Offboarding Checklist

The churn of hiring and firing in a contract remote work environment is common and should not raise alarm. We are always holding developers to the standard we expect of devs working for us. Should an engineer not meet expectations or need to leave the company at any time, the following process should be adhered to and executed in a timely manner.

Regarding remote accounts, disabling the account that is to be offboarded is of paramount importance and access to company services should be removed first.

Technical steps

1. Alert management with a few hour's notice as to when you are going to off-boarding a team-member.
2. Remove from Slack (make sure they are removed before continuing)
3. Delete @gvng.com email.
4. Remove from GitHub organization if applicable
5. Remove from Standuply (usually done automatically by site)
6. End contract on Upwork

End contract on Upwork

We hire our engineers with the goal to make them better engineers who can even better serve the needs of the organization. Depending on the reason behind the Off-Boarding, we recommend ending the contract with a farewell message.

Example message:

Hey there, <NAME>, unfortunately I had to end your contract.

<Issues go here>

I really appreciate your hard work with us, and since canceling the contract I’ve given you a <OPTIONAL “bonus with a” > perfect review. I hope that you can find something soon that is a good fit for your talents.

Engineers that work with us say that they learn a lot in the process and it helps their career in the future -- hopefully that's true for you as well.

Best,

<YOUR NAME>

Address Engineering Team

After the engineer has been off-boarded, it is essential to update the engineering team on the disappearance of one of their team members.

It is important to state factual information pertaining to their colleague's departure.

The reason we are sending the rest of the engineers this message is to clear up any potential misunderstandings as to why the selected engineer was offboarded. We want to ensure high quality engineers continue to listen to us and grow, and make it clear that termination comes with clear warning and time to improve.

Here is an example message:

I wanted to let you know that I let go of ENGINEER today. This was not an easy decision for me. There is a high standard that we expect here in both the code that we deliver as well as the way we conduct ourselves. Despite their best efforts, this engineer did not rise up to those standards.

Still, there are some very important projects that we need to get across the finish line. Let’s do our best to show everyone else that they can count on us to deliver on those expectations. There are number of open tickets and PRs that this engineer was working on that are either in progress, review, or QA. We’ll need some help with that. If you’re available, please do not hesitate to grab one of those tickets to help push them along. If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to reach out. Thank you.