Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 483: My team hated me from day one and should I stack PTO before my resignation

Episode Date: October 20, 2025

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions: How would you handle a situation where a team forms a negative opinion about you from day one — without any clear reason and without ever giving you a real chance to prove yourself? Even when you contribute technically, your suggestions are ignored… until someone else repeats the same thing and suddenly it’s considered valid. Is it possible to stay in that kind of environment without becoming bitter or burned out? Can you keep contributing professionally — or is it healthier to just walk away? You guys are awesome. Jamison, I interviewed with you and it was lots of fun and productive. Which is really rad. Now… I just landed a 12-month contract in big tech role. It’s perfectly aligned with my long-term career goals. My current fintech FTE is perfectly opposed to my long-term career goals. The question — how unethical / despicable would it be to start one week of PTO at my FTE on the same day as Day One at my contract role so that I can onboard without distractions and then put in my resignation upon returning to my FTE? What about two, three, or four weeks of PTO? Also… are two-week notices still the default still in 2025? Also also… I promise I’m not AI — I’ve been using em dashes since the 20th century.

it takes more than trying to unfreeze a frozen app by clicking the buttons hundreds of times to be a great engineer this is soft skills engineering episode 483 i'm your host dave smith i'm your host jameson dance soft skills engineering is a weekly advice podcast for software developers and did you know jameson that there actually was a event loop workaround where back in the day i don't remember what it might have been windows 3.1 but there was a thing where if you wiggled the mouse it would unfreeze certain i don't know whether they call them apps or what but it would unfreeze things sometimes because the event loop would prioritize mouse movements and you could like shake things loose and so i think there's like probably a small

generation of computer power users who whenever their computer slows down they just like pavlov's dog they just wiggle their mouse huh and i'm one of them yeah because it used it worked once yes it's like cargo colting yeah if at first you don't succeed try again 400 times i think that's how it goes right that's more or less right you know what happened mac os just reinforced it because on the mac when you wiggle your mouse really fast the cursor gets big it's just fun yeah so i do that all the time now i get a reward not yeah it doesn't work but i do get a small reward that's a that's like a first world problem your monitor is so preposterously large that you lose your cursor on it yes like imagine that back in the days of the little original mac with its

what was it like 300 by 600 pixel screen or whatever the mac classic yeah people make aquariums out of now oh do they that's a cool idea yeah it's called the macquarium and it's awesome there's like plans online for it oh cool that's probably some some collectors is sobbing tears now destroy this priceless artifact dave should i thank our patrons yes go for it okay thank you to the folks that contribute so much that we shout them out every single week thank you to joel harks says hi to friends ex-colleagues and deprecated classmates how to test frontend.com beta test compiler cache nice engineering leadership summit october 24th and open space event register at yelsummit.com let's normalize calling squirrelly braces squiggly

braces even though they're pretty curly and not so squiggly anyways use neverendingstorypointer.com so i can oh okay i think i have to i have to chain these together at some point yeah someone should make someone should cut up this audio and string together all the patreon shout outs where people do multi-episode series that'd be really cool it's like a little episode within an episode yeah woke up this morning got got myself dave watching sopranos forget delusions of grandeur my co-workers have delusions of adequacy my actual name on linkedin is yami debugging the dark connie the mobile development ordinary first of his name quote or one equals one drop table myomics jacob shandling bjorn sorry i forgot to change my patreon name the smell is no longer an issue we've gotten

used to it the missing semicolon christy the world's okayest programmer noah labhart kyle boss can't see lines either this week might be sponsored by flight true.io project execution sass why do your project centrals always suck you can't cha can't cha daniel remsburg nick molyneux if the service org uses a subservice org and the controls at the subservice order unnecessary pretend it's not javier gonzalez chewy ted timbrel aeroplane baggage catch a single open parenthesis dan from drone deploy chase w norton never is not just a crater on mars flamingo emoji i like chicken i like livery meomics meomics please deliver swiss python summit every october gotta keep the patreon name latency resilience kyle boss can't see dodds that guy over

