[billyhoffman]

Reasonable (though fairly hackneyed) advice. Until I get to this:

> I let my boss know I was leaving in February, so my commitment to see things through to the end of the year was effectively a 10-month notice period.

This, ironically, was the first sentence in a section entitled "Avoid giving too much notice"

If you can't handoff your work in less than 2 weeks, either you as an employee have failed to properly document and communicate status of what you are doing, or the company culture has failed because it created an environment where someone could not pick up what you were doing and continue it. Why? Replace "quitting" with "suddenly died." Companies that can't recover from stuff like this are poorly run and with bad frontline managers.

Short of being a founder and CEO of a startup who has to leave, and needs to gently hand it over so the company doesn't die, there is no valid reason for 10 months of notice. Hell, that is probably not a good reason.

[jamesbrady]

OP here, yeah I mention the 10 months thing as an example of what not to do – the actual handover of tasks I did in maybe 1–2 months, and that was at a leisurely pace TBH. The first ~9 months we were in a slightly weird limbo unfortunately – that's what I was flagging up as an anti-pattern there.

[tweetle_beetle]

The author freely admits a 10 month handover was counter productive. But equally 2 weeks is not appropriate for many roles, especially in smaller companies, or where you may be the only employee with a specialist skill.

It sounds like it may be more of a north american phenomenon to walk out of jobs at your own discretion(?). In my experience, people in the UK are observant of contractual notice periods and 3 months is not unusual for someone in a senior position.

It's become a bit of a nonsensical arms race to tie people down to longer and longer notice periods to make it easier to bring someone in who hopefully has a shorter notice period for a convenient handover.

[boznz]

I am the sole programmer and support for a very large companies production system. The company has flagged the problem and has tried to re-write the system for several years but have never managed to retain a coherent programming team long enough to see the project through nor found a suitable replacement in the market.

Luckily for them I am a contractor not an employee but there are definitely grey areas.