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Comment by monster_group | Hacker News Reader

This is terrible advice. Great that it has worked for the author but it does not mean it's a good idea for everyone. 2 weeks is the standard and as long as you give that you maintain good relations. Most people are not as valuable or important as they like to think they are. I have seen very important people leave / fired and things still go on. (Twitter is still working - isn't it?) Once you tell that you are leaving, everybody's attitude towards you changes. You want to minimize that awkward period. There's nothing to be gained by staying longer than 2 weeks. If you have stock vesting, wait until stock vests before giving 2 weeks notice.

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It's so bad it feels like straight up management propaganda

There’s a lot of merit to taking a week or two beyond the standard. 2 weeks isn‘t a lot of time to hand off all your work, go through the usual HR bureaucracy, and make sure you have contact info for anyone you might want to stay in touch with after leaving.

If it’s an amicable departure 3-4 weeks can be a lot less stressful for everyone.

6-8 weeks is kinda weird though, unless you‘re extremely senior and on critical path for a lot of things, or you‘re using up accrued PTO.

> 6-8 weeks is kinda weird though, unless you‘re extremely senior and on critical path for a lot of things, or you‘re using up accrued PTO.

If you're a leader in a team, definitely give more notice. It's the professional thing to do. Something that the post -doesn't- say is that you should have a transition plan written down before you tell your boss, just in case you get cut off.

Of course they can still summarily kick you out the door, but it's a chance for you as a leader to do right by the team.

And 2 weeks could suddenly become a lot shorter. I gave 2 weeks notice once, then had a death in the family (covered by bereavement leave) and then got sick. My 10 business days of handover ended up going down to about 4-5.

Two weeks is all most recruiters have ever offered me, and some did so begrudgingly. Which is weird because if I say yes that actually makes me a worse hire.

Recruiters don’t like people who want >2 weeks because it adds risk that you will renege on the deal, which means they lose out on their payday. But the recruiter isn’t the other party in the negotiation, the hiring manager is.

So don’t negotiate start date until you have an offer and are talking to the hiring manager. Save it to the end and you can say “well, I’m still not 100% sure about this offer, but I think this would work if you could push my start date out a bit…”

Interesting, I was able to get a couple months when I switched jobs a while back. I think recruiters probably figure the longer the window, the more chance you go do something else instead.

I have resigned for two different jobs where I was the highest tech leader, reporting to the CEO (basically CTO role without the title). Both times I gave 1 month of notice. Both times all the "transition" work was done during the first 2 weeks, and afterwards, I basically sat at meeting listening without say (I pushed for my "replacement" to be the one making the decisions as if I wasn't there) and even the CEO asked me to stay at home in one of the two jobs.

My thought is that if that worked for me for 2 weeks, it should also be more than enough for an IC.

I don't know. Not to offend you but in general I consider leadership roles to be more easily replaceable than IC ones. Fundamentally, it's the ICs that usually have all the intricate knowledge of the details. That is something I'd argue cannot be handed over in just two weeks, in particular to just anyone.

On the other hand, the leadership folks I interact with always make only super high level decisions. Rarely does it get intricate. It's more important to know how to quickly assess the big picture and how to communicate. All lot of what a leader does and makes them uniquely leaders is not something that's based on acquiring company specific and product and infra specific knowledge accumulated across several years.

I rarely care if my manager leaves beyond the fact that I have to build trust with someone new. But ultimately they aren't super in the weeds on anything mission critical.

An engineer that can jump into an incident and immediately identify the problem on a code path because they have worked on it or around it intimately at some point does make a difference, but also just having a detailed mental model of how the system pieces interact is super crucial. Bus factor is a thing, even though it rarely is catastrophic. Lead time can help here.

Of course leaders leaving also is a challenge, but it's because of their unique charm, ability to grasp issues quickly and make sane decisions. But none of this can be transferred to a new guy, in 2 or 4 weeks or 8.

It is terrible advice and especially if you are an at-will employee. 2 weeks is fine, but as others have mentioned, most of the time you get put into a hermetically sealed jar once you give notice.

In my experience it's really situational and depends on the relationship with co-workers more than managers. I've given as much as a month at places I liked and where knowledge transfer will be useful to those who will pick up my slack. Others, I simply said "I'm done" and spent the remaining days posting GIFs and XKCDs on Slack

Yep, everyone is replaceable. 2 weeks should be enough. What's the use in staying more? Anyone who wants to get KT by then should be able to get it.

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