{{first name | Reader}},
The email came at 6:40 in the morning, which is how you knew before you opened it.
Mine said I had been "retained." Not kept. Not staying. Retained, like water.
There were fourteen of us on Monday. There are eleven now. The work did not leave with the three, because the work was never attached to them. It is attached to a system nobody has looked at properly since 2021.
At the all-hands we were told the organization would be "leaner and more focused." Nobody asked focused on what. The three who left were the ones who asked things like that.
Afterwards my manager said this was a good outcome for me.
I said thank you.
I have thought about that since. I am not sure what I was thanking anyone for, and I said it immediately, without deciding to.
A RESIGNATION LETTER I WON’T BE SENDING
To: the New Operating Model
Re: Your announcement of 6:40 a.m.
Please accept this as my formal resignation from the New Operating Model, effective at the close of the transition period, whenever somebody decides when that is.
I have now been through six of these. I have been realigned, consolidated, transformed, streamlined, and once, memorably, "unlocked." I have reported to four managers in three years, two of whom I met only on video, and one of whom I am reasonably confident never established what I do.
I want to be fair to the model. It is not worse than the last one. That is the highest compliment currently available.
My concern is the arithmetic. Fourteen people did a body of work. Eleven people now do the same body of work. I have listened carefully to every explanation of how this will be handled through prioritization, and I have noticed that not one of them names a thing that will stop being done.
I remain committed to the transition. I will be doing the work of 1.27 people, which I understand is called leverage.
Regards,
DEEPLY UNSETTLING MATH
Say a company cuts fifteen percent.
The work does not get cut. It gets absorbed by the eighty-five percent still there.
Fifteen divided by eighty-five is 17.6 percent more work each.
On a forty-hour week, that is seven extra hours. Across a working year, forty-one days.
Nobody will mention it, because you still have a job.
ONE GENUINELY USEFUL THING: Write down what you actually do.
After a reorg nobody knows who does what. That sounds like the organization's problem. It is mostly yours, because whoever decides your next role will be working from an org chart, not from memory.
One page. Every recurring thing you own, the systems only you can get into, the handoffs that route through you, and the two or three things that would quietly break within a month if you stopped.
Not a brag document. A map. Boring on purpose.
Send it to your manager with a plain line: "Wrote this up so the transition is easier. Flag anything I have wrong."
Three reasons it is worth twenty minutes. It arrives before anyone asks, which is the only time it counts for anything. It puts in writing that these things are yours, which matters the next time somebody is deciding what you are for. And you have now built most of a handover document, which is a different and far more useful thing to own later.
Keep a copy somewhere that is yours. What you are allowed to take with you varies by contract, so check yours rather than assume.
PARKING LOT
Third one.
Write the letter you won't send. Hit reply and send it to me. I'll publish it anonymously, and nobody will ever know it was you.
Go do something that isn't work.
R. Countdown
ANY OTHER BUSINESS
The transition period does not have an end date.
Enough, Already Club. Form EA-1. Distribution: internal.
Retention: until you leave.