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Comment by webtopf | Hacker News Reader

It works the other way around too. As a manager, when some of my employees sent me messages like: "Can we talk when you have some time?" One of my immediate fears was that they are quitting because he found another job.

That happened only once, the other 300 times it was just about something they were working on and needed more information.

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Right? I called a meeting to let people know a teammate was off because he'd suddenly lost family and was a real mess and needed our support, and I didn't feel comfortable putting that in emails... And the reaction I got was "I was scared I thought you were quitting". They stopped short of saying it was a relief, which is good, given the circumstances.

Context could be provided with something like "Due to unexpected circumstances, Joe is taking leave of absence. We'll have a meeting to discuss this and the impact on the team."

I suppose it depends on how many meetings you have?

In our company's culture of few meetings, about 90% of the time I received a Slack message "Can we chat when you have a quick minute?" it was indeed the employee quitting. Eventually I would just respond in Slack to confirm they wanted to quit, so we could skip the dog & pony show that is assumed to be necessary for a "proper resignation," which I don't think employee nor manager enjoys.

> Eventually I would just respond in Slack to confirm they wanted to quit

Has this ever come back with a "no"? I would find it pretty unnerving to have a manager ask if I were quitting out of the blue, although I totally get why most of the time that pattern means a resignation.

To be fair that's quite a stretch. Maybe if the writing is on the wall, or floor talk hinted at it, but a mere 'can we talk if you have a minute' followed by 'you are going to quit aren't you' seems a little too much reading into it.

I don't take as much issue with this happening the other way around. It's a rare opportunity for the information asymmetry shoe to be on the other foot.

> I don't take as much issue with this happening the other way around.

That seems to imply that your opposition to a person not being spooked is not a moral one. Please tell us more about it.

A manager's anxieties over losing an employee are not equivalent to an employee's anxieties over losing their livelihood. So taking less issue with it is perfectly consistent with it being a moral position.

Depends on which employee it is. If you ever worked in economically depressed regions, you'd know what I'm talking about right away.

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