What to Do When Your Team Quits | Hacker News Reader

What to Do When Your Team Quits

staysaasy.com

25 points_njuy10 comments

I would add that people leaving is a cascading failure. One person leaves. That load falls on someone else, leading them to leave too, and so on. "Backfill fast" might seem like the answer, but it compounds the problem when the team that is under greater pressure due to attrition must now stop and work interviews and training instead. Pair that with paranoid managers who decide that now is the time to drop spyware riddled laptops on the whole team, since all the new people are getting them anyway...

The major loss of a team member leaving is the institutional knowledge. They wrote some things that need maintenance and the knowledge on how to do that leaves with them. If I'm an experienced person treading water in a new code base, I may as well get a salary bump by leaving for a new company. Management really doesn't put themselves in our shoes.

If it’s knowledge centralized to a single employee, then it’s not institutional.

It is when nobody is left that knows something has been documented in the wiki, source repo or google docs.

It's not centralized to a single employee. It's institutional knowledge that you don't know. All the coders know how to write code. You don't understand the processes that happen in a lumber mill. Now because lumber coder left, you're maintaining code for a lumber mill. You need to learn that stuff, but you've been working in the concrete division of the company. Get it?

I think a shorter article would be "look for a new job."

If your team quits then you've failed as a manager. Treat it as a learning moment but maybe don't put good effort after bad.

You're assuming that you are an employee. If you are a founder, and especially if you've taken money, going back to your investors stating that you quit just because your team quit is likely to ensure you never get funded again.

If you're a founder and your team quits then you might consider a job at USPS. It seems they're always hiring.

> If your team quits then you've failed as a manager.

While it's certainly possible the manager is poor, this isn't necessarily true. I'm 43, and have overseen about 10 teams of various sizes in my career - generally 1-3 years each. Sometimes you have good teams, some times you have rockstar teams, and other times you have duds.

It's the luck of the draw, and as a manager, sometimes you can hold a lackluster team together with bubble gum and shoe string, but in the end I've found it's far better for everyone to identify and force out the bad if they don't go of their own volition if at all possible (I've been in contractual/political situations where it was not possible - and that happens, and it is painful).

When a majority of your team quits, if you can honestly say it wasn't you (perhaps based on prior counter examples), then thank them for making your job easier.

Maybe you are poor fit for the team, and your dud team would be full of Rockstars with a different manager?

It would worry me if one of my managers thinks that since they have led many teams, some successfully, that any negative outcome must mean that the team was bad.

Such opinions are probably the reason many good people leave.

Blame circumstances and others. Demand a raise and a bigger budget. Put together a new squad of expendables. That's how you buy time.

... Lather, rinse and repeat.

After the second round, change employer yourself.

Seen it a few times.

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