今天，互联网越来越投行化了Tech Companies Are Turning Into Investment Banks

Introduction

This piece runs about 8,700 characters, in four parts:

1. What is "the investment-banking-ization of tech"?
2. Why is "the investment-banking-ization of tech" so toxic?
3. Where should today's working professional go from here?
4. What can employers do?

Set aside roughly 12–18 minutes to read it. I'd encourage you to be patient and read to the end. Enjoy:

01 Tech Companies Are Turning Into Investment Banks

I break the investment-banking-ization of tech into two parts, or two sides: the employer (the company) and the employee.

The employer's investment-banking-ization has a few features:

1) Headcount "streamlining"

Pay for two people, hire one, get the work of three to five done.

Tech companies appear to be hiring more, but in essence they're still reluctant to. What they fundamentally want is higher output per head — probably related to the fact that tech fortunes were mostly built on low-marginal-cost expansion leading to two-sided network effects. There's also this: people used to simply sell a particular skill to the company, whereas now they sell the whole person, so naturally the company wants to mine all of that person's potential.

They give you a high salary, they give you dignity, they feed you three meals plus afternoon tea, they give you a housing subsidy — so you can live near the office and work overtime. To outsiders it looks great, and many companies write all this into the job description to draw people in.

Investment banking does the same: you stay in five-star hotels, every ride is a black car, you fly first class — dazzling, the envy of everyone. But what you have to understand is that these perks are given to the position, not to the person. If a banker leaves their role, they quickly find themselves materially very poorly adjusted.

At China Securities in the past, the travel allowance was 1,000 for Beijing/Shanghai/Guangzhou and 800 elsewhere. Because transport was fully reimbursed, many employees would take a cab everywhere they went, even when the subway was faster. After leaving, they found themselves badly adjusted — going from luxury to thrift is hard. Go out to pitch business, and without the big company's brand behind you, see whether you can still get a meeting with the people you used to be able to reach.

2) Process investment-banking-ization

People outside the finance or banking world may not be familiar with the various banking roles. A quick primer here — and this time we'll only talk about the IBD (investment banking division) that so many people covet. IBD, and the FA world domestically, generally break down into three functions: origination, execution, and distribution.

• Origination: find clients, find deals
• Execution: do the due diligence, coach the client, build the materials, write the filing documents, undergo regulatory oversight
• Distribution: sell the finished product/deal

In summary: origination brings the deals in, execution does the work and gets them approved, distribution sells the finished deals. Many people reading this will think: tech doesn't seem to work quite like that — why say tech's process has been investment-banking-ized too?

The investment-banking-ization of Big Tech lies in this: the work and job functions have been investment-banking-ized, split into extremely fine-grained specializations. Just look at the JDs of the major tech companies — they're all the same: this product manager, that product manager; this ops role, that ops role.

The individual does very fragmented work in a very narrow lane, and switching directions gets harder and harder.

It's just like how banking breaks the process into pieces. That's why bankers can't go out on their own. Some will ask: why can an FA go independent but a banker can't? Two points:

• FA handles private-market private-equity fundraising; IBD handles IPOs and public-market fundraising
• FA has no license and no regulation; IBD has a license and is regulated — it's mainly the license constraint

The employee-side investment-banking-ization means that the bar for hiring is now almost level with banking's: only the very best, the "Tsinghua-Peking-Fudan-Jiaotong" crowd. Look around — basically every decent job, whether campus recruiting or lateral hiring, is like this.

At campus info sessions, a 500-seat lecture hall is packed to the rafters. The event ends and you can collect hundreds of résumés on the spot — some people come by train from hundreds of kilometers away. For online applications, tens of thousands are no problem, and these days, unless you're from a 985/211 university or a global top-50 school abroad, you won't even clear the first screen.

(Figure in original.)

Back in the day, the tech industry didn't ask where a hero came from: the two "Ma" brothers go without saying, and Li Xiang, Cai Wensheng, Huang Zhang, Li Xingping (Hao123) were all heroes from the grassroots. But today, tech and banking look more and more alike.

In America, when a friend jumps to Wall Street or picks banking out of school, people say they've gone over to "the dark side." Because banking hours are brutal — on call at all hours, laptop practically never out of reach — and every so often one of these elites dies of overwork, or jumps from a building in a depression.

And now tech has followed banking down the same road. People around you say: "So-and-so went to a big tech firm — I have no idea what they're thinking."

