Management – Steve Novoselac's Blog

Career Geek: Leaving Your Job Gracefully

I don’t often blog about non-tech things here, but sometimes I do, and well, it’s my blog so.. yeah. Anyways, I have been in some kind of tech lead or manager position for a while now, and have hired and fired and seen people leave from time to time, so I have some experience, not the most by far, but some, and just want to get this one out here.

Leaving Gracefully. Pretty simple when you think about it. Give your employer ample time and notice (2 weeks seems to be the norm). The other company you are going to or whatever you have planned for your future (retirement?) can wait. You have given the company years of service, and they have given you years of paychecks. It doesn’t hurt to give them as much time needed to transition you off the team.

A few times even recently I have seen people just up and leave, 0 day notice, a few days, etc. That’s just not cool.

Another thing to think of is “what I am responsible for, only me, and how can I get someone else to know where to even start”. Most everyone has something only they work on or know the in’s and out’s of, or where to even start to get some system configured or whatever. Don’t leave without giving someone at least some basic training or documentation.

Try not to burn bridges, you never know when you will need to get back across them.

If you do the right things, you might even get a send off party, so all your colleagues can join in wishing you well.

Everyone moves on sometime, there is no doubt, but if you do it gracefully you will come out in the end as a more likable colleague and even sometime in the future when you might want to come back (you never know, I have seen it happen!) then the company and other people on the team will welcome you back.

Now in some tech companies, they might even ask you to leave right away, and that is ok. No use having someone sit around for 2 weeks, it all depends on the situation, but you should at least offer the 2 weeks, and in some cases even more, 3, 4 weeks, etc.

Like I wrote earlier, the other place can wait. How do I know this? I hire people too. In the grand scheme of things waiting a couple of weeks to get someone on board isn’t going to make a difference. When most tech/software jobs are 2-5 years, waiting 3 weeks isn’t going to kill a project.

Keep in touch with your team, maybe even your manager. In the end, just use common sense when moving on.

UserVoice: Using A Customer Service Tool To Democratize Technical Debt

Not sure if you anyone has heard of or used “UserVoice” – It is a site that allows you to create “forums” for your products and then submit ideas, give users votes and they can vote them up, and an admin can say things are started, merge ideas, or mark when the idea has been completed (and the votes go back to the users).

UserVoice is (sorta) along the same lines as GetSatisfaction (another cool customer service 2.0 app). Pretty cool tools. If I was in a customer service role, especially with any type of user based or public product, I would be running these tools to gather ideas and feedback from my users.

I am in a technical role, so what I decided to do was “democratize” the development area of our product one of my teams is working on. We have a ton of technical debt (as do most teams, it is just a matter of what level of debt you have) – but what should we work on next from a technical perspective?

In comes UserVoice. Let’s throw out ideas on UserVoice, give everyone 50 votes, and the ideas that bubble to the top will become our next set of things to work on. One “idea” may become several “user stories” (we are agile). Our goal is to have 20-25% of our stories focused in on paying down our technical debt. If we didn’t, the debt would never get down to a low enough point to where we are very comfortable.

What is cool is that it really shows what the team wants to focus on next. People can have others vote up their ideas, etc. Also, getting the votes back at the completion of an idea is key. As you can imagine, our forum is private. The one cool thing about UserVoice is you can create multiple forums, with different ranges of settings, so you could also have a public forum, or a different private forum for a select group of users, etc.

One thing I wish I could do is maybe give different # of votes to different users. Integration out of the box with TFS or other systems would be nice too, I haven’t looked to much into that though.

If you have a team that ranges from medium to large, I would suggest checking out UserVoice to get the ideas and opinions of the members out on the table regarding your technical debt. You may be surprised as to what gets voted to the top!