't deleted anything.

No, the reply to you. Sorry, wasn't clear.

Fact is, Yahoo is a directionless arguably dying company and very much a large company rather than a startup with all that entails, probably meaning many meetings before you can ever change anything and so on.

And Jason said something in the heat of the moment? So what? They just promoted the guy and he can't even sit down and have a conversation? I'd be horribly disappointed too.

Remember "disappointed" means you actually care and had high hopes/expectations for that person. That's WAY better than no expectations whatsoever.

First of all, California is a right to work state, and even if Calcanis were the noblest of them all, no one should have any doubt that were something to go horribly wrong with their revenue stream,the company would let its employees go just as abruptly. Secondly, as far as changing jobs go, the guy wasn't leaving two months into his stint, he was leaving after a year.

Thirdly, when the boss throws out a blatant insult because someone resigned, you conveniently let it go as "done in the heat of the moment" but the fact that someone resigned over email is worthy of scorn?

And please, spare us the "He got so angry because he cares" sermons. Someone who cares about an employee as a person does not tell them "no need to come to the office". I have been at both ends of this type of transaction several times and never once have I seen such lack of grace as Jason exhibited.

> Fact is, Yahoo is a directionless arguably dying company and very much a large company rather than a startup with all that entails, probably meaning many meetings before you can ever change anything and so on.

Does not matter. The boss has absolutely no right to judge the next company. Everyone moves around in the tech world. MS employees joined Google, then Facebook, then Amazon, and so on. Bosses are supposed to wish employees good luck in the future or at the very least be polite and respectful.

> And Jason said something in the heat of the moment? So what?

So TechCrunch. So permanent record & documentation. So bad PR. People in the IT/startup world should know the internet never forgets. Also there is no heat of the moment when you reply to an email titled "Resignation." I can believe heat of the moment if an employee walks into your office and says "Screw you! I quit." But you can't play the "heat of the moment" card if it's an email. Take some time to cool off before you reply.

> They just promoted the guy and he can't even sit down and have a conversation?

Irrelevant to the discussion. He could have been made CTO and still wanted to resign. It was a very polite email and it is a free country/world. As a boss, you need to be a good leader and say positive things even when someone wants to quit.

> I'd be horribly disappointed too. Remember "disappointed" means you actually care and had high hopes/expectations for that person. That's WAY better than no expectations whatsoever.

I'd be horribly disappointed too myself. But saying "horribly disappointed" is not constructive criticism or even a poor choice of words. It is outright insulting. Instead of going back and forth over these words, let me just write out what an appropriate reply should be, so you can decide yourself how far this is from what really happened:

    Hi Evan,

    I accept your resignation and have notified Elliot to take care of the paperwork tomorrow. You can take the next two weeks off and have someone pick up your personal belongings or let Elliot know where to ship them.

    I had high hopes for you and am disappointed to see you leave. Good luck with your future ventures.

There. Said nearly the same things without sounding rude or insulting. Senior employees resigning can't possibly be such a common occurrence that a CEO can't even take 2mins to think the reply through. Could it?

> > They just promoted the guy and he can't even sit down and have a conversation?

> Irrelevant to the discussion.

It's entirely relevant. If you accept a promotion, you are making some kind of commitment. To turn around and quit 2 weeks later just goes to show your actions were, at best, disingenuous.

> As a boss, you need to be a good leader and say positive things even when someone wants to quit.

The chance to do that went out the window once this private email was made public. That's kinda the point of this whole thing.

Correct me if I have the chronology wrong, but I believe negative things were said before any emails were made public.

Do you really think Jason Calacanis would have actually apologized the next day if stuff didn't go public? Told him he's not really disappointed? Wished him luck? After disabling the guy's email account?

If it didn't involve some sort of rearrangement or big announcement, I would say that the promotion acceptance being a commitment argument is weak. It's not that big of an investment by the promoter.

WRT the second, as a boss, you should not be petulant. If you're not someone who your subordinates can look up to and admire, morale suffers badly. He doesn't deserve a chance to issue an email redaction any more than I deserve the chance to redact insults I make to someone at a bar. Sure, it would be nice to be able to apologize before it has any negative impact, but it is by no means one's right.

