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Skip the exit interview when you leave your job

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86 pointsohjeez80 comments

It's possible to give feedback without burning bridges. At my last place I had a very long exit interview where I explained all the bad management decisions that led to me leading. I made it very clear that this was my account of events and focused entirely on how the decisions had affected me rather than saying what I think they should have done. They were really interested in the feedback and not remotely defensive.

Why do this? 1. I was leaving behind a lot of people I consider friends and wanted them to have a better experience. 2. I think it gave a good last impression which they might remember.

Obviously this was my specific situation and the managers were actually normal, nice people who could fathom that they may have made mistakes which isn't always the case.

It's possible but it's not really up to you. I had an experience I could describe almost exactly the same as yours. I later found out from a friend who stayed that my feedback was used in some sort of failed management coup between VPs I had never met or interacted with. But it associated me with that conflict, and one particular side of it.

I've thought about this a lot over the years but I don't think I had any information I could have used to predict this outcome. All the people and relationships I could observe were healthy and professional. But it continues to affect me professionally; the company was large and well known in my area and industry, people who worked there then are all over now. I don't give sincere feedback anymore.

It's up to you if you decide it is. Failing to do your part in counteracting sociopaths in society is what allows them to flourish. If your feedback was honest, balanced, and constructive, but it caused blowback, that's a sociopathic organisation.

This stance, which has been espoused throughout these comments, is in the same conceptual space as "we should stop upsetting terrorists or we're causing the terrorism".

It's really not. Being a member of the working class, that is having to sell your labor to survive, constrains your freedom in certain ways. The specific ways, and to what degree, are variable based on your circumstances and to some extent your choices.

But if you need to work for money there is no absolute freedom, you will have some constraints. You can decide the consequences of violating the constraints are worth it in some cases, as you have in this one. But that may circumscribe your ability to work for money at all in the future, as people are saying here.

People making this choice one way or the other may be more or less moral depending on the specifics, sometimes the circumstances do require our blood. For example someone working for ICE just for the paycheck right now is choosing evil. But it is a fundamentally different choice than "letting the terrorists win" or whatever.

"Sociopathic organizations" exist, you can't just write them out of your reasoning like this. A little marxism goes a long way in understanding what is happening here and how to engage with it.

My wife was recently re-hired by a place she had previously left. The director who wanted her back was given a hard time by HR precisely because she had pointed out issues during her exit interview. She didn't feel like she was burning any bridges at the time.

You may have the best intentions but it doesn't mean the other side does. Lesson learned.

>>It's possible to give feedback without burning bridges.

Unless you are a coach, and your job is to give feedback. I would advice a) Don't give a feedback ever. b) If you are in a situation and had to give feedback, always say something positive.

Very few people are genuinely interested in improving and largely use feedback as a mechanism to see how people judge their work, and here a negative feedback is simply used to mark up people as enemies.

There are people who are exceptions to this, but this really is the rule.

The OP says there's no upside. I think that the OP is wrong and you're right.

Could there still be downsides? Yes. But I think that there are possible upsides if the people in the company come to realize that you were right. They may hire you back?

And so it's a gamble.

Did anything change as a result of this interview?

I have only given negative feedback once when leaving a job, and it resulted in pretty sweeping changes in leadership across the department. I've since found out that the whole ordeal garnered me "legendary" status amongst the remaining employees.

On the flip side, the author is right -- it's a small world out there. While I don't regret doing the "right thing" and speaking up about serious issues, I am nervous that I burned some bridges with the two leaders who were let go after my departure. So far it hasn't come back to bite me (~8 years and 3 jobs later), but as they say time will tell.

I try to just give honest feedback, and I don’t feel badly about it or worry about blowback.

For example, I applied at a company for a fairly high ranking position and did really well. The technical co-founder said I gave the best performance he’d ever seen on their code exercise. The internal recruiter said I was the first candidate he’d ever given the maximum score to.

Then I had one round where the interviewer showed up very late and was instantly rude. Would barely even talk to me. He had this disdainful look on his face for the whole interview.

