I get three weeks of vacation per year. I’ll tell them this Monday that I’ll retire in mid-May, which will be four weeks’ notice.
I’m a legal secretary, not a project manager or a tech genius, so it’s not like it’s going to be that time-consuming to replace me.
In that case, I would say 4 weeks is kind, 3 weeks acceptable & 2 weeks would be a bit rude. But there are no real rules for this.
You’re done, which is great.
I pondered this myself for a while. The “experts” on Reddit say to give the bare minimum because they will find some way to screw you over if you give notice too far in advance. I was never clear on what sort of screw-over they were so terrified of.
So I originally planned on giving two months. But, the more I thought about it, the more I wanted everyone to be prepared (and wanted to not be a dick about it). I had worked there 36 years and there were parts of my job that I took on that nobody else had a clue how to do.
I ended up giving three months, and that was the right call. I spent a good amount of time making sure everything was in order, people were taught my ways, and that nobody would be cursing my soul in the future. The co-workers and the manager all appreciated that I did not just leave a pile of chaos in my wake.
mmm
The only screw-over I ever saw explained was that if you gave notice too far in advance you might get sort of pushed to the side and not assigned to new and interesting projects. But I didn’t really see why someone who was giving two or three months notice would care about that.
They could theoretically fire you on the spot but why? I told them that they were free to call or email me if they had any questions after I left which they sporadically did for a few months. I was happy to help.
At my Fortune 500 employer they recommend giving 3 months notice. You can retire no-notice, but they say it takes the bureaucracy three months to do all the paperwork, so you won’t be seeing your retiree medical coverage nor you pension checks any sooner than that.
For my particular job, retirement is mandatory based on attained age. Both I and my employer have known my retirement date for a couple decades now, so nobody is surprised that it’s coming up (5 months and counting). Of course I could retire earlier, but there’s definitely a drop-dead date.
Hoping of course that my actual drop-dead date is a 2+ decades post their drop-dead date. 
For at least two years, I let it be known that I planned to retire the second I was eligible. However, this was a workplace where everyone (overworked and exhausted as we were) was always saying that, so no one took me seriously until I actually started the retirement paperwork. Since I worked for a huge school district and our retirement is under an even larger state retirement agency, the guidelines requested that employees to start the process three to six months before their retirement date. Supposedly, retirement dates also had to be at the end of a school quarter. Even so, I saw some people give as little as two weeks’ notice in the middle of a term. We all thought that was rather rude and thoughtless, and odds are that they didn’t see any benefits for at least a month after they left, but what could the school do? Refuse to give them a reference for senior citizen center activities?
@teelabrown I just returned to this thread and saw you’re retiring! Congrats in advance!
I was with my old job for 32 years. I gave two weeks notice after going through a grueling pile of health issues and a year before that under the Manager From Hell. I didn’t feel I had any obligation to stick around more than the bare minimum. And my company apparently agreed: I was sent a “you’re leaving” check list, HR never contacted me to conduct an exit interview, just sending me a survey link which I never even clicked. Don’t let the door hit you, g’bye.
I retired from my job last May. I had been there 21 years. I “accidentally “ let it slip out in March that I was retiring the beginning of May. I think I wrote the official email a week or so later. So about 4 weeks notice. And “they” didn’t care.
I spent 25 awful years working for a small retailer who would hustle you out the door the second one announced his or her departure. Too bad if it hurt other employees, the owners ruled through fear and weren’t having anyone in their employ NOT fearful for their job.
When I finally retired from my position at a small university, I gave three months notice because they had always treated departing employees with fairness and respect. Heck, all employees were routinely treated respectfully.
My impression was that in tech they’re not used to people being old enough to retire. I think I remember one, and the rest “retired” but were really fired with a cover.
So, I gave three months but they didn’t believe me. The reason people don’t give a lot of notice in tech for changing jobs is fear that you’ll get booted out. Ditto for not telling anyone where you are going until after you start a new job. Neither an issue when you retire.
@teelabrown That sounds like a perfect amount of time for your role unless you are working on some big case that has lots of ins and outs to be learned by the new person.
There was a supervisor at my workplace who came in during the weekend and wrote on a white board in his area “I retired Friday - Joe”. It was all the buzz Monday morning. We never saw him again.
Had a somewhat similar experience. Had a mid-level management person who everyone knew was likely planning to go in about 6 months (there is no retaliation for talking retirement at my job, it’s practically a pastime around here), but who was generally unhappy with their own superiors. Then a work incident happened that had an outside potential for them to get thrown under the buss, in a dressing-down/numerous tedious reports sort of way. They scheduled a weekend vacation, then immediately went downtown and filed their retirement paperwork on that Friday, all while telling no one and scheduling meetings on their calendar for the following week. They then extended their vacation to a month (which by policy cannot be denied when retiring) and never set foot on the jobsite again.