Now tech's 996 has become the target of public wrath, the rat in the street that everyone yells to kill. Some point out that finance has 996 too — but somehow the reputational risk seems completely different?

There are four main differences:

One: numbers

Finance — especially the private and public capital markets — is essentially a business of "small firms" and "small workshops." Take the top funds directly: on the private side, Sequoia and Hillhouse have the most people, no doubt, but even they're under a hundred. On the public side, a brokerage research department is only around 200 people, a single sector team a dozen or so. A big mutual fund has at most 100 analysts, a top private fund at most 50–60, the top-tier banks' IBD (even after expansion) at most a thousand-plus, an underwriting team just 20–50, a trust business unit under 30.

Finance is more a collection of "small workshops" — everyone's a "lone wolf," a "special-forces operator," in small groups within a small circle. Screw over your junior today, and in a few days the whole circle knows.

Finance has 996 too, but few complain about it, because everyone can clearly see that overtime yields clear feedback: under the small-team model, a somewhat subjective allocation mechanism covers, but isn't limited to, performance, bonuses, and promotion opportunities.

Two: it's personal

In finance, reputation, standing, and future are all more personal — harder to assembly-line, and impossible to replicate along a fixed path. Most of it is tied to the individual: if your research is good, your read on a stock is sharp, you can source deals, then even if your boss bullies and undermines you, or even sexually harasses you, they have to think twice — they can't act with impunity, because there are still eyes watching. And when you leave, you can carry away some portion of your ability and resources, more or less.

At a big tech firm, the means of production and the resources aren't yours to take — the cost of rebuilding them is too high. And what a big tech firm mainly rewards is managing upward. Your work can be mediocre, but the work of serving the boss well had better be excellent.

Simply put: big tech firms are just too big, whereas finance is closer to a startup — high risk but high reward, a clear path up, small-team management where you needn't fear being buried, and resources you can take with you.

Three: the content of the work

Because of the small-team model, the work style in capital markets is more like a special-forces operator's: you write reports, organize data, do roadshows, work every angle, and glad-hand with the best of them.

Whereas a tech company, sorry, is just too big. B(yteDance)AT are all past 100,000 now, and the bigger the institution, the more you feel like a cog, and the more intense the sense of futility. As for Pinduoduo, it doesn't treat employees as human at all. You think you can build the next WeChat; in reality you're tweaking one interface or one feature.

It's a bit like the teller counter at a bank in finance: there's income, there's a promotion path, the entry bar isn't low (some even require pulling strings) — but the feeling that the work at the counter is a waste of life keeps welling up. It lacks any sense of life, and even more any sense of accomplishment, because the work isn't yours at all — you don't even have the right to put your name on it.

At a big tech firm, thousands upon thousands of people work together, and you have no way to measure how much of the value here is yours. Every time you get something done, you can't tell how much your own value in it really was. And 99.99999% of the time you take part in no decisions at all: you can't attend the meetings the boss attends, you don't know the things the boss knows. Many people at big tech firms feel proud, but do you think you're really happy, or is it an illusion of happiness?

Four: hours

This is a small factor: finance's hours. The private side is a very small "category," and most of the other roles are constrained to some degree by trading hours — starting at 10:30 in the morning and getting off at 1 a.m. would be simply unimaginable.

02 "The Investment-Banking-ization of Tech" Is Toxic

It's like those finance posts on the forums a few years ago: "I'm a student at such-and-such; freshman year I did a Goldman program, sophomore year a JPM S&T internship, junior year BAML's IBD — as a senior, can I get into a BB IBD?" One crop after another of target-school students throwing everything they have into squeezing across the single-plank bridge.

There's nothing new under the sun; tech is exactly the same now: "Master's from a 985, six years of work at such-and-such — can I land a P7 at Alibaba?" "I've done LeetCode twice — can I get into ByteDance?"

It's all industry jargon, and the practitioners who've "made it ashore" care about ranking by seniority; if the year-end bonus isn't high enough, they job-hop. A ride-hailing driver put it well: big tech firms have no secrets. Most people at big tech firms are highly educated, high-earning, pulling annual packages of hundreds of thousands or even millions — but plenty of people, ride-hailing drivers included, don't envy them at all.

Big tech employees really are the object of much envy. But stretch out the time horizon: most of this group are veterans of the mobile-internet era. They didn't live through the 2000 dot-com bust, nor the 2008 financial crisis.