The internal recruiter called me after and was basically like, “What the hell happened in that interview? Everyone loved you and said you were amazing. Now Chuck (not his real name) said you’d be a bad hire. What is going on?”

They still made me an offer, but the whole thing left a bad taste in my mouth, so I went elsewhere. But apparently a couple of pretty high ranking people were pissed that I walked away, and there were some consequences.

Should I feel bad about that? Honestly, I’m glad. Their interview process was broken, and I hope I improved it so this shit doesn’t happen to anyone else.

If that's true, why didn't you give that feedback while working there? Sweeping changes in leadership - if that's true they might hired you.

I went from being a waiter, to a bootstrapped startup CEO with 20 employees after 4 years, who couldn't grok why employees didn't want to get involved more.

Then went to Google: I was absolutely stunned, stunned, at just how reactive people are.

When you're offering unsolicited advice, you have 0 idea how it's going to be taken. Even the gentlest, most caveated things can set someone off.

In 7 years, I saw exactly one post-mortem, and it was well-understood doing one was seen as aggressive.

One time someone was being a bully in code review, something like 7 rounds of review for 200 lines. 600 review comments from the reviewer total. I'm not kidding. Can't remember exact line count but it was 3:1.

The person being reviewed, at that point, wrote a comment on the meta-situation, something relatively innocuous, can't remember it for the life of me. Within 2 quarters he was PIP'd, and it took 3 years to get a release so he could transfer to another org.

This factor is probably at a high at Google, as reality can't really intrude as much as a normal company. But I did greatly change my perspective on how to communicate in the workplace when you're working for someone else.

There is perceived (likely valid in most cases) risk with criticizing employers. It is entirely possible that if you go directly at leadership, you may be shown the door, regardless of whether you are ready to go or not.

The counterpoint to this guy's story is many of us who have told an employer the issues that we were concerned with in an exit interview, or even in a feedback period during employment, and seen it come right back around to bite us.

Leaving the company is a very strong signal that your objections are serious and not idle complaints.

IMHO, once you have decided to leave a company, it's almost always a bad decision to be convinced to stay. As such, it doesn't really matter how serious your complaints are, it's not in your best interest to try to change the problems.

Even if they offer to promote you or give a massive pay rise to stay, the fundamental problems that lead you to look elsewhere originally will likely still remain. Any inducements to stay look shallow when you question why they were only offered in response to a resignation.

Making the decision to quit is usually tough and involves weighing up a lot of different things. Once you've crossed the threshold and realised that quitting is the right course of action, it's hard to undo that process and convince yourself to stay after all. The things that you tolerated before will now be more apparent than ever.

I've stayed in places accepting a pay rise after quitting twice, and both times I appreciated the extra money but regretted my choice within weeks. Both times, I'd left within the year.

Similarly, once you've decided you want to leave your current job, just get on with it and find something new as soon as you can. I find this harder advice to take myself, but several times I've stuck around for 6-12 months after I've mentally checked out of a job. There's a very real risk of others noticing your apathy creeping in, and it can have a massive impact on how people remember you once you've gone.

Often it only gets attention if it's delivered with some strong action.

> If that's true, why didn't you give that feedback while working there? Sweeping changes in leadership - if that's true they might hired you.

Yeah this doesn't make sense. You only leave if people don't listen to you.

Yeah, but who knows why they aren't listening to you? If they could fix the problem, but they don't think it's a serious issue, they're not motivated to fix the problem. But if it's serious enough that someone quit their job over the issue, then they may get motivated to fix the problem before more people leave. Not a guarantee, obviously, but it does make a certain amount of sense.

So they are more likely to listen to someone on the way out than someone they actually work with? I don't get that logic.

probably doesn't help that's not what I wrote. I made no such comparison. I did give reasoning why comments made by someone leaving could be seen as a serious complaint, instead of whining, however.

Once I suggested that we need to have a meeting, a sort of post-mortem, about why two teams were working on nearly-identical projects.

My manager told me that our PM got yelled at because of that, and told me that negative comments should be restricted to private channels, without other managers present.

So, uh, why would I give any feedback that could be even remotely construed as negative again? Especially when the fallout could land on my coworkers as well?