there jenny kim the stochastic parrot quinton we have not heard from you in a month please go see susan in hr asap jonathan kings and i beautiful functional user documentation oh this looks like part of the cow emoji that like the old school ascii diagram it's like slash slash parenthesis oh oh close parenthesis some more slashes i don't know how you pronounce that but i just tried is it supposed to represent a wait what what did you call that it reminds me of you know did you ever use cow say oh yes terminal program where you type in text and then it makes an ascii cow say that text uh-huh it looks like a cow nose oh but what did you think it was i have no idea i i'm gonna have chat gpt analyze this okay oh chat gpt thinks it's a tiny ascii cow as well oh okay

all right well that always makes me feel better when the oracles and i agree uh will angel uh wants to work a drone to play softwares episode three revenge of the technical debt brayden canes john grant britney ellick and closed parenthesis and then a single closed parenthesis thank you thank you so much yes you make our hearts sing you increase the length at which the show will have to go so we produce a program that compiles out of all the open and closing parentheses yes and um if you want to join this group you can go to soft skills.audio click support some patreon any amount will get you an invite to the patreon nope well i guess technically it will it'll get you an invite to our slack team and enough of an amount will get you a weekly

shout out so this week something really funny happened to me which is one of our patreon supporters reached out to me to apologize for not changing his name because he didn't want to confuse the other Patreon creators that he supports. And he said he felt bad that he couldn't change his name. Do you want to guess who it was? I'm assuming it wasn't forget delusions of grandeur. My coworkers have delusions of adequacy. No, it was Kent C. Dodds, which some of our listeners might know but he just he was like i'm so sorry i don't want to change it i just i have all these other patreons i support we forgive you ken it's for a good cause i understand but we we now know how much you love us whatever amount you gave in patreon but not quite as much as changing

your name reasonable reason you know we will we will accept any safe for work string in here your name, someone else's name. If you want to pretend like someone contributes and put their name instead, I don't know why that would be an evil prank, but you could. Dave, do you want to read our first question? Yes, I do. This comes from a listener named Ed who said, how would you handle a situation where a team forms a negative opinion about you from day one without any clear reason and without ever giving you a real chance to prove yourself? Even when you contribute technically, your suggestions are ignored until someone else repeats the same thing and suddenly it's considered valid is it possible to stay in that kind of environment without becoming bitter or burned out

can you keep contributing professionally or is it healthier to just walk away my question is what did you do ed how did you turn them all against you on day one yeah so fast this is wild i mean maybe ed is super junior because this somewhat seems like uh a team that is not listening to someone maybe because they think they're i don't know i'm trying to think of why they would do this and sometimes it happens to junior developers. I was thinking maybe Ed replaced someone that was like the favorite team member. Oh, and their name was Ed.

So every time they hear you say something, they're reminded of what they've lost. I miss Ed. I miss the real Ed. Not this imposter Ed. Fake Ed that gives good suggestions that I steal for myself. I know, they should be thanking you.

I mean, look what you get. They get great ideas and get to take credit for them without having to do the mental work of coming up with them yeah oh man this is especially tricky because it's hard to bring up it's not like i mean you could maybe you could bring it up i think it would be strange to go into a meeting and say hey i feel ignored i noticed that you all ignore my suggestions and then sometimes you steal my ideas for your own oh how do you think people would react if he said that especially the second part poorly i don't know i've i have seen a thing happen where sometimes an idea the ownership gets lost in the scrum of people just kind of

contributing and saying things and working at the problem together in a meeting but i only notice if it's my idea or i feel like it was my idea then my idea got lost or someone else said wait that thing yeah i think sometimes ideas get stolen subconsciously where you don't even you don't even remember hearing it from someone else but you definitely did and then it pops up i've been guilty of perpetrating that once in a very while someone's called me out on that and been like you know dave that thing you just said that great idea you just said yeah i came up with that yesterday and told you about it i'm like oh crap sorry my solution for this is to try to be clear as often as i can when i do remember it's someone else's idea and give lots of credit and then