A lot of young people today have hearts loftier than the sky and no long-termist mindset. They can't wait to pour out their guts to the very last drop from day one — not knowing that everyone's fortune runs on a different rhythm. Charge too hard all at once, and when a real opportunity comes later you won't have the strength left to move on it. The loss outweighs the gain, and by the time you regret it, it's too late.

Most are lost in an arrogant, prejudiced "reality distortion field," completely unaware that they're walking down a dangerous road.

How did this get pulled into "danger"?

Because anyone who isn't grounded in facts and hard reality — who relies merely on a résumé and the industry's temporary supply-shortage to perch on a high branch — is doomed to be neither sustainable nor lasting.

I've been in this industry about five years now, and I've watched many investors grow from Analyst and Associate into MD or Partner. I've also met plenty who entered with first-rate backgrounds and high starting points, only to leave in disappointment later or gradually fade into obscurity.

Their traits are nothing more than arrogance, impatience, switching interests too fast, a lack of humility, and being overly utilitarian. And I've seen plenty of outstanding partners start from a lower rung — ordinary education, not good-looking either — but focus on their own research domain, keep pushing for years, and finally see the clouds part and the moon come out.

As I've grown older I've come to feel that patience is simply the most important virtue after kindness. And steadfastness, and the ability to reach down and connect across levels, are two rare and precious qualities.

(Figure in original.)

A friend once told me this story:

"Five years ago when I was studying at Yale, I noticed that any Yale computer-science student, regardless of coding ability, could basically land a six-figure-dollar offer from Oracle (this must have been over a decade ago). An Oracle senior told me the company often hires from famous schools just for prestige, and the actual work was simple: just maintaining old code from the '80s, less than ten hours of work a week — the classic 'well-paid, low-effort, close to home.' But the good times didn't last: in less than three years, Oracle announced it was shutting down the SPARC project and cutting the entire department of over 2,000 people, my senior included. That's when I understood: coasting on the halo of a famous school always comes with a bill to pay."

Don't be blinded by the giants' glossy positions. Keep your head down and press on, running one last stretch in the twilight of an era. Surplus value belongs to the company; personal value belongs to you. You think landing an offer from such-and-such fund is an opportunity — not knowing it may be a "trap": just a chip and a wager in the company's horse-racing mechanism.

One of the biggest problems with the investment-banking-ization of tech is that wave after wave of good students are turned into "excellent sheep," fixated on the surface of things — pay, perks, office politics — while neglecting whether they're creating value, whether they can create value over the long run, and whether they serve society.

The domesticated sheep look up to find that, having spent so long in the zoo, they've lost the ability to hunt, and can never again leave the zoo on their own — a Goldman managing director with 14 years of tenure, a genuine senior executive, fired at a moment's notice, unemployed in middle age, utterly lost.

What's so despairing for bankers is that if they lose their jobs, they have almost no chance to start something of their own — even founding a boutique bank is as hard as climbing to heaven. And now, what are the throngs who've poured headlong into tech supposed to do?

Start a company? It's not as simple as you imagine, and the opportunities are getting fewer while the costs rise. Especially once you've been shackled by high pay in the industry, many people get locked in by their mortgage and don't dare lightly switch jobs or resign.

On the other hand, the Matthew effect among tech companies — especially in China — is getting ever more pronounced. New startups need only reference the developmental patterns of the pharma and consumer-goods industries to "consult" their own future: die, or get bought up by a giant.

03 Work Is Not the Whole of Your Life

If work is the whole of your life, then losing your job is nothing short of a catastrophe.

But of course work isn't the whole of our lives, and its meaning for us is far more than salary. The implanted belief that "pleasure is degeneracy, and labor is most glorious" is probably one of the most tragic and deep-rooted sources of involution among East Asian peoples.

Beyond salary, work — a career — gives us far more, and far more important things: recognition, status, a sense of belonging, self-esteem, and it reinforces our self-concept. And a strong sense of work-identity can greatly boost well-being.

But what if you lose that job? If your sense of personal identity is tightly bound to your work, losing the job can feel like a catastrophe — even when being laid off is no fault of your own, merely the result of an economic downturn or a corporate restructuring. In that case, unemployment can trigger a systemic existential crisis.

To be sure, losing the anchor of work — or, put another way, the source of one's livelihood security — leaves many feeling intensely uneasy, as if adrift on the Pacific. In some extreme cases, one may even question one's own worth, feeling like a useless good-for-nothing. There are several ways to help you restore, and even redefine, your sense of self.