Black balling is only for the rich and powerful...dont try it please, you need them to survive.

I agree, you dont need an exit interview but the logic everyone is parroting is how sociopath keep entrenched

"Here’s why: There is absolutely no benefit for you to gain by talking in an exit interview, and plenty of negative consequences to come out of it. At best you’ll be remembered as a complainer, and you may make enemies."

I guess I would counter with if I have friends there, I would like their lives to be better. If my exit interview is able to do that, then I would take that as a net positive.

The only possible way to help is by providing positive reinforcement. “I loved working with X. Y is really killing it on her KPIs.” I am otherwise in agreement with TFA.

This, for sure. I pump up good people doing good things. No one cares that I think our new time tracking sucks, or that an HR policy sent me over the edge, and they definitely don’t care that I think an SVP in a different department is going to tank the company because their metric strategy is all about finding fractions of fractions that make them look good.

But they’ll, even subconsciously, remember that I said Joe and Jane were absolute rock stars.

Then count the costs. If it is worth more to you to leave such feedback and improve their world, it's always your choice.

However, you should also be either convinced that HR gives a crap, or that any potential outcomes are acceptable, including but not limited to being moved into "unregulated attrition" status, losing the ability to be hired by the same company in the future, having your words potentially turned into a lawsuit against you, etc. Unless you have actual, legal, signed documentation in place giving you such assurances, these are all on the table.

It is this sort of fear that holds society back. Individualistic thinking and a belief that one cannot make a difference anyways allows so much bad behavior to take place. With everything in life, you should always try to leave a place better than how you found it.

>I guess I would counter with if I have friends there, I would like their lives to be better. If my exit interview is able to do that, then I would take that as a net positive.

If you had any confidence your feedback would be listened to and actioned on, why would you be leaving?

One time I got two months severance for complaining in my exit interview.

> There is absolutely no benefit for you to gain by talking in an exit interview, and plenty of negative consequences to come out of it.

This horrible game theory bullshit being applied to all work interactions is why I will never work for an American company again.

The necessary and sufficient conditions for game theory to apply to a situation, any situation whatsoever, anywhere in the world, is two or more human beings in communication. That's all.

Sometimes the "game theory bullshit," as you put it, is more evident and sometimes less so. But it's always there.

It's not even correct game theory because it only analyzes the negatives.

There are plenty of positives like being a hero to many coworkers and teammates. You should generally care more how competent individuals see you and less how incompetent individuals see you.

I kind of agree with you. On the one hang OP is logically correct, on the other it's very sad and a form of a tragedy of the commons. If everyone gave candid feedback we'd all be better off.

It's happening whether you participate or not.

Work should be transactional. You owe your employer nothing beyond what you're contractually obliged.

Why American? In European companies this is the same. It is more human nature then anything else.

You're right that American companies have a lot of game theoretic bullshit going on, but in my opinion this is just straightforward interpersonal advice. It boils down to saying "it's not you, it's me" when you're dumping someone, which is a time-worn trope for a reason.

Is it also why American companies pay multiple times as much as whatever alternative market you're thinking of?

It's good to see most of the comments here recognise the virtue of an honest exit interview rather than always focusing on the expedient or advantageous to oneself. An honest exit interview is also an exercise of freedom, and if you're not able to be at all honest then you're a slave to your future wage payers.

Lying in an exit interview is also an exercise of freedom.

Once I am leaving, I am not being paid for my sincerity. They should know why they suck, I am not going to do consultancy for free.

What makes anyone a slave to future wage payers is not the sincerity of exit interviews (or lack thereof). It is the bills, they keep coming.

Like all things, there's a place and time.

If you're walking out over unfair treatment or wage theft or similar, sure, skip the interview.

If you're at the end of your first internship, or leaving on good terms, or both parties genuinely care, there's plenty to be gained.

The exit interview I had with an intern after my first time mentoring was very valuable for both of us, and was a positive point in our relationship.

On the other hand, I'm quitting the same job and will be declining any exit interview with "I've spent the last six months explaining to you why I'm quitting". There is no value at all to be gained from the conversation so I won't.