Their manager came in Monday to find a notice from HR saying they had started the retirement process and was vacationing out. They actually had to call them at home to check if it was true and I would have loved to have overheard that conversation 
. The retiring person was very widely disliked, but everyone got a kick out of them slipping out like a weasel under a wire fence .
I gave 15 months’ notice, mainly so all the bureaucratic stuff could be done, but that was excessive. Three to six could have done the job nicely.
I didn’t get screwed over, exactly, but a month after my announcement, the bean-counters not in the building discovered us as a cost-center and changed the prime metric we were judged by to Average Handle Time. I went from the top three scorer to the bottom quarter.
The annual review was done a month or so before I retired and my boss said, “I’m sorry, but with your scores we just can’t justify a raise for you this time around.”
When I just said, Gosh," he said, “I’m gonna miss you.”
When I was working at a defense contractor in 1987 we were a sub-contractor for LMSC on a project. The recession hit in October then in early December the QA guy who would come over once or twice a week suddenly announced he was retiring on December 30.
This was a surprise because he’s been talking about waiting for our project to finish before retiring. It turned out virtually all his retirement investments were in Lockheed stock. By retiring in the fourth quarter, the stock’s value was calculated by its average in the third quarter, before it fell off a cliff. The difference was about $50,000 a year.
I suspect that’s mainly because of the need to handle pensions and the like. With fewer companies doing defined benefit plans, it might be less of an issue.
Part of my retirement money is in a defined contribution plan separate from a 401(k) - in fact it’s basically treated as a savings account, with the company crediting interest at such-and-such percent. At retirement (or whenever I leave the company - and at my age, the two are likely to be the same), I would have the option to take it as cash, or turn it into an annuity, or some combination. That requires a little bit of lead time.
The similar funds from the pre-merger employer are in something 401(k)-like - which I could move to an IRA, or turn into an annuity (or, I suppose, take as cash) - and that definitely requires some lead time. I actually tried to annuitize that a couple years back for reasons related to independence - and was told that supposedly there’s some bonus if I don’t take it until I leave my current employer (the one that bought the prior). Dunno about that - it was the first I’d heard of it. But I gave up on that at the time.
Well, I’m going to tell the HR woman to keep it confidential as long as she can, and I’ll tell my favorite bosses that I’m retiring, but I don’t want any parties or fuss. I’m a bashful person and don’t do parties well, as I hate being stared at and public speaking is a phobia of mine. Hopefully they’ll respect that.
Wish I could find my own replacement. I’d get a good bonus from that. Anyone here want a job as a real estate legal secretary?
I really didn’t want a fuss too. I had been there 14.5 years and was well known in the place and pretty popular. Another engineer who had been working there just a few months less than I was coincidentally retiring on the same day. He was as well known as I was and even more popular. It was pretty fun to get to share the day with him and we both gave our six month notice within a week of one another.
I was somewhat relieved that we would share a party and he would get more of the limelight but I still really didn’t want a party. We gave our six month notice in November of 2019 and our last day was May 1st 2020, the height of the lockdown. So there wasn’t a party. Be careful what you wish for.
I’m work from home. My current team is scattered all over the country, and not likely to have a party anyway. My end of work process will probably consist of dropping my laptop and 28" monitor off at the office.
My old boss talked with my newest boss on Friday and said she insisted they not make my last few months miserable. Of course, HR wants you to give them lots of notice about impending retirement, but my personal opinion is (barring pensions that have rules) you owe them as much notice as they’d give you if they were eliminating your position. However, I didn’t really care if they had a problem with it. If they want to buy me out, that would be great. If they want to fire me, they wouldn’t have cause and I’d be eligible for unemployment, which would be great. Otherwise, I’ll do what I"m told, whether it’s learning Alteryx and Tableau (which I already have a handle on, it’s just learning the data sources) or continuing to do the analyst work I’ve been doing for my small division of my Fortune 25 company. In any case, I’ve pretty much checked out.
StG
A co-worker retired last year and made it very clear that she wanted zero fuss. As in ZERO. She was very adamant, and very serious. She could not have been more clear. Guess what she got? A HUGE fuss (despite my protestations that she really was not kidding).
I didn’t want a fuss either. Really. But I knew better than to fight it, so I got my own HUGE fuss and just went with the flow.
mmm