《1》Interact with different kinds of people

The famous American sociologist, social psychologist, and philosopher George Herbert Mead — the founder of symbolic interactionism — proposed the "I" and "me" theory. Mead held that self-awareness has an important influence on people's behavioral decisions.

A person's self is formed in the interaction between the "I" and the "me," and is itself an embodiment of that interactive relationship. The "I," as the subject of will and action, is concretely embodied through the actions and reactions the individual takes toward the objects around him; the "me," representing others' social evaluation and social expectations, is the embodiment of the self-consciousness's social-relational character.

The "I" is form, the "me" is content. The "me" can prompt the "I" to change in new ways, and the "I" in turn can change the "me"; the interaction of the two continually forms a new self.

Interacting with others can reflect what kind of person we ourselves are. But always interacting with a fixed or similar group of people means we unconsciously fall into an interpersonal "information cocoon."

Western culture is, to a large extent, work-oriented — and East Asia needn't even be mentioned. Dr. Neil Tocoff, a renowned American psychoanalyst, said: "Over-investing in work means sacrificing the other areas of life where meaning and purpose might otherwise be found" — relationships, hobbies, volunteering, and so on.

Broadly taking part in a wide variety of activities can better help you understand yourself, coordinate your time, build new relationships, and find meaning elsewhere, ultimately diversifying the lenses through which you view and define your own identity.

《2》Change your angle and check whether your thinking is boxed in

A person's self-identity and self-consciousness are really just concepts the mind constructs. If you feel stuck in this respect, it's often because we view ourselves through a single fixed lens (and usually a rather useless one). Many companies or teams push their employees so hard that team members burn out, quit, or get fired.

It later turns out there's one big limiting mindset behind such behavior: "My worth lies in my output."

(Figure in original.)

You can ask yourself, or others, the following two questions:

• "What do you value or admire in me?" — which lets the person see that what others value isn't only their work output.
• "What do you think your unique value is?" — which lets them understand others' ways of thinking, and thereby find a new angle on themselves.

You'll find that many of the answers have nothing to do with work or output at all: "a good listener, supportive of my partner, has a certain streetwise warmth, dependable and trustworthy," and so on.

《3》Envision your future self, and be a friend of time

The only constant is change; the only thing that changes is constancy. A person's self-identity isn't static — it shifts over time. No one is exactly the same as they were ten years ago, yet we fall prey to another cognitive bias: assuming the current self will stay unchanged.

I've raised a point before: when job-hunting or job-hopping, one reference dimension is: "Ten years from now, who do you want to become?"

Focus more on the future, be a friend of time, ponder who you hope to become, and your self-identity narrative will gradually change. This helps you break free from the fixed mindset of your current situation and adjust your behavior toward the direction you want to head — making you more proactive.

We may pour tremendous energy into work and find meaning and positive affirmation in it. But our meaning isn't confined to work. Losing your job doesn't mean losing the whole of your meaning as a human being.

04 Today's Competition Is More a Competition for People and for Employer Brand

Capital can ripen an industry quickly in the short term, and can accelerate a company toward IPO — but it can't "make people" within three or five years. Human growth and maturation take time and cycles.

The fiercest competition today comes from the competition for talent. People are a stock asset: the more senior, the scarcer, the more of a stock they are. And in a future where the population falls into the fertility trap, people are all the more an asset.

As competition among enterprises intensifies, how to retain outstanding talent becomes the key. And strengthening a sense of identification is an indispensable part of it. A sense of identification strengthens the bond between employee and organization, making employees more effective and more engaged, and helping the organization execute and achieve its goals.

Organizational identification refers to the emotional connection or bond between an employee and the employer (the organization). This is the definition given by industrial-organizational psychology, describing a psychological state of attachment an individual has toward the organization. The level of organizational identification can be used to predict employee engagement and satisfaction, business performance, and self-directed leadership.

When employees possess a strong sense of organizational identification, they identify with the company's core and its future vision (on both the professional and personal levels), better understand the organization's goals, feel themselves part of the organization, feel their work is respected, and feel satisfied with the treatment they receive. In this way, you not only raise productivity, employee participation and engagement, and drive up morale, but also lower turnover.

《1》Build organizational identification through sincerity and candor

As competition among enterprises grows fiercer, organizational identification has become the key to retaining the very best talent. Employees with a strong sense of identification exhibit more positive behavior and greater determination and drive.

