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I'm planning to leave my job at the start of the year for a new opportunity. I had been planning to make this move for a while, and over the past few months, I had been neatly winding up my projects. I hardly interact with my boss anyway, and I was glad to tie it all up.
Unfortunately, rather recently my boss drove by and dropped two new projects on my lap. I found myself in an awkward position, where I wasn't ready to announce my impending departure, and would also feel dishonest turning down work when I had availability.
But it has been very hard to get invested in it. One of these projects is realtively minor, but has a late January delivery, and nobody to back me up. It will require me to now put in a lot of holiday hours to get it to a passable state. The other one is a major intiative that would realistically require most of my time next year. I've basically (unintentionally) slow-walked it over the past two months, and I guess I will just drop it altogether in the new year, and leave the stakeholders with essentially 2 months wasted delays.
It's something I feel really bad about mishandling, not for the "company's" sake, but for the humans left hanging, the weird, but necessary duplicity when discussion things January and beyond, and the general failure in doing an good job I can be proud of.
Every other role I've ever left, I put in my notice pretty much immediately after being sure of my next role, and left within 3 weeks. This has been a new experience for me, and I feel weird and like I mishandled it. On the one hand, I wish I had told them 2 months ago, I'd be out at the end of December and to plan accordingly. On the other hand, it would have been a real financial hit to my family if I had been let go immediately in response.
Perhaps this is my Hock.
Congrats on the new role!
What made you decide to delay giving notice? Not that you're obligated to, either legally or morally, but with the human interests that you're describing, I would think it's the best approach unless you feared retaliation or early termination. Thinking about that a bit, I think my own feeling would be that if I didn't believe the company would engage in good-faith end-date timing with me, I wouldn't feel all that bad about them getting screwed over a bit and wasting everyone's time. In my only personal experience with a comparable scenario, I was able to give three months of notice, and this actually worked out great for everyone involved because the company and my team lead were good-faith negotiators that appreciated my willingness to stick around and wrap everything that I could. This was actually a surprisingly productive time in my career precisely because all of the stress was off, I had a definitive do-or-die date on literally any project I was handling and got to just do some wonky one-off stuff that no one else really wanted anyway.
The good news is that however the next month or so goes, everyone from you to the other stakeholders will move on in pretty short order, so it's probably not worth getting super wound up about the mishandling. These things usually feel more important in the moment than they are in the long run.
It's a bit of this, and a bit of wasn't sure on the exact timing of the next opportunity. I knew that it was time to leave, and planned to be out by a given time, but there was uncertaintly on both sides of the equation.
In terms of fear of retaliation, yeah. There's been a lot of instability in my current org right now, which is part of why I started making plans to leave. I already had one teammate who was clearly pushed out so they could reclaim her headcound. My fear was that if I had said, Hey I'll be out at the end of the year, they could have (reasonably) come back with, "No, why don't you finish up what you can in the next two weeks."
Then I would have been out ~2 months of pay this year.
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