The Most Important Offboarding Question

Death is not a single event, according to Mexican culture. It begins when the heart stops, but only when the last person ceases to tell our stories and forgets us, are we truly gone.

Any organisation that has been around for long enough has an offboarding procedure for software engineers. It typically involves removing access – a good practice for security (and cost-saving) – and collecting company hardware. Forward-thinking organisations will also have an exit interview to collect feedback to improve their EX. But there's a question every organisation should ask an outgoing engineer, yet very few do:

If you were to stay for three more months and could work on anything you would like, what would you address?

Every significant software project carries tech debt. Like a mortgage, tech debt is not inherently bad. Sometimes engineers take deliberate shortcuts to meet deadlines; sometimes they make decisions they only learn were sub-optimal in hindsight. Having some cleaning tasks on the backlog that are constantly out-prioritised is normal.

Tech debt becomes a problem the moment you forget that that is what it is. Some tech debt is unmistakable, but some turns into a haunting mystery when the last engineer who was around to witness the shortcut or the sub-optimal decision leaves the project. You are left with an unlabelled fuse box nobody dares touch out of fear that flipping a switch plunges the entire building into darkness.

A sustainable software system is one that is understood. Keep the stories alive. Preserve ADRs; leave context comments in your code; write useful commit messages; tell tales around the fogata ‒ whatever best fits your team. The machine knows how; the humans must remember why.