(Figure in original.)

Interacting with a lot of people born after 1995 and after 2000, one very clear impression is: they less often chase big tech firms, less often chase financial freedom, and place more weight on company culture and on work-life balance. You could say they may feel the path up is no longer obvious, but on the other hand my read is this: those born after 2000 are the only free and abundant generation among the five generations of Chinese to date (born in the '60s, '70s, '80s, '90s, and '00s): digital natives; not many are hugely wealthy, but they're basically well-fed and clothed; many have a home in the family, and many who don't may not necessarily buy one.

I once wrote a piece about how Sequoia recruits and how it differentiates itself in recruiting. If you look closely, Sequoia's hiring standards aren't actually profound or particularly unique — four of the points are simple truths.

And most of the truths of our lives were told to us back in kindergarten — treat people sincerely, be kind, sleep on time, eat well. But how many actually do them? So is it that knowing is easy and doing is hard, or that knowing is hard and doing is easy?

When the company you're interviewing with turns out to have a fake opening, a slow process, no feedback, and much of its judgment of people is stereotype rather than tailored to the individual — will you come away with a good impression of it?

The contest of corporate competition today has become a competition of employer brand. Employer brand — as the name suggests — is aimed at the company's target talent. A good employer brand can not only help a company attract first-rate talent; more importantly, it retains them. As the saying goes: conquering the realm is easy, governing it is hard.

《2》Understand your employees

Understand your employees, understand what motivates them, and organize each employee's values, abilities, and skills into a detailed profile. These traits are the true drivers of behavior, so by understanding them in detail, you'll know which jobs a person can and cannot handle, which jobs to avoid, and how the person should be trained.

And these profiles should change as the person changes. If you don't understand your employees, you won't know what to expect of them and can only forge ahead blindly. If you don't get what you hoped for, you have only yourself to blame.

For a long time, the HR function has not been regarded within enterprises as a "business" unit, but the HR departments of genuinely well-run companies — the new breed of HR talent — need to have business awareness. Take Zhang Yiming: he's actually ByteDance's best HR person and headhunter, as poaching James Zhou makes plain.

(Figure in original.)

From the company's angle, it should conduct a lot of research broadly, with subjects including internal employees, members of the public, students, and so on, discussing with them what kind of corporate culture and employer proposition to build, and how the company should operate. At the same time, internally, it should repeatedly confirm whether this value proposition can meet the needs of different business segments — product, R&D, manufacturing, supply chain, etc. Then, provided the needs align, help each business make further "localized" refinements.

Recruiting/job-hunting follows the same logic as dating:

• Manage expectations well
• Match with each other

Let employees and company mutually attract, sparking employees' enthusiasm and drive. And that burst of drive in turn propels the company's growth and performance, forming a flywheel.

How to manage and motivate young employees is, for many enterprises, an enormous management challenge. Regardless of age group, what employees want is really just three things — sustainable learning and development, recognition, and respect. The only thing that differs is the HOW — how the company should do it. Money matters, but it isn't the sole yardstick or the sole means.

Some time ago, AstraZeneca, the world-leading pharma company, launched a benefits program themed around the "employee Life Circle," precisely discerning and analyzing employees' needs at each stage from onboarding to retirement, and setting up a complete benefits system — where employees can easily learn about the benefit programs the company offers according to their own stage. For instance, beyond the basic medical plan and critical-illness insurance, the company also buys critical-illness insurance for an employee's spouse or parents; there are special subsidies for an employee's marriage and childbirth, corporate annuities to help build wealth, and generous long-service awards — so at every stage you can enjoy a "salary-and-happiness moment."

Enterprises and their management, caught in the torrent of the era, need not only a management mindset but also flexibility, to effectively discern employees' needs — only thus can they weather uncertainty.

《3》The values that truly shape a corporate culture come with both merits and flaws

Many companies have a long list of positive values — Alibaba, for instance: customer first, employee second, shareholder third; because of trust, things are simple; here and now, it can only be me; live earnestly, work happily.

Pinduoduo: always put consumer needs first; hold to the value of "duty," and insist on doing the right thing.

These values can be pasted on posters and hung in the company cafeteria, but they can't truly define a culture.

Values that matter provide clear merits and flaws. Just as there's no opportunity without risk, any decisive value will bring a company negative effects too.