Hopefully it just sort of balances out karmically. Or people are aware by seeing me give credit to other people that if I ever do this, it's not because I'm trying to steal all the ideas or want everyone to say that's Jameson's idea. But I guess my point is, I think I've seen this happen in environments that I would consider healthy because I help make them. So obviously I think they're healthy. Of course. There can't be anything wrong with this environment. They're really great for you. What are you talking about?

I'm a boss here. I'm perfectly comfortable in this environment that I created. yeah the power dynamics feel good to me i don't know what you're whining about right but i could see how a perception of unfairness would make you notice this happening more yeah if it always happens that feels pretty bad i don't know that you could get you could just have a perception problem if it's literally every time but i feel like some people are more sensitive to this than others and then they notice it more because sometimes it happens inadvertently yeah so maybe that's a data point does it happen to other people too or is it just you

it still sucks though i mean i don't know it feels bad if you feel like you're ignored and this is just one thing they mentioned that someone else repeats their idea and then it's valid yeah i mean surely surely there's other reasons here for why you think your team has a negative opinion about you is it just that your ideas are ignored and then stolen or is there more stuff going on here because there is there you know just a i don't know i'll play the other side of this argument for just a moment but there is a world where consensus building happens and it's messy and i gotta tell you the number of times that i speak in a meeting and i look up and i realize that at least half of the other meeting attendees are just they're completely

distracted not listening they're on their computer they did not hear a word you said exactly yeah and and just to be clear i'm also guilty of this but then later they'll they'll there's some seed would have been planted this gem of an idea is planted from you in their minds and then later it pops up So, like, it is totally possible that you have a very disengaged team in discussion context like this. And they're just picking up these ideas, but only from, like, foggy recollections of seeds planted by you. And it really is not intentional. Maybe they're really not out to get you. I'm trying to think of a negative opinion.

Yeah, it would be interesting to know, although we cannot know from this question, what other things lead you to believe they have a negative opinion. Again, to play Dave's advocate. Nice. Start calling that instead of devil's advocate. Is that because I'm the devil? Yeah, I don't know. It's always the one you least expect. That afterwards.

That was a Simpsons Ned Flanders reference. Oh yeah, isn't he the devil in one of the Halloween episodes? Yeah. Flanders, you're the devil? It's always the one you least expect, Homer. Yeah, I already forgot my point, though. Oh, my bad. You're going to play Dave's advocate.

Well, that's exactly a thing that Dave would do. My point is that sometimes it takes a while to buy trust on a team. some teams especially i mean you joked about replacing beloved ed but maybe it's not ed specifically maybe it's beloved past employee or they're just kind of suspicious by nature maybe they've been hurt before by a precocious new employee that came in and had a ton of suggestions without proving their their metal or building up context and just wasted a bunch of time so maybe they have some some armor you have to break through and they might not be talking about it explicitly but maybe they are sort of saying we'll prove yourself first and then we'll trust

you. That's exactly a reasonable thing to expect. I mean, there's a certain level of human respect that we should extend to everyone. But that doesn't necessarily mean that a new team member is immediately deserving of all their ideas being influential on the team, because you're missing so much. And so depending on how these people are acting, it is totally reasonable that you are just in that forming moment where your reputation is being built. And it's totally okay for them to ignore your ideas for the moment and i don't know give it what i'd say like give it six months if they're still ignoring your ideas after six months or worse taking credit for them then you probably have a real problem but within the first six months i don't know that's just like normal team

