Exit interviews are a trap

In that spirit of honesty: you really have no idea, and are extrapolating from a sample size of one. What feels good and righteous is not always what is most effective.

> 1) Being true to yourself is worth more than any of his purported wins

This advice is about being fully truthful with others. You can avoid exit interviews as a waste of your time, and still be "true to yourself."

> 2) Be your own merit, and don't rely on others for references or goodwill

You don't get a choice in whether employers use references, and in the he-said-she-said scenario, you lose against the candidate whose references weren't toxic. This is borderline "pull yourself up by the bootstraps" advice.

> If every exit interviewee states that the CEO is a dick, that can't be ignored.

It actually totally can. HR reports to the CEO, not the board. Bill Gross lasted 43 years at PIMCO, which is longer than your typical HR career. In fact, I'd almost bet "asshole" is a job requirement, based on stories we hear about CEOs. I've never personally encountered such a person professionally, but if you're leaving because they're an asshole, telling them that to someone who can make good on the classic "you'll never work in this town again" threat is doing yourself no favors.

> If you get in trouble for telling the truth, that's not a company you need to be at.

I feel like you don't understand what an exit interview is: it's somebody in HR interviewing you to protect themselves from lawsuits. They want to know if you are leaving due to harassment, or violence, etc. By the time you do an exit interview, you have already decided to leave the company, and unless the reason you are leaving has to do with illegal behavior, it's unreasonable to conflate the interview with HR changing anything.

At the big corporation I work at, we have yearly surveys. We also do exit interviews with people who are leaving. You're right the notes usually go directly to the person's supervisor. Then the upper management guys put together some kind of directive to try and improve whatever was spelled out in the surveys or the exit interview feedback if they start seeing a pattern.

Then it becomes a quarterly goal for the manager - say reducing team churn before EOY. Goal is met, everything goes back to normal and nobody is the wiser about anything said in the exit interview.

Its literally a one-time deal that is a short-term, surface level managerial fix.

Even when you supposedly have a system in place that should theoretically handle negative survey and exit interview feedback, the system is designed to more or less just sweep it under the carpet as if nothing ever happened.

If it's something that no one is likely to take too personally, then sure tell them that you didn't like the quality of the free lunch or that you wanted an air hockey table instead of foosball.

But there's really no upside to slamming your former boss, and there could be a downside if the hiring manager at the company you want to work for reaches out to that former boss personally to ask about you.

It sounds like you're including yourself in the group you call "petty". And in an earlier part of the post, you talked about behavior that I'd consider vindictive.

Honest question: Are you happy that you behave that way, or do you wish you behaved differently?

I'm not criticizing. I'm genuinely curious about the different ways people see the world.