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Discussion on: Graceful Resignation

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Beekey Cheung

Nicely written! Definitely agree on all the points about keeping in touch. I love that I have a wealth of friends from multiple companies.

I'll add that handing things off effectively is a matter of company culture as much as it is on the developer that's leaving. It's impossible to hand off 2 years of knowledge in 2 weeks. A developer may be able to rattle off all that knowledge, but a developer will not be able to absorb that knowledge in such a short period of time. Comments are great, but can't always provide full understanding of how things work.

There needs to be a culture of team communication. Even without pair programming, which I hate, all systems should have multiple developers working with and understanding everything. Code reviews are a given, but code reviews are useless unless a reviewer actually has a deep understanding of the code being reviewed. Ideally there shouldn't be much of a hand-off because another dev is ready to pick up anything a leaving developer leaves. It's ideal because voluntary exits aren't the only reason a developer leaves a company. My friends and I used to talk about "the truck factor". People get sick. Things happen in personal lives. Sometimes people get hit by trucks. In all those cases, there's no 2 week warning and no opportunity for hand offs.