31–40 of 51 posts
I'm in the middle of this right now.. Handover would be super helpful. Cool concept. Kind of reminds me of I Robot where you can ask specific queries to holograms
Large corporations won’t bite. The higher ups don’t care or they would not do mass layoffs to kowtow to hedge funds or the stock market. Corporations throw people out like garbage. Go ask the Senior engineers at Microsoft who worked there for 22 years. Entire teams.
Well that is what happens when people on this site keep telling themselves that it is the "juniors" that are only affected.
Everyone (except the owners) and especially engineers of all levels are always affected.
I think this is a great idea for a product, but in my experience, the pain associated with handover is something that is earned over a long period of time. Knowledge starts to centralise in one person and they don’t do enough to disperse it. Maybe they are too busy, maybe they don’t value documentation, maybe it’s an oversight, there are lots of reasons. But that problem starts to build up and you only discover the f…
I’m the kind of person who is conscientious enough to make a handover document when I go on PTO, and the same traits that make me do that are the reason why I’d never use this. It lacks a personal touch; in fact it’s almost insulting (“I couldn’t be bothered to prepare a handover document so I asked this AI to do a shoddy job of it”). And the whole point of a handover document is to capture top-of-mind priorities tha…
That is the reason I think the Handover project has merit. What I personally hate however is the format ( video ), because I can see corporations adopting this out of sheer laziness. In other words, I don't wish this project be adopted by corporate America based on personal preferences, but I can kinda see them jumping on it.
The issue is there is no incentive for the person leaving to make these handover docs and videos. They will just say the bare minimum and complete the task.
The incentive of leaving a good last impression on your employer, so you get a good recommendation, is a pretty good one, imo. It might actually be much more valuable than anything else you do in those last days/weeks, in fact.
This has merits, and I don't want to criticize that. But, as a matter of practice, I'd like to suggest, if you have the resources to task another experienced person to do a recorded interview, that might yield better results. My most recent example... A software engineer had given notice, while finishing solo marathon coding on a complicated big new thing that I think no one else had yet seen. So I (as the new princi…
Apparently I need to move faster. Quitting the day job soon.
A skill cannot be handed over. You can painfully train someone to acquire some of it over time, but certainly you cannot “hand it over”
I think this is a great idea for a product, but in my experience, the pain associated with handover is something that is earned over a long period of time. Knowledge starts to centralise in one person and they don’t do enough to disperse it. Maybe they are too busy, maybe they don’t value documentation, maybe it’s an oversight, there are lots of reasons. But that problem starts to build up and you only discover the f…
I once quit a job and gave them 6 weeks notice because I wanted to try and make the handover as painless as possible. My manager said “stop working today. Come in, check your emails, but don’t do any work. Forward and delegate everything that lands in front of you. Let people who reach out to you know you’re leaving and introduce them to whoever is taking over that particular responsibility. We’re going to have to wo…
This 1 month also helped me refresh all my knowledge, go through my notes, etc. "In teaching I learn, and in learning I teach". Having around 100 people asking me questions from all over the 'region' helped me put things back together, see connecting dots that I missed before, and I left there with a new (better) set of notes about myself and how to do things.
I'm working on a tool with a very similar business purpose but it isn't sold as this because I've concluded you can't sell this. Apparently I need to move faster. Quitting the day job soon.