Skip the interview if the job sucks. Participate if you think you'll get value, or in particular if you're young and early in your career.

I remember doing an extremely painful one back in the day. I was leaving because relations had already broken down but i had no particular desire to burn any more bridges than i had to. So they got the only person who didn’t already know me on the HR team to do it. I felt sorry for them, they might as well have been twelve and had zero context for the conversation.

Q: Did you feel like a valued member of the team?

A: I chose to leave.

Q: (getting pretty exasperated by this point) Would you care to expand on that.

A: No.

Grief, it was painful and i remember it to that day. But yes, the moment you’ve handed in your resignation, that part of your life is over. There’s literally no upside in doing anything other than smiling and getting out of the door.

>"the moment you’ve handed in your resignation, that part of your life is over. There’s literally no upside in doing anything other than smiling and getting out of the door."

From a purely selfish point of view, you're usually right. That said, if the organization is functional, (and yes, I know that's a big 'if',) such an interview with a departing team member can provide valuable feedback that might lead to improvements for the remaining team members.

If the organization is functional you can give the feedback _before_ it gets bad enough that you have to quit - and feedback gets actioned to improve things.

People quit for all kinds of reasons unrelated to the functional of the organization (child-rearing, desire to live somewhere else, better offer, etc.).

The team members have no agency? I should get blacklisted and unemployed, starving my 4 kids and wife be cause Greg and Susan can't open their mouth or get a new job. Why are we starving daddy! Shut up son, you don't talk that way to a goddamn exit interview hero!

This assumes everyone at your ex-company is an inhuman corporate asshole.

This may or may not be the case though. Many people at companies actually do give a shit!

Yeah. And on that note I've given the "I don't think my issues with this company's processes are the fault of the individuals I work with or report to" interview before.

Even if they don't give a shit it's literally their job to track this stuff and notice that everyone says manager X is a dick or that people across unrelated teams complain about some top down initiative. It's like a bug report. They probably already know but putting numbers to it helps.

People who give a shit always get burned. Being too emotionally invested with your employer, as an ordinary salaried employee with a bounded upside, is basically a modern day mental illness.

I once worked for a guy who who literally destroyed his company because his wife wanted a bigger house. He put the companies finances in a precarious position by sucking out capital at the wrong time and 8 people (the entire company) lost their jobs.

I've worked at a company where the team wasn't hiring (no budget), but suddenly one of the department heads old mates gets hired. A month later someone else on the team gets laid off for no apparent reason. Dead mans boots.

I've worked at companies where non-compete clause's were weaponised. They'd be enforced for long enough to torpedo any competing offers (which you're required to disclose on resigning) and then released, leaving you unemployed without support.

No-one is saying many companies don’t suck. Obviously they do.

But to go into the world with a mindset of ‘everyone is an asshole’ is just sad.

Maybe in tech or wherever your experience is it’s like this. But many people in the world go about their business with a heart and soul.

Not everyone - but by assuming it’s everyone you are making it worse.

I left a firm that was refusing to fix compensation issues because "attrition is near zero." The only thing I said in my exit interview was that I was leaving specifically because of compensation and I didn't want to comment on anything else.

Sure, it didn't get me any more comp at that particular firm but I've heard from those who stayed behind that they eventually did relent.

> There is absolutely no benefit for you to gain by talking in an exit interview

small startup, you already have excercised shares, you want the company to continue to hockey stick but you think there is a blind spot in leadership that blocks hockey sticking.

Nah, getting to call a spade a spade is a great joy in life, worth far more than any toxic work relationship predicted on you having zero opinions.

I don't think this advice should be taken universally. If you are talking to HR and you left because things were bad, then yes pull out the corporate speak. But if you are talking to a manager or colleague who you have been on good terms with and you suddenly stonewall them you'll burn many more bridges than by giving your honest opinion.

“What do you imagine will happen as a result of your exit interview? That the company that you need to get away from will magically pull its head of its ass? “Damn shame that Jenkins left, but I’m glad he told us about what a bad manager his boss was. Once we got rid of that guy, the world became a better place around here.” It won’t happen.”

