How to Resign Gracefully

> I don't work well while being yelled at. I don't want to deal with that. And so I refuse to work in environments where I get yelled at.

Completely agree. I have a very simple philosophy: Nobody yells at me. Ever. Nobody has that right - not my parents, not my wife, not my boss, not my friends, NOBODY. I am very compassionate and understanding. If you are nice to me and reason with me, I will climb mountains for you. If I make the smallest mistake, I will man up and apologize before you even know something's up. But if you yell at me, I walk away regardless of whose fault it is. I am an adult, treat me as such with respect and dignity.

Also, I've noticed that yelling is a VERY good indicator of the morale of an office environment. I can't much speak for warehouse/construction-type jobs where yelling might in fact be the rule but I have not once seen happy employees in a place where managers or CEOs can yell at anyone they so choose. This is a free country. A salary does not entitle anyone to belittle me, regardless of fault.

Statiscally speaking, it is a sad episode for both Jason and Evan: the former will be condemned by several people for handling the matter not in the best possible way, and the later for making its employer's inadequate response public. Which is relevant, as Jason, being more well known, is more likely to actually suffer a bigger impact from this bad press than the engineer. Not a win-win situation by far.

> Fact is, Yahoo is a directionless arguably dying company and very much a large company rather than a startup with all that entails, probably meaning many meetings before you can ever change anything and so on.

Does not matter. The boss has absolutely no right to judge the next company. Everyone moves around in the tech world. MS employees joined Google, then Facebook, then Amazon, and so on. Bosses are supposed to wish employees good luck in the future or at the very least be polite and respectful.

> And Jason said something in the heat of the moment? So what?

So TechCrunch. So permanent record & documentation. So bad PR. People in the IT/startup world should know the internet never forgets. Also there is no heat of the moment when you reply to an email titled "Resignation." I can believe heat of the moment if an employee walks into your office and says "Screw you! I quit." But you can't play the "heat of the moment" card if it's an email. Take some time to cool off before you reply.

> They just promoted the guy and he can't even sit down and have a conversation?

Irrelevant to the discussion. He could have been made CTO and still wanted to resign. It was a very polite email and it is a free country/world. As a boss, you need to be a good leader and say positive things even when someone wants to quit.

> I'd be horribly disappointed too. Remember "disappointed" means you actually care and had high hopes/expectations for that person. That's WAY better than no expectations whatsoever.

I'd be horribly disappointed too myself. But saying "horribly disappointed" is not constructive criticism or even a poor choice of words. It is outright insulting. Instead of going back and forth over these words, let me just write out what an appropriate reply should be, so you can decide yourself how far this is from what really happened:

    Hi Evan,

    I accept your resignation and have notified Elliot to take care of the paperwork tomorrow. You can take the next two weeks off and have someone pick up your personal belongings or let Elliot know where to ship them.

    I had high hopes for you and am disappointed to see you leave. Good luck with your future ventures.

There. Said nearly the same things without sounding rude or insulting. Senior employees resigning can't possibly be such a common occurrence that a CEO can't even take 2mins to think the reply through. Could it?

Jason needs to chill. It is not clear to me if Evan has damaged his brand as an individual. But it is clear that Jason has damaged Mahalo as a brand. As the CEO, Jason has responsibility to his shareholders. If you promote someone and still he leaves, you need to find out why and you need to ensure that the team left behind is still motivated. A good CEO does that by inviting the departing employee to a face-to-face in order to provide a reasonable explanation to the rest of the company. It is all optics, but it is important optics. How Jason feels emotionally is not important. What he does to maintain shareholder values is.

> > They just promoted the guy and he can't even sit down and have a conversation?

> Irrelevant to the discussion.

It's entirely relevant. If you accept a promotion, you are making some kind of commitment. To turn around and quit 2 weeks later just goes to show your actions were, at best, disingenuous.

> As a boss, you need to be a good leader and say positive things even when someone wants to quit.

The chance to do that went out the window once this private email was made public. That's kinda the point of this whole thing.