bonding team i don't know what what's the right word but team integration call it yeah and my preferred team cultures are generally much more collaborative and much more focused on listening so i i feel like this is not my ideal setup but i could see some teams where maybe the domain is so complicated or they've been burned before like i said by someone coming in and thinking they have all the smart ideas that they just they just have a thicker shell they have they have some more armor built up maybe there's a reason for it maybe it's not maybe it's not ideal i think it's possible this still could be an okay team or company despite this if it's the if this is the reason why you feel like you are disliked especially i could see maybe some cultural things too i don't

know maybe they're all like northern europeans and they're just like i don't know blunt and reserved at the same time somehow that's my stereotype for like scandinavian people blunt and reserved yeah so like the blunt part i get what do you mean by reserved i mean they don't like they're not very smiley and jolly like the american stereotypes oh yeah yeah i'm a fan of categorizing many millions of people with a couple sentences big fan and so i feel pretty good about that jason owns some very large brushes yeah well yeah whether whether that's a true stereotype or not it's there and now y'all know i have it sorry so biased can't trust anything you say if you're from a scandinavian country you will very clearly let me know yes directly bluntly and reservedly

yes at the same time i don't know i was wrong no actually i i love scandinavian countries i've been to a couple and it was delightful oh nice i forgot my point in trying to backpedal it's easy to do when you put your foot in your mouth so bad yeah it is my point is this still could work out okay i would raise an eyebrow at this i would not feel great if this were me and i felt like my suggestions were ignored and i mean other things too people dislike you for other reasons but i think i agree with you that it it's it's not an immediate bail right now unless you have a lot more information about no they do actually just dislike me specifically yeah and assuming it's you're within the first couple months on this job i think it would be a bad idea to approach these

people and say hey how come you don't like me what did i do wrong or what can i do yeah yeah because people just be like what are you talking about now they're gonna think you're super sensitive yeah so like i said wait six months and then decide how the team feels about you i think is if there's someone specific on the team that you trust a little bit more you have a little bit of a better relationship i think it it could be useful to talk to them and say hey i feel like feeling my technical opinions don't really aren't really carrying a lot of weight do you notice that why do you think that might be i think that's a more specific question than why doesn't the team like me and if this is uh yeah maybe a blunter team for many different reasons yes many many

which may not have to do with where they're from maybe they just like computers and don't like people maybe geography doesn't play into it at all yeah yeah that's jameson's first time considering that possibility yeah every time i have a problem with someone i think wait a minute are they from scandinavian are they from north of this latitude yeah i think i think you could poke at that gently with if there is someone you trust a little bit more have a little bit of a better relationship because it is maybe this is a group dynamic not necessarily an individual thing on the team or maybe they have some more light they can shed if you're new to the team maybe there's some context or history they can give you yeah especially

i think if there's a manager that that would be a good question to ask them like how do i earn their trust more maybe is maybe a more positive way to phrase it yeah maybe maybe that's a good way to say it i think yeah but i would still be kind of cautious even in the first few months of approaching a manager about that but i do like your idea of going to uh if there's a trusted team member who you think will give it to you straight uh maybe they're scandinavian maybe not i mean you can go either way they are then they would give it to you straight that's right that's that's what's great but yeah i like that trusted team member approach but i i still even that's the one angle I would take within the first few months but I probably would still be pretty cautious like just

grow some grow some thick skin for a little while and uh you know deal with it for the first six months and then see how you feel after that and I'll bet you don't feel the same way in six months I think I would leave if I felt like I tried really hard and the team just didn't trust me yeah after some time I for better or for worse I'm heavily influenced by what people think of me And if people think I'm a moron, I tend to do more moronic things. Oh, nice. That's good to know. If they think I'm great, if they trust me a lot, value my opinion, I feel like I just

perform better also. I certainly feel better. My ego feels better. But also, I think I just do a better job and work is more enjoyable and meaningful. So I think if you stick around for a long time and you feel like this doesn't change, that's a reason to get a different job, I think. I agree. I don't know.