So this actually happened for me with regards to my last job. I was honest during my exit interview and said while the company was largely a good place, the only negative (and negative by far) was a particular manager at the firm, and that he was the sole reason I was resigning. About 2 months later that manager was asked to leave. I also had lunch with his manager a few months ago where he acknowledged that his hiring “John” (the horrible manager) was the worst decision of his career.

Speak not but what may benefit others or yourself; avoid trifling conversation. - Ben Franklin

I was once "forced to resign" for not expeditiously rushing to weaken (punch random holes in) the security of a private credit card network (PCI-DSS applicable) accessible only by a proper VPN. Oh, well, on to the next. There is zero advantage to helping an organization with constructive feedback when they're firing someone, and saying anything negative only puts the ex-employee in potential legal jeopardy.

I've seen managers managed out because a team that was formerly low turnover started hemorrhaging senior talent a bunch of whom said the new boss was a dick on their way out.

Now, if you've ground out enough leet code to land an almost no-show job at some bigco that runs on monopoly bucks and everyone is silo'd and everyone is divorced from actual results you'll probably never see that. But it happens.

A whole lotta nuance lost with this headline..

A good reminder to be cautious , but I don't think the absolute position justified..

I run voluntary exit interviews with departing engineers - I'm not in HR (more of an engineering advocate / practice lead) and any disclosure of content is entirely opt-in, as it's not remotely necessary.

The purpose of these exit interviews _actually is_ to make us better & hold leadership accountable. (And give an escape hatch to The SNAFU Principle [^1])

Ideally we wouldn't only learn this stuff when someone's leaving, but alas sometimes that's how it goes.

FWIW: generally collate insights and themes from these interviews, periodic skip 1:1s, etc.. and use them to report on broad trends we're doing well / sucking at.

For me these things are invaluable.

[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SNAFU_Principle

TLDR: please don't stop doing exit interviews! (But do be very clear on who you're talking to and what their intention is.)

You don't know what their intentions are.

They are like the police or the car salesmen: they do this every day or so, you do it once every 5 years. If you're not careful, you won't even know what happened there, not until you see the consequences. Protect your own career and interests.

The best thing one can do both for oneself and the remaining employees is vote with their feet. If enough employees do that, things may change. Don't burn bridges when you leave.

I work for a boss whose anonymous yearly reviews are atrocious every single year. Nothing ever changes, he's still running the department. The organization is rotten to the top, and no honest feedback will ever change that. I bet not even most of us leaving.

Another huge risk: anything you say can be used in future legal action. Assume you leave, and tell them everything was great. Six months later, you decide that you have cause to sue. Now, the company can provide documentation in court that you said things were great.

There is zero value in participating in an exit interview. Just don’t do it.

Exit interviews are also discoverable in legal proceedings, so anything documented can be subpoenaed and used as evidence in court cases beyond just what you mentioned.

My understanding is that once I completed an exit review form, my former colleagues on the helpdesk immediately received a ticket from HR to block my personal email address on the mailserver. Which would have been the 6th or 7th such block in the history of the organisation.

Pretty satisfied tbh.

I guess it depends. In one job I gave my feedback in a nice way that didn’t put blame on people but procedures and it helped the remaining coworkers.

In the another job I didn’t think providing any kind of feedback would help me or anyone there due to multiple reasons, so I didn’t even try.

My experience has been that people (including me) kinda suck at accepting critical feedback. You could try to mitigate this with some techniques but you never really know how the receivers will take it (or how the message is relayed!!) So the rational thing to do is to play it safe and not do an exit interview unless you are sure that it won’t backfire on you.

OTOH, if things were really bad, and you want to a chance to actually effect some change, write up a public blog post about it: https://www.susanjfowler.com/blog/2017/2/19/reflecting-on-on...

Jacob Kaplan-Moss blogged something similar 3 years ago : exit interviews are a trap. https://jacobian.org/2022/apr/4/exit-interviews-are-a-trap/ Similar advice, basically say nothing, you’re on your way out anyway.

