What the Exit Interviews Said

I read two years of exit interviews in one sitting.

It wasn't my job. Nobody asked me to. I was looking for something else entirely -- trying to understand why a critical operations team had missed its delivery targets for three consecutive quarters. The exit interviews were sitting in a folder that HR had shared during a workforce planning meeting six months earlier.

I opened the first one expecting generic complaints. By the twelfth, I had a knot in my stomach.

The Pattern

The language was different each time. Some people were diplomatic. Some were blunt. One was angry. But the underlying message was identical across almost every departure from the ops team:

They didn't leave because of money. They didn't leave because of competitors. They left because they spent 60% of their time on work they knew didn't matter, and nobody in leadership seemed to notice or care.

In an iGaming operator running at pace, the ops team was buried in manual reconciliation, compliance patch-ups, and reporting workflows that existed only because systems hadn't been integrated properly. These were skilled people doing mechanical work, and they'd been raising it for months before quitting.

My Confession

The knot in my stomach wasn't just empathy. It was recognition. I had been in some of those planning meetings. I had seen the attrition numbers. I had nodded along when someone attributed the turnover to "market conditions" and "competitive offers."

I hadn't asked the obvious question: what are the people who are leaving actually telling us?

The data was there the whole time. Filed away. Read by HR, summarized into a paragraph in a quarterly deck, and never connected to the operational failure it was explaining.

The exit interviews weren't a mystery. They were a mirror. I just hadn't looked.