nobody wants to work somewhere where you feel like the whole team just pushes you aside yeah i totally agree with that and it's not just about your own feelings like you said which are i think important but also you just won't do that good of work if you are constantly living in this belief that your whole team thinks or you think your whole team hates you yeah makes it harder to push back it can all right have we answered this question i think so good luck best of luck dave should i read our next question please do from an anonymous listener who says you guys are awesome james and i interviewed with you and it was lots of fun and productive which is really rad wow well i don't think we work together right now so i'm glad you had a good time sorry it

didn't work out unless it's currently ongoing and then it may or may not work out but i i did interview some folks from the podcast and i found them all to be delightful people which i guess i knew already because they listen to this yeah yeah it's just very it's just confirmation bias and validation yep not it wasn't confirmation bias it was just confirmation that's true you have bias makes it sound like it could be wrong that's right like just because you confirmed something doesn't mean it was by confirmation data yeah that's right okay all right now i just landed a 12-month contract in a big tech role it's perfectly aligned with my long-term career goals my current fintech full-time equivalent is perfectly opposed to my long-term career goals

nice the question how unethical despicable would it be for me to start one week of pto at my full-time equivalent on the same day as day one at my contract role so that i can onboard without distractions and then put in my resignation upon returning to my fte what about two three or four weeks of pto and are two weeks of notice still the default in 2025 also i promise i'm not ai m dash i've been using m dashes since the 20th century there were two m dashes in this question there were also in the last question there were two i could not explain it but i did not even consider for a second that this question was written by ai maybe the ellipses yeah i don't think i've ever seen ai do there's there's some ellipses here that i i guess i didn't pronounce

dot dot dot yeah you'll have to imagine where they are well i knew it i knew you weren't ai yeah somehow jameson can defeat the ai in the touring test yeah are two week notices still the default i think they are they're not a law but it's courtesy courteous i was going to say courteous and courtesy and then i just bailed it's common courtesy and i think if you want to leave a better impression or a positive impression if you want to leave a negative impression don't give two weeks notice i think that will have people say huh that kind of sucked how they didn't give two weeks notice because it is for better for us it is somewhat expected in the u.s yep i'm assuming this is u.s because i feel like if you were i don't know if you're in europe

there's probably a contract of some kind and this it might be contractually there maybe are some obligations to yeah give notice or i don't know whatever i like how we latched on to the simple yes no question on this and totally are avoiding the really hard question yeah question answered yeah but yes still give two weeks of notice i i think you need to give two weeks of notice while you're employed while you are working productively there and if you stack pto or whatever maybe you do i don't know i think two weeks of time for them to to slurp the knowledge out of your brain is sort of the benefit there and to prep and and try to hire or change their plans or whatever to to adjust the team capacity are both the things you're getting and if you just give them

two weeks of notice and go on pto they will probably say no you can't do that if you give them no notice then you're not giving them time i don't know what do you think dave so we've got okay we've got here i guess there's an important question i would ask before i answer this question which is the company you're leaving is it does it have accrued pto that they're going to pay you out if you don't use it or is it the kind of pto where it's like use it or lose it so i've worked at both kinds of companies and at the accrued pto places they will write you a check with your last paycheck equal in value to the hourly wage times the number of PTO hours that you have in the bank. And so if that's the case, it doesn't matter.

Like you don't need to hack this system. You could resign before you even take your PTO and you're still going to get paid for it. And then you could take a week off if you want, right? So if that's the case, I think I would just go with the early resignation. Yeah. Now, if that's not the case, and you have an unaccrued PTO policy, which means you take the PTO when you want it, and then there's no accrual process. I think it's more common nowadays. I've actually never worked somewhere that has accrued PTO.