I'd do an exit interview if it was paid. Nobody has ever offered to pay me for attending one, so I've never gone to one.

This is advice I would give employees if I was a terrible manager. Who benefits from mistreated employees taking a vow of silence?

Or a good one who cares about their naive reports not to get burn.

Like any advice, it is contextual. Especially when working for large organizations, the OT is the right default. If you're leaving because things are bad, it will be a mix of 1) people know but did not care/could not do anything about it and 2) people did not know about specific issues. Younger me thought it was often 2), but actually it is almost always 1).

The employee. Especially if you have been seriously mistreated – what you need is a lawyer, not an opportunity to materially worsen your legal position.

Did you ever see someone post an unhappy missive when leaving an online forum, explaining why they are leaving? It’s a practice as old as the internet but virtually never received well. The response is usually: “Don’t let the door hit you on the ass on your way out!”

At a previous job I was obviously unhappy and while HR said they'd book an exit interview, they never did (which I'm grateful for). Meanwhile my manager and the people he was playing political games with got swept aside and all ended up leaving within 18 months anyway.

I was a senior leader for over 3 years and a year past a take-over. I had to give 3 months notice so I worked as hard as I could until way past the end of my last day. There was no exit interview at all. I think most of the new HR no longer even spoke much English.

What it said; I respected my team and wanted to give them the best possible chance so I worked for them. The people above me didn't give a shit. It's all quite funny in hindsight how clear that is. To any of my teams reading this, I love you people, I'll try and get you here when I can. :)

This article sets up a strawman by talking about someone from HR asking for an exit interview. Well yeah, you shouldn't give unfiltered feedback to HR because HR is clueless about engineering and have tenuous context at best about the majority of feedback a technical person would be inclined to give. On the other hand, there might be some legitimate feedback that A) would be relevant and B) could be helpful, but only if the organization is prepared to hear it, which you need to use your judgement on. Be warned that if you aren't regularly hearing about what the business needs, or if what you are hearing sounds like nonsense, then you are not in a position to deliver useful feedback to HR and you only have downside.

The place to really consider more direct feedback is with people that you have worked closely with. Personal relationships matter infinitely more than HR or any "official" record. If you have good relationships with your boss and/or peers, talk to them and give your thoughts, it could give you some closure and maybe even potentially improve things. Just don't let it turn into a unconstructive venting session. Ultimately working in organizations is hard and every single person can generate a laundry list of complaints, the real value is in finding a path to improve with the levers under your control. If you have credible idea about how to nudge things in the right direction, people will tend to appreciate that; if you're just looking for commiseration about how broken everything is then keep your opinion to yourself.

This is stupid advice. When there are problems bring them up, while you’re there, on your way out, After the fact. Whatever. You have nothing to lose and everything to gain.

You get a reputation as a straight shooter You start acting at an executive level You get a reputation as someone who not only sees the problems but has ideas on how to fix them.

Do you want to go through life cowering in your rut or do you want to step up, take responsibility and start fixing shit?

Don’t be unkind, but learning to give constructive feedback is a life skill. Cultivate it and learn from your mistakes. Don’t be so afraid to make mistakes that you never learn anything.

Never understood the impetus to do the exit interview. I just simply decline and no one follows up or makes any kind of deal about it.

There's no use to interviewing someone who doesn't want to participate, which is probably why nobody follows up.

Why not try to improve the place you leave behind? Feedback is valuable and can be hard to do honestly while you depend on the job. This almost reads like fearmongering to keep cargo cults going some people profit off.

Because there's nothing to gain for being truthful.

Lying to your employer is luch like lying to children. Just accept that you are lying for the greater good, so it is not a sin.

Pretty dismal attitude. If there were real problems at that company, the exit interview is a rare chance to have the company's ear, and contribute to reducing harm.

Staying silent certainly plays right by sociopaths and other wrongdoers, sparing them the accountability that holds them at bay.

It also says to those remaining who may not be in as strong a place as you to leave, that you couldn't care less about their suffering, just "what's in it for me?".

Smacks a bit sociopathic itself.

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