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If you’re considering a new job or career, do what you can to make the switch smooth.
Changing employers. It’s something we all have to deal with. Even if you are an independent consultant, you will probably come to the end of a contract and need to find work with a new client. Sometimes that transition goes smoothly; other times, it can leave a lasting, negative impact.
I’ve worked with my current employer for over 15 years. There are many reasons why I have stayed with them for so long, but even with that long tenure, there was a time where I decided to leave for what I thought was a better opportunity. After 18 months, I gave my two-week notice and left on good terms. Unfortunately, things did not turn out as I hoped. 6 months after my change in employment, I was fired. In a future article, I’ll talk about this experience, but for now, I want to focus on what happened immediately after this turn of events. As soon as I walked to my car, I called my current employer to see if I could come back, and fortunately, they had a position open. The next week I was back on their payroll, and I have not looked back since.
One of the reasons that I was able to come back to my current employer is, as I said, I left on good terms. I have resigned from a couple of other employers in my career, and I have always done what I think is the right thing - that is, I gave two weeks’ notice, and kept the termination civil and professional. Early on in my career, it was drilled into my head that the software development community is a lot smaller than it may look at first glance. Word can travel fast, and if you got a bad reputation as an employee (deserved or otherwise), that can show up in undesirable ways.
In the modern day, it’s arguably harder to “hide” past experiences. Social media, discussion forums, and other electronic avenues make it easier to disseminate information about a potential employee. That can be a good thing: for example, you can show your work by providing your GitHub site, which would let an employer view your repositories and see the high quality of code you produce. However, it’s also possible that information about previous employment experiences (whether they’re based on facts or “alternative facts”) will be discovered, which could hurt your chances of employment.
You may have the phrase, “burning a bridge”, before. It means that you have severed a relationship with another person or group of people in such a way that it will be very hard to rebuild. Believe me, it does not take much to leave a very negative impression as you walk out the door and leave a smoldering ruin at the bottom of the proverbial ravine. Here are just a couple of incidents I have heard about:
There are times where you do need to “burn the bridge”. Your employer may be toxic - that is, they may have an extremely negative work environment, and it is time to move on and never engage with those individuals again. However, in most cases, handle a resignation in a professional manner as best as you can. You never know when you may run into folks in the future, and knowing that you did the right thing in the past can make those encounters easier to handle. Until next time, happy coding!
Published: 02.22.2017 01:00 PM CST