Yes. Probably because of that reason of you have to pay them money when they leave if they don't use it. That's right. Accountants, they do not like accrued PTO because it's a liability on the books. Yeah. right you have you have this financial obligation to a bunch of people that's going to come due at any unknown time in the future yeah and so they have to like they have to cash flow plan for that and liabilities on the books are just viewed negatively anyway so yeah it is getting less

common was that a accounting pun liabilities on the books are viewed negatively i mean i don't know they are negative aren't they i get it like it's got a negative they are negative numbers yeah Yeah. I guess sometimes they're in parentheses. I don't know why. I'm not an accountant. Sometimes they're in red. Yeah. Everybody knows positive plus red equals negative. Right. So let's just assume it's not a crude PTO, because if it is a crude PTO, I think the question wouldn't even be getting asked. So it's not a crude PTO. So now your question is, should I take a week of pay from my company fully intending to quit when I get back?

if you take a week and then come back and give your two weeks notice i think that's that feels okay ish more than that starts to feel like kind of shady and i don't have a yeah data point or rule or anything it just i if someone did that i would say i wish you hadn't done that that feels kind of unethical to me yeah and okay so here and not only is it unethical but you may have signed a contract with your full-time employer saying that you won't work at another full-time job or you won't pick up a contract without disclosing it or something like that. So you might be under a contractual obligation

not to do exactly what you are proposing to do. And it sounds like what you're trying to do is take one week of PTO, get double paid for that week by taking paid time off from your employer and start getting paid by the new contract and then resign on the very end of your PTO with no notice.

Yeah, and give zero notice. Yeah, and that I would say I am never working with this person. Yeah, that would be a bridge is broken. And I'm telling everyone I hear about, I will never work with this person. Exactly. So that's a no-go for me. Ethically, if you're in the U.S., you are completely within your legal right to do that.

It's not a criminal act. It's not even like a civil, I don't know. It's not even disputable in court in any way that I know of. Although we are space lawyers, not terrestrial lawyers, so take that with a grain of salt. Certainly not disputable in space, though. No, yeah. Space law is very clear on this point. Yep.

So, tons of precedent. but I would say if you did that your employer would feel deceived by you and you would be burning bridges I wouldn't do it I think it's bad now the next question is and I think that that might actually be a nail like the final nail in the coffin of this whole plan because if you believe you need to give two weeks notice as a professional courtesy which Jameson and I both agree you should and this whole plan hinges on you being able to just quit without notice then it's not going to work out and now I feel like I should tell a story where someone did this to me i would love to hear this story a little story time with dave i had an employee that worked for

me and this is going back a few years and i actually can't remember his name now oh i may have just remembered it i'm not going to say it on the show i'm going to test it out by saying it out loud and if this person sues us actually if they sued us we wouldn't know that could be because we falsely identified them or truly identified them yeah we don't know okay so this person came to me and said, Dave, I'm about to be a father, and I'd like to take some parental leave. Can I do that? And he had been with us for about six months at the company, something like that, less than a year. And I said, listen, we don't have a parental leave policy at this small company, but I am going to bend some rules and pull some strings to make this work for you.

and I'm going to give you the best I can within the policies that we have. And so we had an unaccrued PTO policy and I just, I made an exception and I let him take like four weeks of contiguous PTO, which was not our standard policy. And, but I, this was during a time when getting engineering talent was so, so hard. And I had, I was trying to grow a team like crazy. We grew a team from 17 engineers to 54 engineers in 12 months. And this guy was one of it was a very challenging time for hiring so i'm like in my mind i'm like i can either give him the parental leave that he wants or he'll probably just quit so i said yeah i'll give you the parental leave so four weeks and it really hurt because we needed every developer at the

time we were trying to finish a huge effort and the company the product was just in real trouble and needed a ton of work and love did you know that i mean a feature of parental leave is you often have a lot of notice it's coming because babies babies give notice did you know that they were having a baby i want to say it that i i had about like a good two or three months of heads up on this before the four-week parental leave period heads up about the leave or about the baby about the leave like he said hey i'm gonna have a baby four months from now i'd like to take parental leave okay okay you had a bunch of notice at least before i proceed with the story i just want to say to everyone working in big tech or all these big companies that have an amazing revenue

