▲ 4 points

Ask HN: When doing exit interviews, do you give honest feedback?

I have handed in my resignation yesterday, because I'm starting a new job in two weeks. My boss and HR have asked me for exit interviews and both told me, that I should give them plenty of "honest feedback" and that this feedback would stay between us. How honest should I be?

4 comments

You do exactly what you want, they are not giving you instructions to follow, but in general it's best to avoid burning bridges so best to keep it nice and bland.

Personally I think there is no benefit to you in giving "plenty of honest feedback". If you're open to staying if they make you an improved offer then you can try to politely explain your reasons in a way that leaves the door open for them to make such offer if they wish. But if they wanted to keep you your boss would probably have come to chat with you instead of calling an "exit interview" with HR...

Good luck on the new job.

To may expand on the OP:

As someone who is now in kind of a dysfunctional organization, I'm very thankful for people who give honest feedback to management. If everybody who leaves just says "It's not you, it's me!", how can management ever make informed decisions about changing processes and decision-making? OTOH I understand people's and my own urge to just play it nice, so people who will soon become just nothing more than entries in a list of contacts do not despise you. Especially if the scene of the city you live in is kinda small.

There's probably a middle ground here: give constructive feedback withouth dragging others through the mud. But it's hard to hit this middle ground in an exit interview that is scheduled on short notice. So what I'm doing right now, is prepping myself.

> As someone who is now in kind of a dysfunctional organization

I suspected as much when I read that they explicitly asked you to give plenty of honest feedback.

It means that they know it's dysfunctional, and they know why you're leaving.

It's not a question of telling them "it's not you it's me", but there is nothing you can do. There's is no need to prep and get thing off your chest in the interview. Keep it generic and short, move on.

You sound quite junior (no offence it's just that your question sounds like it might be your first time in this situation). No feedback from a junior engineer leaving a company is going to change anything, especially if they already are fully aware of the situation. At most they want to use this to build a case to get rid of someone they see as the issue, which is why to develop your feedback might make you enemies.

(By the way, you cannot know if whatever you say will stay between you and them, so keep that in mind)

> how can management ever make informed decisions about changing processes and decision-making

If they listened to that sort of feedback from those that remained, they wouldn't need to listen to it from those that leave.