Officially left an awful job today and 30 minutes after walking out of the office I receive an email to my personal email address from my manager asking me to address comments on a deliverable.

Wow that’s unbelievable! Did they show any awareness that you’d be doing an extreme favor or they simply sent a normal request like any other day?

Blatant break of confidentiality agreements

You could ignore the email....or have fun with it and reply all kinds of things.

Don’t burn bridges - offer to discuss over a quick call

Let them know your rate per hour as a contractor.

“I am happy to assist, however to avoid violation of confidentiality requirements with your client and keep their data off unapproved systems, we’ll need to onboard me as a contractor first. Will an hourly rate of $xxx work for you?”

Reply in two weeks - "hey sorry, missed this. Assume it was taken care of?"

God I would lose a lot of sleep thinking of the most fun ways to handle that situation. When I left my last job a partner called me the next week to talk about something I had done several months prior. He didn’t know I had left and it was a quick call so I did it but I felt that was crossing the line a little bit.

This is a personal/ professional thing. Personal - lots of responses here about charging hourly rate, sending to HR etc - if that’s your personality, then go ahead and do that. You mention it was an awful job - was it the just the job or was the manager awful as well - if you have a decent relationship, you are helping someone out. Professional - I’d say if it’s a quick conversation, go ahead and do it. Roles reversed, you’d hope to rely on similar support. Don’t cross any privacy lines, help them out - be professional. Additionally, as someone mentioned - you never know when you’ll come across these people again.

I had someone roll off our team once (honestly don’t remember why, or who initiated the roll off. Remember it being amicable). We had a series of questions come in from our client that were directly related to this former team member, so I forwarded it over with a friendly “hey, would you mind please taking a look at these questions and offering your thoughts...”. Cc’d manager and director. She just responded back with “unsubscribe”. That’s it. Nothing more. Never heard from her again.

Officially left an awful job today and 30 minutes ...

HIGHLIGHTED

Recent

Wow this blew up. Apologies everyone for not responding sooner but I actually have been traveling and am just getting settled down. I'll try to address all comments or questions in this response but if I don't, please feel free to ask away.

A little background: I am in engineering consulting. I was the sole individual assigned to an awful project that I strongly recommend to management we don't accept. The reason I was against it was because I knew that what the client was expecting and what we could actually provide are on two different spectrums. They basically wanted us to use unproven tools for a purpose they weren't designed for in order to come up with a solution to a problem that research institutions (whose sole purpose is to study this very topic) have been trying to solve for decades with no luck. They still went forward with it and on top of that, assigned me to it.

I notified them 2 months ago that I am resigning and rather than roll me off, they kept me on the project. The reason for this was because no one else wanted to touch it, including the manager who accepted it. I couldn't leave because I was contractually obligated to finish my contract, which ended on the 4th.

Fast forward to a few days ago, I finished work on the 4th and told them that I will be doing a half day on the 5th in order to close out everything and do my exit interview. I did not get paid for the full day, only the 4 hours that I worked.

I had submitted my report to my manager which basically said these are my findings and there needs to be further analysis to conclude anything of value, which is the case. I also included my personal email address and let them know that I'd be happy to help answer any questions if they are confused about what I did or why I did things a certain way. This was my way of trying to leave on a good note and not burn bridges.

Fast forward to the 5th at 12:30pm, half an hour after walking out for good. I receive a email from my manager to my personal email address with a list of comments and questions. Some questions were fair and were asking for clarity, which I was happy to answer. But the rest of them included things like:

Please capitalize this word
Please rephrase this sentence to this instead
This graph should be this color
Reformat the layout of this section

He ended it with requesting that I address the comments and send back the updated report. This is the perfect example of give an inch and they take a mile.

To be civil, I responded to the questions but for of the other requests, I told him I no longer have my laptop and can't help with those items.

I'm still a bit shocked by the whole thing. Not even from a confidentiality perspective but more of a shock at the lack of common sense and inconsideration. Suffice to say, I am relieved that I'm done and looking forward to my next role.

Because of the nature of the work, I cannot disclose the company name. But it is a large 50k+ global firm. Let me know if anyone has anymore questions!