After the Going, Went

07/12/2013

Episode 21 of The Ship Show (“Going, Going… Gone.“) is over a month old, but with Crazy JuneTM1, I never made it around to discussing the episode. Plus, there were some interesting developments that took some time to percolate.

If you didn’t hear the episode, the Crew discussed the various considerations and issues that are worth taking into account when deciding whether or not to stay at a job. It was an interesting episode to tape, because it’s often hard to have that conversation and entirely remove the identifying information.

In fact, it was such a delicate topic that we ended up putting this episode in the can for a few months, just in case.

If you’re an employee and didn’t have a chance to hear it, I’d definitely take the half-hour and listen; it’s turned out to be one of our better discussion/advice episodes to date.

The one thing I was a little sad about it because none of us come from a management background (really), we didn’t really have anyone with the managerial perspective on this issue. I think it would have been really interesting to explore

  1. As a manager, have you ever lost someone good? Did you see it coming, or was it a total surprise?
  2. How did you handle it? Did you try to keep them? Were you empowered by the organization to offer them anything substantive? Were you successful?
  3. Do you wish the person had talked to you before making a decision? What is your advice for reports on the best way to start that conversation?
  4. Have you ever had a report leave, and after hearing their reasons, think to yourself: “they’re totally right?” What did you end up doing then?
  5. Why do you feel the it’s so difficult to have these conversations? Is there a way we could improve upon that, from upper-management to middle-management to line engineers, without it being… weird?

We may have to redo the episode at some point, and get some management input on these questions… I think that’d be very valuable.

In any event, even though the topic was a delicate one, I personally received a lot of positive feedback.

No less than four people took the time through various channels to to tell me that this episode prompted them to really re-think their work situations.

Two of those announced their new jobs a couple of weeks after the episode shipped.

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  1. Mostly related to getting my #DevOpsDays talk ready!