Exit interview collector
A small system that asks a leaver the same short set of questions twice — once before they go and once six weeks later — keeps the answers separate from the person, and only reports a theme once several people have said the same thing. It never shows a single response to a manager. Seven posts on the same system — one diagram at a time — with a cost breakdown and an engineering reference at the end.
- 01
An exit interview collector on AWS for a few dollars a month
The whole system on one page — a two-stage asker, a separated store and a theme reporter — built around one observation: the honest answer arrives late.
- 02
How the two asks are timed
Collecting a personal address before the account is disabled, why six weeks rather than three, and what happens when the first ask is ignored.
- 03
How answers stay separate from people
Two tables with no join any query uses, a one-way token, what a leak would actually expose, and the honest admission that a small team cannot be truly anonymous.
- 04
How themes get found
Grouping free-text answers into recurring themes, the threshold below which nothing is reported at all, and the comparison between a person’s two responses that no ordinary exit process can make.
- 05
How the retention report reads
Counts and directions rather than quotes, the coverage line that stops the report being over-read, and why a quarterly cadence is safer than a live dashboard.
- 06
What the exit interview collector costs
About $1 a month. One Bedrock read per response is the only line that grows; the queue, the table, the mail and the storage are rounding errors. Plus the three ways the bill could surprise you.
- 07
Engineering reference: the exit interview collector architecture
Same system, drawn purely for engineers. Service names, region, Lambda inventory, IAM scopes, the schemas and the exact model id.
Frequently asked questions
- What is an exit interview collector?
- A small serverless system that asks leavers a short set of questions twice — on the way out and again six weeks later — and reports themes across several people rather than individual responses. A manager never sees one person’s answers.
- Why ask twice?
- Because the answer on the last afternoon is filtered through wanting a reference and not wanting a scene. Six weeks later, in a new job, the same person will tell you what actually happened. The second response is consistently more useful and it is the one almost nobody collects.
- How is it anonymous if you know who left?
- Honestly: with a small team it cannot be fully anonymous, and the system says so rather than pretending. What it does is hold responses separately from identities, and refuse to surface anything until several people have said something similar — so a report is about a pattern, never about a person.
- Can a manager see what their own leaver said?
- No. That is the one hard rule. A system that can be asked what one person said is a system people answer carefully, and carefully-answered exit interviews are worthless.
- What does it cost to run?
- A couple of dollars a month. Leaver volume is low. See part six.