numbers look i know that four weeks of parental leave probably seems like a paltry like crappy terrible thing to you but that was a lot for this little struggling startup that wasn't even profitable and uh didn't you know we barely had enough people to get the job done so you know i'm sorry like you've got these amazing uh really bougie perks and i'm really glad you have those i'm sorry we just didn't have them so yeah don't come after me that was the best i could basically that was the best i could do so all right so the the date comes he starts to leave three weeks into the leave he sends me an email dave thanks so much for the parental leave listen can i add two weeks to it and i'm like oh okay and once again i have this conversation with myself i can either give

him the two weeks or he's gonna quit yeah and so i said yes now if i could go back in time i would have said yes and i need you to commit to x amount of more time of service at the company or else you're gonna owe us that money back or some some incentive yeah to prevent abuse of the system that was a little foreshadowing for you so two so the four week then then the week goes by we hit the four week mark and then the two weeks go by and uh we had the two we had the six week mark and he comes back to work and he says dave i'm resigning and i was like i was super professional and cool about it but on the inside i was a raging storm because i'm like i just gave you so he had been like i said only been at the

company like six months or so and i just gave you so much money six weeks of pay for nothing for absolutely nothing. And, and I couldn't backfill you for that whole time because I knew you were coming back or I believed you were coming back. And so I was, I was so mad. And if I ever see this person in an employment situation again, I will definitely have serious reservations about offering them a job because I realized like they were willing to screw me and the rest of the team for taking advantage of a, what I consider to be a very generous policy exception so that he could have what he wanted and by the way that was hard to manage because other departments were like how come the engineers get parental leave i thought we didn't have a print and i had to fight

that off forever yeah you know and and the other vps would come to me and be like what are you doing dave how can you defend this and i'm like oh my gosh so it created a bunch of noise and frustration for me to deal with this was wild before before they quit before and during and before and during their pto when they found out like where's this guy what happened where why has he been gone for so long and i'm like oh he's on pto why oh he had a baby wait i thought anyway it just led to a lot of questions and explanations and it put a lot of people into awkward situations so that he could have this parental leave which by the way i'm supportive of parental leave i wanted him to have time with his new born baby even though in my career with

zero of my children did i ever get even a day of parental leave but you know whatever i'm not bitter about that. So anyway, I will say that the way in which you depart from a company can leave either very positive or very negative impression on you. So carefully put yourself in the shoes of your employer and think about how will they perceive this. Now, I want to add one more like nuance to this whole thing i guess more like a caveat as much as i want everyone who works for me to extend this professional courtesy i also know that many companies you work for and i work for will with zero notice terminate your job because of any reason right and so it is a little bit of an asymmetrical expectation where on the one hand it's like oh of course you have to give

your employer two weeks notice and yeah yada yada and on the other hand it's like well yeah they're going to lay you off by marching you into a room with 30 other people and then say please walk straight to your car as you're done you know it's like so on the one hand professional courtesy people will care about how you leave on the other hand the same company will chew you up and spit you out with zero courtesy so take that for what it's worth i'm glad you mentioned that because i could see that being an argument about this is well they would not do this to you if it were better financially for them to not have you work there they would do it yep and i don't know what to say to that besides yes and you still work with people that will form opinions about you and if you

want to work with them again you might not care that much about the company itself because they're this soulless entity but the people i mean i i have worked with many people through networks and presumably i would not have worked with them if their networks had said hey this person just absolutely put me in this horrible situation yeah i just want to comment on that jim like what you said i think makes a lot of sense even though the company itself will chew you up and spit you out without any notice or grace the individuals who you work with can be put in a tough spot in their own jobs because of the way you treat them and that's the relationship that i care about yeah i uh actually yesterday we're recording this on a saturday usually we record on friday so

