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Comment by MikeTheRocker | Hacker News Reader

I am coming around to this line if thinking much more lately. Especially if you work at a big company in a fungible role. The power imbalance is such that it costs the company essentially 0% of their assets to abruptly terminate you, but for most people it would start a countdown to financial ruin measured in weeks to months. The only snag is that I would feel remorseful for the former coworkers I would be saddling with undue additional workload.

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There’s another risk you’re not accounting for: Reputational damage.

The professional world is smaller than you think. A few years from now you may want a job with someone who works with someone who knows your old boss. They’ll ask for a reference because it’s so easy to find these connections in the era of LinkedIn. When someone leaves a company without notice, that tends to become the thing they’re remembered by. And it’s not a good look.

The risk of a rescinded offer is vanishingly small. Choosing to optimize to avoid that tiny risk in exchange for a near guarantee of damaging your reputation is not a good trade.

I'm not sure that's really an issue in the era of remote work. The word on the street is that it's hard to find a SWE job these days. There's also a lot of talk about RTO (return to office). The two are not necessarily correlated industry-wide, though it may appear that way. If it's really that it's hard to find a SWE job, remote or no, then I wouldn't worry about professional reputation. I'm not sure that you can make an impact/gain real seniority without both impressing and pissing off people.

>I would feel remorseful for the former coworkers I would be saddling with undue additional workload

Huh? How do you control the workload of your team, especially as a departing IC?

Do you mean you're a manager who piles on the work then quits?

I think he meant if he leaves, his coworkers would have to take on his tasks. That’s why I like sprint based development - if my boss wants me to do something unplanned, he has to remove something planned first.

Yeah, after almost a decade of “agile” I’ve never seen this to be the case other than when I was super green. Usually, everything’s high priority and it needs to be delivered by day XYZ/ASAP regardless of sprint alignment or milestones.

My boss and I plan tasks at the start of each sprint, and once the tasks are chosen the only way to add a more is to remove something from the sprint. Asking more output from me than what was agreed upon would be similar to me asking my boss for more money. In both cases it’s perfectly reasonable to refuse the request (unless I underperform or am underpaid), and if either side is not satisfied, part ways.

Same thing would happen if he got fired, or needed to take a leave of absence. What happens next is not his responsibility.

The workload is determined by the employer, not the workers.

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