I read your version as someone who is starting to examine new opportunities, and that "high hopes" part would definitely sting me. I'm not disagreeing with you at all, but at least in Evan's case, the email helped confirm he made the right choice.

Early on in my career, I learned a lesson from a retiring colleague -- a former Army Colonel, "never be loyal to a company because the company won't be loyal to you." You can be loyal to individuals, and people can be loyal to you. But the company? Nah. Lots of people get burnt really early in their careers thinking that showing intense loyalty to an organization will be rewarded when no such thing happens -- an "organization" doesn't care. At best, your boss might give you a bump if you are loyal to him/her, and that kind of thing pays off in the long run, in terms of keeping well built bridges (it's amazing how often you meet the same people in a given industry no matter how big).

The reason I'm commenting about this?

> They’re not in the office? You wait a few days until they are. They new job can’t way? Bullshit. Or, if true, it’s a good sign that it’s an organization you don’t want to work for because they don’t care about you.

This is the kind of idealistic naiveté, that while nice in principle, doesn't really matter in reality. Show up, do a good job, when the time is right, move on. If you boss isn't there, call them. If they aren't making themselves available to the employees, then I suppose they fall into the category of "places that don't care about you" anyways.

Organizations, by definition never care about you and you shouldn't care about them. Care about your work and doing a good job -- that builds self-respect and your reputation. Ask for what you want when you want it and be patient until you get it, don't be a baby or an asshole, be flexible when better ideas than yours come along, that builds respect. Business isn't about feelings, it's about production and making more money than you lay out. If you want feelings, wait 'till quitting time and the after-work meetup at the local happy hour where everybody can commiserate all they want over $3 beers.

Think your company cares about you because of the free t-shirts, catered food and free drinks? Are you kidding me? They just know they can squeeze and extra 2-3 hours a day out of your sorry ass at pretty much no extra pay and about $10-15/day.

Other than that, the post is pretty spot on.

Your post is probably accurate for most megacorps, but I should hope that employees at a startup or company of less than 10 people don't feel this way about the company. At that level, it's very much a personal relationship rather than a company-employee relationship where loyalty only goes one way. Not all companies are about the creation of profit at any cost... some actually like creating an environment that is pleasant to work in, with free food, etc. for no reason other than making life a bit more enjoyable.

You'd be surprised at how fast that all can go away though. Everybody thinks they are all a bunch of friends, hanging out and building something cool, until they can't make payroll. I've worked at a few startups with that kind of nice "let's make it great here" vibe. And sure enough when the investment money runs out, and it's time to start turning the results from the monthly accounting report black...well the company's loyalty will only stretch about so far.

It's a personal relationship with the people, not with the company. You feel a personal connection with the founders, with the other early employees. You're passionate about the product. You want to build something amazing, and make more money out of it than you put in, and maybe change the world doing so.

Your CEO probably cares about you. It probably kills him when the company is running out of money and he has to let you go. But the company doesn't "care." It shows no loyalty to you, and you should feel no loyalty to it. That doesn't mean you can't work for a company and love the work, but it does mean you shouldn't get wrapped up in it to the point where you lose sight of your own interests.

My point was that when the company is the founders, it's not really possible to separate loyalty to the founders and loyalty to the company. At that point, it's very possible that the founders/company will act out of loyalty to you rather than purely out of self-interest, at least until their ability to do so runs out.

And I disagree vehemently that one should feel no loyalty to their startup. I know of at least one startup that has run out of money without sacking their employees, and the employees agreed to waive their pay until the startup was able to get its cashflow going again. Had they all immediately bailed as you seem to imply they should have, that startup would be dead now. Instead, I believe its current valuation is around a billion.

I would hope my employees would do the same for me.

Agreed. Whether you work for a startup or a large corporation, you have to do what's best for yourself. Anyone who kids themselves into thinking that a company is going to put you before the business is an idiot, especially when the boss blogged about laying off almost 10% of his workforce and saying what a smart move it was.