For example, in LinkedIn's early days, the internal talk was not "we're destined for greatness." When things weren't going well, Reid and the executives would talk it through with employees. The upside of telling it straight is that it can produce useful reflection — the whole company can rally to solve problems around a key challenge. The downside is that morale may not soar. Because some very talented, very capable people sold their shares and left the company early, since in their view the company had no future. When Jobs left Apple to start something new, he went through a similarly darkest hour.

A decisive cultural trait is: the whole company's good and bad are fully transparent.

So what matters is understanding the values that actually shape a company's behavior, and understanding their pros and cons. When looking for a job, employees shouldn't rashly believe in so-called values; you need to feel and understand carefully what the true culture of the new work environment really is.

《4》Employer brand is the sediment of culture

The formation and shaping of a company's employer brand is often inseparable from its leader. The leader projects their expectations for the enterprise and their personal values and beliefs into the corporate culture, and through long-term advocacy, implementation, and the sediment of history, an organizational culture takes form.

Employer brand is a way of promoting and measuring organizational culture, and it has an inherent advantage over corporate culture: because to this day people have not actually found a good method or means of measuring culture, whereas employer brand, as a kind of brand, has a brand value that can be genuinely perceived and measured.

Because employer brand is not just the company's image but the positive feelings of employees — and not only internal employees but external talent too. Industry competitors and university students, as outsiders without firsthand experience, are all the more likely, on account of a good employer brand, to develop a favorable impression of the company and be willing to become one of its members.

According to Watson Wyatt's global "Best Employer" survey, in the boom years of the internet economy, the three-year total shareholder return of best employers was 108%, versus 66% for ordinary employers — nearly double. And in the lean years, best employers returned 24% versus ordinary employers' 8% — a full three times! Clearly, the more economically depressed the times, the more the power of employer brand shows itself.

《5》A company's caliber is seen from how departing employees fare, not from how they join

I've written before:

Most of us are rational when we job-hunt: the company's past, its future; our own income, whether there's a future in it — you'll often even see people pull out an Excel spreadsheet to calculate and rank. But we are emotional when we quit: the reasons, boiled down, are always that the boss is an idiot, the colleagues are idiots, the office vibe is idiotic, and so on. Very few people join for emotional reasons, and very few quit for rational ones. That is: you come for the work, you leave for the people.

And on the enterprise side, it's much the same: companies spend enormous time, manpower, resources, money, and energy on onboarding new hires and retaining employees, yet rarely put any heart into the matter of departures.

Isn't this just a modern-day unequal treaty and a one-sided most-favored-nation clause?

Departing employees mostly go through a few perfunctory exit interviews, listen to a leader hand down some "instructions" on the handover, get a token explanation of their post-departure interests and resources — and that's about it. Often they run into impatient or rude managers; in more extreme cases they're told there's no time to hand over, are made to clear out their desk quickly, and are even regarded as traitors by their former boss and colleagues.

Even though today's talent market is more fluid and frequent than the older generation's — people job-hop every 1.5 to 2 years on average, whereas our parents' generation might have changed jobs only twice in a lifetime — quitting is still a frightening thing. Whether you can part on good terms depends on whether the company's exit program acknowledges the departing employee's contribution to the company, whether it offers training and other resources to aid the transition, and whether it can provide the departing employee with feedback.

Enterprises ought to think carefully about how to manage departures — and how to manage departing employees is itself one of the elements of building an employer brand.

Managing departures is not only an increasingly necessary part of enterprise talent management, but also an opportunity to create long-term value. Former employees may return to work, or become future clients, suppliers, or mentors to current staff.

In recognizing an employee's contribution, companies should offer diverse forms of acknowledgment or well-wishing, including today's public thank-you texts to departing employees, farewell parties held by managers, and so on.

Different companies have different cultures and different methods; some organizations do more to ensure a positive, friendly departure atmosphere. When an Apple store employee leaves, everyone gathers to applaud them out. Whether an Airbnb employee leaves voluntarily or involuntarily, the company's alumni talent directory keeps their profile on file to help them find new job opportunities.

Many companies also provide outplacement services for employees whose contracts have ended: including but not limited to job-search training, career assessment, help building a personal brand, and financial planning. The finest departure planning even includes counseling and other psychological support, helping employees work through the emotions associated with leaving.

An employee-departure program should not be an afterthought, still less absent; it should be integrated into the company's overall talent-management plan, its planning, and its blueprint.