19 ms·

What is necessary. Sometimes, I've worked overtime the last day. Sometimes they want me out of the building. Professionals bring their A game with them, and

What is necessary. Sometimes, I've worked overtime the last day. Sometimes they want me out of the building. Professionals bring their A game with them, and reputation spreads way faster than demonstrated success.

HeyLaughingBoy 5y ago
Absolutely. When I left my last job (team lead), I did the best I could to leave my team in a good position for the future. Got my code into a working state, documented everything I could, including stuff I hadn't touched in months. Made sure I left a time-critical project in a good enough state that they could demo to the client. Even after all that, I still got a panicky call a couple weeks ago about a project that hadn't been touched in over a year. You can only go back so far :-)
- euroderf 5y ago
  Did you answer it with a freebie or with the billing clock running ?
  - uranium 5y ago
    For former colleagues I'm personally always willing to answer a reasonable number of questions for free. But after leaving one particularly-unpleasant situation, I did barter that I'd give a friend a brain dump if we could do it over dinner and he'd expense it =*).
  - HeyLaughingBoy 5y ago
    This was a freebie since I was sympathetic: supply chain issues hit them really hard. The employer before that, it was $200/hour and they were happy to pay it.
uranium 5y ago
This. I've worked past the point that my access started expiring and I had to make sure not to reboot anything important so I could keep making progress, even after they came and took my chair away [yes, seriously]. When I absolutely had to reboot the dev system to continue, I sent off my final notes and left. I do agree that knowledge transfer is top priority, but sometimes there's also work I'd really like to hand off in a completed, easy-to-take-on state, that will save the next engineer ever more time than another few hours of brain dump. Still, try to do the brain dump first.

HeyLaughingBoy 5y ago

Absolutely. When I left my last job (team lead), I did the best I could to leave my team in a good position for the future. Got my code into a working state, documented everything I could, including stuff I hadn't touched in months. Made sure I left a time-critical project in a good enough state that they could demo to the client. Even after all that, I still got a panicky call a couple weeks ago about a project that hadn't been touched in over a year. You can only go back so far :-)

euroderf 5y ago
Did you answer it with a freebie or with the billing clock running ?
- uranium 5y ago
  For former colleagues I'm personally always willing to answer a reasonable number of questions for free. But after leaving one particularly-unpleasant situation, I did barter that I'd give a friend a brain dump if we could do it over dinner and he'd expense it =*).
- HeyLaughingBoy 5y ago
  This was a freebie since I was sympathetic: supply chain issues hit them really hard. The employer before that, it was $200/hour and they were happy to pay it.

uranium 5y ago

This. I've worked past the point that my access started expiring and I had to make sure not to reboot anything important so I could keep making progress, even after they came and took my chair away [yes, seriously]. When I absolutely had to reboot the dev system to continue, I sent off my final notes and left. I do agree that knowledge transfer is top priority, but sometimes there's also work I'd really like to hand off in a completed, easy-to-take-on state, that will save the next engineer ever more time than another few hours of brain dump. Still, try to do the brain dump first.