yesterday was a a beloved friend and colleagues last day at my current job i love him wish he was staying he got an offer he couldn't refuse imagine i had a big uh godfather voice there makes sense i still wish nothing but success for him and doom on the company he works for so that he must come back but he gave i think it was about a month of notice maybe a day or two off plus or minus that's very generous yeah super generous and i would not expect it also took like i don't know a week and a bit more of pto during the notice period and it was not because he wanted to go work this other job he had this rad vacation planned but i'm giving this as a counter example of like this felt like going above and beyond i think part

of it is because you were a tiny startup so it's not this soulless corporation and yeah he swears to me he does like us and so there is a bit of like yeah i'm leaving i know i did a lot of good work here and they're gonna miss it and maybe i'll soften the blow here but i just i can't can't understate how high my opinion is of him both because of how we worked together and because of the courtesy extended when he left and knowing like yeah this will suck this will mess up the roadmap i'm we don't have that many engineers so he was a big fraction of the head count of the team and capacity of the team but that doesn't mean you can't get another job like you're still allowed to quit but he did it in a way that made me feel like oh this was just so like this is the

most responsible way he could have done this thing i wish hadn't have happened yeah so is this a case where he's like hey i've got this new job opportunity i have to take it i also have a vacation planned next month and i mean i've told them i i'll start in a month from now and did he kind of work through it all with you basically i think well i think he came to me with it all planned out already so i'm not sure the order of the timing or everything but it was yeah i don't know does that answer your question i guess it doesn't i'm sure yeah i mean given given how he gave it all to you up front and gave you tons of time it's actually kind of cool like i bet you were more than happy to give him the week of time off in the middle of the notice period oh yeah for

sure yeah there was not a thought in my head of like no you you can't take that time off or you're or you're fired like i don't know what are we gonna do yeah exactly yeah you can't quit we also spent the last several weeks saying you didn't fill out your performance reviews that's it you're fired in two and a half weeks and i was going to say that um one of the cool things about taking pto in the middle of your resignation notice time is that the company can practice not having you there without the risk of you never coming back so then it's like i think that would actually be a really ideal way to do a resignation to say look i'm going to give you three weeks of notice but the middle week i'm taking time off it was helpful it was a soft practice and and

more time to backfill right i mean you can't realistically we cannot hire an engineer in two weeks yeah nor can we in a month usually takes us a little bit longer but at least we got to get started a little bit earlier so there's a little more overlap yeah cool well have we answered this question yeah do it that way if you can if you have the luxury yeah and no one will throw you in jail if you don't right but you might never work with those people again no one will throw you in jail if you overlap and and use up all your pto and give zero notice but i think anyone responsible for the output of your time will be in a really bad situation yeah and we'll yeah have a bad taste in their mouth maybe you hate them and want them to fail and die i don't

know it'll you'll give them an opportunity to practice unconditional forgiveness that's what i say every time i cut someone off in the car and then drive with my knees while i flip my double middle fingers out i was gonna say out each window that my arms are not long enough so i have an extender in my right hand that i hold out left hand out the window it's it's very challenging for me to imagine that but i'll take your word for it all right dave what can people do if they want their own questions answered go to soft skills audio and click the ask a question button where you'll be taken to our beautiful little form where you can fill it out put in as much or as little identifying information as you like

and tell us about your woes tell us about your challenges tell us about whatever you need our disgustingly terrible advice helping with and please also just a regular shout out if we've answered your question on the show before send us in the follow-up how did it go did you take our advice did you reject our advice and we're keeping score here so we want to know like what percent of the time do people actually benefit from taking our advice so far it's not looking good i actually have an announcement about this every time we've given space related advice such as space psychology or space law by listening you agree to pay us but you only have to pay us when you get into space nice so our hourly rate is pretty high and we will be waiting in space to

collect when you get there very cool um all right thank you for listening we'll catch you next week Thank you.