Ask HN: How much work do you do during your notice period?
Do you actually do work? Surf the web?
It's only like day 4 and there's six more to do and I'm useless.
It's only like day 4 and there's six more to do and I'm useless.
This industry is small and I want to leave a good last impression.
This leaves a great impression on your manager(s) and co-workers, the latter of which is often more important (thought people neglect it).
I've amassed a high reputation at my organization. Except for the last 2 years on my current team. It hasn't helped me. There have been some opportunities for backroom deals/promotions, but I feel those are unethical.
Edit: why downvote?
Good advice to focus on documentation and wrapping; don't start anything new.
The rest of the time, which would generally be the bulk of it, was spent surfing the 'net, going to long lunches with my colleagues, or hanging out in the break-room swapping war stories, talking about out-of-work hobbies (mountain biking, etc.) and such-like.
That's what I did for my internship which was in office years ago now. Was nice for those last two weeks to unwind and take some walks with my fav coworkers. Everyone brought in some baked goods on the last day it was nice!
For my other jobs I had I got laid off for COVID, so no two weeks, and remote so unfortunately less of a thing now.
Maybe it's a relic of bygone era since everywhere seems to be at least hybrid now, and convincing everyone to come in for someone leaving probably won't happen.
I focussed as much as I could on handing stuff over, going into "question and answer" mode, and generally refused to go into meetings for new projects, excluding myself from discussions on the basis that it was better for everyone if I did not.
I did some genuinely new work in one case to help a colleague I liked get started.
EDIT: You're on day 4 with 6 more to go, so that means you're giving 10 days notice? My current contract says I need to give 3 months. Most roles prior to that have been 4 weeks. What sort of job has such a short notice period?
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Notice_period#Notice_periods_i...
Labor protections don't really exist but neither do obligations, I couldn't imagine giving 4 weeks+ notice unless it's around the holidays or something.
But after reflection, that was a mistake. 4-6 weeks is an eternity in product & engineering time. Too much time to sit around and work-but-not-really-work, and was ultimately disrespectful to my staff, peers, and myself.
My current place has an unwritten rule to not allow notice periods of longer than 2 weeks. When someone resigns, just cut it off and move on. We suffered in knowledge transfer in a few cases, but that's been rare. If it takes longer than that to transition, we probably have other problems.
Maybeeee if you're like high up two weeks might be too quick and you need an actual transition plan of some kind.
I'd rather take those extra weeks and put them into a real vacation to combat burnout.
That's ridiculous.
What if you gave 3 months, and then 1 month in said, "Nah, F this, I'm out" and just bailed?
3 months isn't even the longest I've known. I worked with some people a few years ago who were C-level execs in a manufacturing business who had to give 6 months notice.
Management consulted with lawyers, who basically said yes, you can hold them to that contract, but no, it's not worth it as you'll basically have to pay them whilst they're either un-cooperative or you place them on garden leave.
He left after a month, though those bridges were quite burned!
On the other hand you can often negotiate a shorter exit period; it will depend in some sectors _when_ you are leaving as much as how much notice.
e.g. as I understand it, in government sectors in the UK, you might find your notice period runs out at the beginning of any new Budget regardless, or you might find yourself on gardening leave.
And if you travel into London you might find your final date has as much if anything to do with your travel season ticket loan period!
Cuts both ways, too: longer notice periods for employees resigning are matched by longer notice of redundancy (and statutory pay), as well as other redundancy protections, like they can't make you redundant just to hire someone else they prefer. It's a very different world to the "at will" states of the USA.
Some countries/states have no notice period at all. (How could you work under conditions like that? How could you plan anything? That would include tasks at work, your mortgage, your holidays, etc, etc.)
IMO it’s kind of a dick move to deploy in your notice period. Each deploy is a missed opportunity for knowledge transfer. Better to point out to peers what you would do and help them get up to speed while you are still around.
I've worked past the point that my access started expiring and I had to make sure not to reboot anything important so I could keep making progress, even after they came and took my chair away [yes, seriously]. When I absolutely had to reboot the dev system to continue, I sent off my final notes and left.
I do agree that knowledge transfer is top priority, but sometimes there's also work I'd really like to hand off in a completed, easy-to-take-on state, that will save the next engineer ever more time than another few hours of brain dump.
Still, try to do the brain dump first.
Even after all that, I still got a panicky call a couple weeks ago about a project that hadn't been touched in over a year. You can only go back so far :-)
The employer before that, it was $200/hour and they were happy to pay it.
At the previous job, I quit because the management was awful, and I was more or less working by myself. So, I absolutely did not put in much effort after giving notice. I didn't feel I owed anybody anything more than the minimum.
I'm usually pretty aggressive in setting expectations. "I'll try to close out X & Y, and I'll stand-in on Z for calls but I don't plan on finishing anything but the outline."
I've straight up ask my boss: what is the minimum I need to do in this 2-weeks to ensure I can get a favorable review later, keeping in mind the past few years of work as well? And that's alls I do.
It can get really annoying if you have to sit out some 3 months though and I think that's the reason why many companies might actually let you leave earlier than stated by your contract - they know you will not be 100% in anymore if you're already looking forward to your next gig.
That said, I 100% prefer this over at-will.
If I've been with the company for a while and there are still projects that actually need wrapping up or documenting, sure, I'll fill my final days with work.
In other cases I've done very little during the notice period because there maybe nothing I need to "wrap up", the only thing left for me to do being general tasks. No, I can't say that I'll work very hard in my last days in this case.
I'm of the belief that, if you have nothing to do for your final days, you should just quit without the whole "2 weeks notice" thing. Some good employers will say they don't mind if you don't work 2 more weeks before you even have a chance to explain why you are quitting immediately. Surfing HN 8 hours a day for 2 weeks doesn't do you or the employer any good.
Once those things are done I largely get by doing smaller tasks and helping out where I can rather than directly involving myself in anything. Nobody has really seemed to mind.
Funnily enough, the last two days at my previous job involved HR and IT slowly revoking my access to most of the systems and groups we used at work (email, repositories, etc), to the surprise of my manager who said I could just kick back and relax until my last day.
Working days are often filled up with some long term crap like meetings and training. Notice period is a good time to actually deal with the issues that matter. Cleaning out and flagging legacy code, documenting stuff, mentoring people, actually having lunch with colleagues. Sometimes there's that client they really want to land. Maybe let's focus on that instead of Q3 planning.
I've been on notice periods of 2-3 months for the past 5-6 years. Generally it involves finishing projects, training others and writing documentation for whoever takes over your work.
> It's only like day 4 and there's six more
You're in the land of 2-week notice periods. The most recent company I joined has a 3-month notice period (it's in my contract) which is kind of ridiculous. I'll probably try to get it waived down to 1 month when it comes to it.
Location: Germany
Just want to document everything and next week you have me if you need me lol.
Of course, you should not do anything that will leave work hanging around for others, but in most environments I've been in, there's plenty of clean up work and documentation to be done.
Sometimes they just don't have any work for you and that is fine. If there is nothing to document / button up then yeah it can be painful.
Some employers seemed to be in denial about the change.
Other lean in and address the elephant in the room.
But it shouldn't be a drastic load increase. You're still an employee and a human being.
What are they going to do? Fire you?
Other people have there own lanes to worry about
If that runs dry I find 1-off things to fix or improve that either I personally care about or that a customer I will miss cares about