Jason needs to chill. It is not clear to me if Evan has damaged his brand as an individual. But it is clear that Jason has damaged Mahalo as a brand. As the CEO, Jason has responsibility to his shareholders. If you promote someone and still he leaves, you need to find out why and you need to ensure that the team left behind is still motivated. A good CEO does that by inviting the departing employee to a face-to-face in order to provide a reasonable explanation to the rest of the company. It is all optics, but it is important optics. How Jason feels emotionally is not important. What he does to maintain shareholder values is.

Mahalo is no better or worse off for this incident.

The people who hate Jason and/or Mahalo still hate them. The people who like Mahalo, well, I can't imagine they quite match up with the profile of the average YC reader...

Mahalo are worse off. There are plenty of people out there - me included - who neither knew much nor cared much about Mahalo but may have considered working there had an opportunity arisen. I wouldn't work there now though. That might not give Jason any sleepless nights, but I bet many better developers than I have watched this play out with great distaste and resolved never to put themselves in the way of the people involved.

That's exactly the point. If Mahalo was a restaurant and I am a dish washer, I probably won't think too much about who I work for and who I work with. But if I am a technologist then I would have to choose to work for a startup. Life is too damn short to be working for a dick.

Let's play word-replace...

A lot of comments on SocialCrunch revolved around being treated badly. If you’re lucky you have a husband that’s passionate about you. If so, such husbands will get heated and yell because they care.

Yeah, sounds just as lame.

This is one of my favorite techniques in showing why some arguments are asinine; well played.

This article condemns the employee for doing something well within his rights in a polite manner because that's not the Right Way To Do Things. It then goes on to say "An employer is well within their rights to bar you from the premises."

I mean, really? This is a two-way street here.

> Had it remained private, which it should’ve, Jason may have calmed down and mellowed about the situation over time.

Honestly, I find that highly unlikely.

Why shouldn't the guy post it online, really? I believe he was "verbally" abused on twitter and "yelled at" rudely in an email. It's important to know these things about an employer.

> you that if there was anything urgent there (eg prescription medication) that he would’ve gotten that ASAP

Yeh, he lost me there. It's a huge assumption that may or may not have held out - you can't make a point off the back of it.

> Why shouldn't the guy post it online, really?

Because now on the first page when you google his name you'll find a post about him leaving a company after 12 months and posting a private exchange with his (former) boss on his blog.

+1. I haven't seen another article or comment pointing out that resigning over email is a terrible idea.

I said recently that egregiously bad behavior should be publicized (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1274033). This is not an example of such behavior. You resigned over email and received a harsh response? Airing it in public will only cause you harm.

(None of this is a defense of don't-hire-job-hoppers. See http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1287253)

Statiscally speaking, it is a sad episode for both Jason and Evan: the former will be condemned by several people for handling the matter not in the best possible way, and the later for making its employer's inadequate response public. Which is relevant, as Jason, being more well known, is more likely to actually suffer a bigger impact from this bad press than the engineer. Not a win-win situation by far.

i'm pretty happy jason's character is being exposed. hopefully every future potential hire will see this.

hmm... I wonder if Jason would/has ever fired someone in as 'shitty' a way as this kid quit? If his business was in trouble and he had to do it, I guarantee he would; notice would be minimal; and the process would be formal (otherwise he's not doing his fiduciary duty to his investors).

Having fired > 100 people, I think 'at will' is in force in startups just as it is in the real world, and it cuts both ways. If someone was willing to email 2 week notice, they probably didn't drink the kool-aid, or felt like they weren't appreciated. Or maybe they're just an unsocialized 20-something who didn't want to deal with the drama. Either way, the pay-it-forward karma would be to take him into the office and say "hey, next time keep in mind the company is comprised of people who give a shit; man up and quit in person, with reasons". That should have been the end of it.

it's ironic, given the tweet from calacanis, how it's the employers demonstrating the sense of entitlement in reacting to all of this.

"So ignore any comments about the at-will issue. It’s irrelevant."

no, my legal rights are never irrelevant. go screw yourself.

This is the tragedy of the modern education system in that it rewards participation not winning.

Winning is entirely beside the point. Sure, merely showing up should not be enough (never mind what Woody Allen said). But education should be about bettering yourself, not defeating others. Oh, and learning how to learn. Not just memorizing facts to pass tests.

Eighty percent of success is showing up. -Woody Allen

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