When I left my most recent position, I told my manager I was planning to leave months in advance, so he could plan accordingly. I also documented all the systems I was working on, trained the juniors on my team, and even made a couple of walkthrough videos showing the complicated system, step by step.
Then the company announced a merger, and they started losing senior people. Lots of them. The new owners saw the brain drain happening, and announced a retention program. They were basically bribing seniors to push their resignations back for 90 days in order to train and document. Kudos to the new owners for that.
The retention bonus (bribe) came with strings attached. There were metrics set as to the knowledge transfer that the manager had to define, and had to approve that it had been done, in order for the bonus to be paid.
This actually caused a problem for my manager, as the wording of the program stated he had to document that I'd trained and documented during this 90 day period. The problem was, I'd already done it all in the months before. I was fine with staying the 90 days to give Q&A sessions and the like (and to get the bribe), but was I supposed to write a second set of documents, and give the same training to the people who'd already been trained on it just six months earlier? According to the wording of the program, yes. The stuff done prior to the 90 days didn't count.
He took it to HR, who rewrote the terms of the program. They hadn't considered that anyone would have done it prior to that, because "we've never had anyone do that before".
This was a company where testers wrote such sparse test procedures that it was fully accepted that the only people who could run a documented test was the person who wrote it. So when a tester left, they not only had to rerun all the tests, they usually had to create an entire new test suite from scratch.
I remember reading one of their tests, and one of the test steps was "do the needful". Yeah, I can't see a new hire knowing what that meant.
When I left my most recent position, I told my manager I was planning to leave months in advance, so he could plan accordingly. I also documented all the systems I was working on, trained the juniors on my team, and even made a couple of walkthrough videos showing the complicated system, step by step.
Then the company announced a merger, and they started losing senior people. Lots of them. The new owners saw the brain drain happening, and announced a retention program. They were basically bribing seniors to push their resignations back for 90 days in order to train and document. Kudos to the new owners for that.
The retention bonus (bribe) came with strings attached. There were metrics set as to the knowledge transfer that the manager had to define, and had to approve that it had been done, in order for the bonus to be paid.
This actually caused a problem for my manager, as the wording of the program stated he had to document that I'd trained and documented during this 90 day period. The problem was, I'd already done it all in the months before. I was fine with staying the 90 days to give Q&A sessions and the like (and to get the bribe), but was I supposed to write a second set of documents, and give the same training to the people who'd already been trained on it just six months earlier? According to the wording of the program, yes. The stuff done prior to the 90 days didn't count.
He took it to HR, who rewrote the terms of the program. They hadn't considered that anyone would have done it prior to that, because "we've never had anyone do that before".
This was a company where testers wrote such sparse test procedures that it was fully accepted that the only people who could run a documented test was the person who wrote it. So when a tester left, they not only had to rerun all the tests, they usually had to create an entire new test suite from scratch.
I remember reading one of their tests, and one of the test steps was "do the needful". Yeah, I can't see a new hire knowing what that meant.
They're going to miss me when I'm gone ... the feeling will NOT be mutual.
I do not, in fact, miss that place. At all. 🥳
Just like my previous work...