Farewell e-mails become an art form in the age of pink slips

It was not the most eloquent subject line for a farewell e-mail to 5,000 co-workers: "So long, suckers! I'm out!"

But Jason Shugars worked at Google, whose off-center corporate culture is more forgiving than that of your average investment bank. In the rest of his goodbye, Shugars, a senior sales-compliance specialist, reminisced about workplace moments that included putting cake down his pants at a sales conference, stealing a boss's $8,000 leather couch and singing "Hit Me Baby One More Time" in a miniskirt and braids.

"It took me a long time to write it," said Shugars, 34, who left Google to become director of ad operations for the music-streaming Web site Imeem. "I didn't want to send out a stale 'good working with you, please reach me here' e-mail. Who wants that?"

That's a good question these days, now that thousands of people are finding themselves with pink slips and the need to let colleagues and contacts know they are moving on and — perhaps more important for job seekers — how they can be reached.

The farewell e-mail suddenly has become commonplace, a new art form in the electronic age. Yet, like so many aspects of the Internet era — how to unfriend on Facebook, how much to reveal on a personal blog — the technology has moved ahead of the etiquette. There are no rules.

Some farewell e-mails, such as Shugars', strike a lighthearted, even funny tone. Some are workmanlike and short. Others are poetic or poignant, expressing surprise or regret at the turn of events. A few — and these are the ones that get most of the attention — use the electronic goodbye to blast the boss.

"Heartlessness"

In May, Shinyung Oh was let go from the San Francisco branch of the Paul Hastings law firm six days after losing a baby. The seven-year associate, who said she was told her previous, glowing evaluations might have been "overinflated," composed a blistering e-mail to the partners and fired it off to about 1,000 colleagues.

She accused the firm's partners of "heartlessness" and of blaming her for failing to generate business "that should have been brought in by each of you."

"If this response seems particularly emotional," she wrote to the partners, "perhaps an associate's emotional vulnerability after a recent miscarriage is a factor you should consider the next time you fire or lay someone off. It shows startlingly poor judgment and management skills — and cowardice — on your parts."

Within an hour, Oh said, her e-mail was posted on a widely read legal-affairs blog, and made its way into the mainstream media.

Oh has no regrets. She also is changing professions.

"I am glad I spoke out," said Oh, 38, who has started a blog, is taking writing classes and is pregnant again. "It's been really good for me on a personal level. It made me reassess my life, and that's a good thing."

Will Schwalbe, co-author of "Send: Why People E-mail So Badly and How to Do it Better," said the farewell e-mail was a reflection of two intersecting trends: the universality of e-mail and the confessional spirit of the times, which have resulted, as he put it, in "the democratization of the process."

Outplacement professionals, naturally, are against the parting shot because they fear for a person's ability to land a new job.

"It's so easy to e-mail, and that's the risk, isn't it?" said John Challenger of the outplacement company Challenger, Gray & Christmas. "Once you've put it out there, you can't get it back."

Vent to your mom or boyfriend, said Alison Doyle, a job-search expert on About.com. "You can have all these feelings but you shouldn't necessarily share them. And don't go on about how terrible this is, and 'I don't know how I am gonna buy the groceries.' Err on the side of too little information rather than too much."

Sometimes, though, an angry goodbye e-mail can alter the terms of a layoff in a good way.

For 20 years, Steve Bass wrote for PC World, a magazine with a circulation of 600,000. He had a popular monthly column, a blog and an electronic newsletter called Tips & Tweaks.

In August, in a cost-cutting measure, the magazine said it would pay only for the blog, which then could be "repurposed" for the column.

"At the time, I was devastated," said Bass, 61, who lives in the Pasadena area and has launched a free e-mail newsletter called TechBite. He e-mailed his readers a farewell, revealing his dismay at what he felt had been poor treatment by the magazine. "I lost a hefty chunk of change," Bass wrote. "It's still a stunner. ... It gets worse. ... Unfortunately, the guy I had to deal with didn't know how to negotiate. His tactic was to just say no to everything."

100 angry e-mails

Steve Fox, who became PC World's new editorial director shortly after Bass was sacked, said he received about 100 angry e-mails.

"I have to say I was initially perturbed by it," Fox said. "But ultimately it's about business, and having been a freelance writer myself, I understood why he was upset. He is a talented guy. He did not burn a bridge with me, but I would imagine there were other people here who were ticked at what he had done."

Bass was invited to stay on the masthead as a contributing editor and write occasional features.

Last year, when Yahoo executive Stewart Butterfield composed an absurdist, mock-epic goodbye to the struggling Internet giant, he seemed to be dinging a corporate culture gone complacent. "As you know, tin is in my blood," wrote Butterfield, 35, whose photo-sharing Web site Flickr was acquired by Yahoo in 2005. "When I joined Yahoo! ... it was a sheet-tin concern of great momentum, growth and innovation. I knew it was the place for me."

But, Butterfield continued: "My ability to contribute has dwindled to near-nothing and not entirely because of my advancing age. ... I will be spending more time with my family, tending to my small but growing alpaca herd and, of course, getting back to working with tin, my first love."

A few years before Butterfield bent the genre, an aspiring comedy writer named Chris Kula penned a long mock farewell e-mail on his blog. At the time, Kula was a receptionist at a New York engineering outfit, honing his craft on the side.

"For nearly as long as I've worked here," he wrote, "I've hoped that I might one day leave this company. And now that this dream has become a reality, please know that I could not have reached this goal without your unending lack of support."

The missive was linked on blogs around the English-speaking world and was even plagiarized by an Irish employee of the accounting firm Ernst & Young, who was forced to apologize (not to Kula, but to his former bosses) when he disseminated the letter as his own, complete with a reference to a co-worker's flatulence.

For Kula, however, the fake farewell was a career boon. "I used it as a sample piece," said Kula, 29, who was hired by a Web site that specialized in office-based humor, which led to a gig with an improv troupe, which led to an agent and his current job, writing for "MADtv."

"I always wondered if the guys at the engineering firm saw it," Kula said. "I would love to know if they still talk about it."