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Comment by randrews | Hacker News Reader

One of the wisest pieces of career advice I ever heard was "you cannot change an organization by leaving it."

It works both ways: if you're leaving in hopes that it'll be a wake-up call to management that a valuable person left, then it probably won't be. And, if you leave your workplace to improve your own life, you've also necessarily chosen not to try and improve the workplace. Leaving means giving up on trying to improve them.

With that in mind, the exit interview isn't a trap so much as pointless: all you can do is hurt yourself here, you can have them remember you fondly or not, but you can't get them to change things in the exit interview.

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If they didnt listen to you when you were there, why would they when you are leaving? That is what it all boils down to for me.

If I didnt make issues clear while I was at a company then it was a failing on my part. If they didnt care or make any change when I shared about issues than its their fault.

You cannot meaningfully change any organization without being one of the ~10 most powerful people in it.

Then if you really want them to change, you should try to become one of those powerful people... Not leave, and give up all power you have over them, is my point.

Yes, but the chance of becoming one of the ~10 most powerful people at Apple or Goldman Sachs is extraordinarily small, and you pretty much know if you even have a shot at it after you've been working at the company for a year. If you've been there three years and haven't been promoted twice you have zero chance of ever being in the top 10.

Yeah. Things you say probably fall into a few categories.

-- "So and so is toxic." Maybe they are. But this is the last sort of thing I'm going to get into during an exit interview because this is the sort of thing that could actually come back to bite you.

-- "The company has gotten so big and bureaucratic/isn't doing well/etc." Don't you think they probably know?

-- "I don't agree with the strategy any longer." Well, this might be a data point for some higher up you know well over a beer or whatever but probably isn't going to help anything in an exit interview.

Just come up with a socially-acceptable, PR-reason for leaving. Probably whatever you told the new job in their interview: "I'm leaving because of the commute," or "not enough potential for advancement," or something. The goal should be for you to part on good terms, not to take a last shot at them, which will only make them hate you.

Take the salary you are getting at the new place and add 50k. "I'd love to stay but salary + raise for moving on + 50k is a life changing amount of money for me and my family." Worst case you get a counter offer and you can decline that with "Oh, sorry the new job just offered counter + 25k" again. Might give them pause to raise the wages of the people you are leaving behind.

Or just some variant of "time for a change and this opportunity came along." Which whether or not it's the case with you, holds true for a lot of people who have been at a place for a while.

>The goal should be for you to part on good terms, not to take a last shot at them, which will only make them hate you.

Absolutely. Any satisfaction from bomb tossing in an exit interview or twitter thread is short-lived and the consequences may not be.

While that's true on an individual basis, I recently left a large company to join a FAANG and, as it turns out, so did quite a few other top performers shortly before me. By the time I left, there were definitely very senior folks asking questions about how to retain talent. I didn't even dislike the job - but the offers from FAANG were a good bit higher and came with some nice perks, so I'd actually think of going back if the message gets through that good technologists are worth paying for.

I wonder about the "worth paying" thing. As an example, I worked at a FAANG company for about 10 years and every project I worked on flopped, was cancelled, or wound up being a net cost. In some sense, the real dollars and cents sense, I wasn't worth anything and yet was paid quite a lot.

My impression is that the FAANG companies have a relatively small part of the company that makes them insane amounts of money (e.g. search ads) and then the rest of the company is just soaking up a lot of that money. In this model of the universe FAANG companies are just over paying software developers and the other companies out there without their own infinite money machine shouldn't actually be learning the lesson that they need to pay their developers more because maybe, as a business priority, they shouldn't be.

I don't entirely disagree with the premise but, knowing that there are companies with money printing machines paying top dollar, rationale talented people will all leave those other industries that don't pay up for ones that do (regardless of whether it is deserved or not). In my experience in other industries, the 80/20 rule applies in that 20 percent of technology employees deliver 80% of the value, but the pay is not well differentiated. In my estimation, many companies could fire half their tech employees, give the rest a big raise and come out more productive.

I once left a company and half the staff followed, they closed their doors 2 months later.

Apparently all the staff that actually knew how to layout the magazine, run the online content, and print the publications were important. A sales staff with no ad-space to sell can't do much.

...Okay, yes, technically sometimes by leaving you can change an organization from "alive" to "dead." :) But that's probably not the change that would have kept you around, right?

Depends on the scenario. I know personally of several examples where key people who had little say in a company, but were key technical roles, simply resigned. Resigned publicly, and drained other talent with them. First it was the better talent who had the most options, and then it was everyone else, like rats off a sinking ship.

This reminds me of Exit, Voice, and Loyalty by Albert Hirshchman [0]. The gist is that you have two options Voice or Exit. Voice means staying and fighting for things to change. It having any effect is predicated on the ability to Exit, to opt out of the situation and leave. Staying and fighting means you may push for change. But quitting and bringing others with you means that you may force change.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exit%2C_Voice%2C_and_Loyalty

This seems common in takeovers. I've seen it twice. In both cases the new management came in and said how surprised they were at the quality of their staff. Within two months all the management had gone. They were quickly followed by the technical staff.

Why would you even want to change an organization?

If you have a chance to make things better where you are, then it’s good for everybody who works there. Also, you might not even have the option of getting a job elsewhere depending on where you live and what qualifications you have.

I've changed the place I work immensely in my three years here, and I think for the better. But at no point did I (or would I) threaten to leave if they didn't change... It just wouldn't work.

if it was a bad place for other people to work at.

> you cannot change an organization by leaving it

If anything, removing yourself from its workforce it's one of the most impactful things you can do!

But you can change it if many many people decide not to work there and they can’t hire a workforce.

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