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Comment by glenngillen | Hacker News Reader

I once quit a job and gave them 6 weeks notice because I wanted to try and make the handover as painless as possible. My manager said “stop working today. Come in, check your emails, but don’t do any work. Forward and delegate everything that lands in front of you. Let people who reach out to you know you’re leaving and introduce them to whoever is taking over that particular responsibility. We’re going to have to work out how to do things without you. We may as well start today, safe in the knowledge we’ve still got you in the building for the next 6 weeks if we can’t work anything out”.

You can debate the cost effectiveness of the approach, but there was no doubt that by the end of those 6 weeks they were going to be just fine without me.

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That's a really interesting approach. Do you think that was too extreme? Like you could've at least done some documentation work in that time perhaps, or that it went well enough that you'd approach it that way again in the future?

There are two parts on this approach. The 1st one is the positive "hey, chillax, transfer knowledge, don't be stressed, etc." The 2nd is security: "this guy cannot be trusted to 'touch' anything, we don't want him to plant a timebomb, we don't want him to mess things up, etc."

It's not 'polite' to bring up the 2nd, but it _is_ there. Imagine me/you/him/her doing something wrong and bringing down Prod for X hours. Then imagine your manager telling the director "oh, and btw he submitted his resignation 2 weeks ago, and in confidence he told me he goes to our ABC competitor". That-Looks-BAD, even if it was the most honest of mistakes and even someone else's fault. Once you 'stop playing', don't touch that jenga tower!!

Sure, but writing documentation doesn't touch the Jenga tower. :)

I struggle to justify it from a cost and utilisation perspective. Given how well it went, I've run the hypotheticals in my head a few times about what the optimal case might have been. If you discount the cost of my time to zero and you assume the company could mandate whatever period is optimum for them I think the duration ends up being around 2 months. Mostly because we had a monthly billing/invoicing cycle we were part of. So one month as the forcing function to catch and document all the process, and then a 2nd cycle just to make sure you can apply everything you learnt.

My time wasn't at a zero cost though. But... at a high level, given the size of the company I worked for + the potential impact of getting something wrong, ~6 weeks of my time is pretty close to zero from their perspective. It also probably helps that we had pretty low employe churn.

But from my perspective it did feel like a bit much. Within a couple of weeks I was pretty bored. I was itching to help and do things like you suggested such as documentation, but the team saw doing the work of writing the missing documentation being part of the work of learning what the gaps were so I had to stay away. Ultimately I spent most of my time planning the next phase of my life and hacking on side projects, or hanging out in the common areas with my wife and newborn son when they'd come in.

Happened to me back in 2009 and I couldn't believe it. I got paid for 1 month to sit around, drink coffee, answer questions. Then I moved and got a 30% raise.

This 1 month also helped me refresh all my knowledge, go through my notes, etc. "In teaching I learn, and in learning I teach". Having around 100 people asking me questions from all over the 'region' helped me put things back together, see connecting dots that I missed before, and I left there with a new (better) set of notes about myself and how to do things.

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