I’ve departed about 10 different jobs over the course of my career, but I can’t recall a single one where I felt that I properly said goodbye.

There are a variety of reasons for that (including a time or two when I left involuntarily, or because of a company closure, and didn’t get an opportunity), but it is mainly because I just didn’t spend a lot of time thinking about it.

Unless you are retiring for good, most job departures get caught up in the inevitable focus on the new job or new opportunity that is ahead. In my case, that usually meant a quick goodbye to those I worked most closely with, then out the door and on to the next thing. Saying goodbye was never a real big deal.

But that’s all changed in the Internet age, where people are compelled to post every little thing about themselves on Facebook or blast it out as a “tweet” to various followers on Twitter. Departures have become very public. Add in the massive number of layoffs and deep cutbacks due to the cratering economy and you get a situation where the departure message has almost become a personal and public epitaph to a job suddenly lost.

“The farewell e-mail has suddenly become commonplace, a new art form in the electronic age,” said a story about this trend in today’s Los Angeles Times. “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 gotten ahead of the etiquette. There are, quite simply, no rules.”

The newspaper quoted Will Schwalbe, co-author of Send: Why People E-mail So Badly and How to Do It Better, who said that “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.’ In the pre-computer world, Schwalbe said, ‘Personnel wrote something—a memo, Xeroxed—generally, you didn’t get to do it. They did it. But what had been an HR function is now a personal function.’ That, he said, leads to a different sort of message.”

And that different sort of goodbye message, the story notes, has taken on a different tenor and tone, especially when it involved staffers getting downsized at the Los Angeles Times. “Some of the goodbyes were bittersweet, some philosophical. Many were entertaining.”

If you read the L.A. Times story, you’ll see that it gets into the nature of many of these public goodbye messages. A lot of them are just angry rants, and outplacement professionals quoted by the newspaper raise the concern that a very public goodbye or parting shot can hurt a person’s ability to get another job.

Although I think that’s true, it fails to take into account the very real fact that if there is an overload of angst and anger in these very public employee goodbyes, it’s due to the heavy-handed and insensitive workforce policies that so many businesses and organizations have adopted these days.

Workers often hear about layoffs through impersonal e-mails, or get looped into e-mails that detail coming plans to lay off people. Worse yet, some companies have executives who seem to publicly delight in getting rid of people and seem to go out of their way to let everyone know it.

I’m with the outplacement professionals on this one: An angry e-mail from a departing worker may feel good at some emotional level, but it does nothing to help that person find a new job. I’d counsel anyone who thinks they need to send a goodbye message to take the high road and to keep public missives as short, sweet and professional as possible.

But I’d also urge managers and executives everywhere to do everything within their power to be as sensitive and humane as possible when it comes to layoff announcements and staff departures. This is a very personal and heart-wrenching activity, as I’ve noted before, and best done in as personal a way as possible.

The pace of work and the impersonal nature of technology can sometimes make our personal workplace interactions insensitive or brusque. But good manners never go out of style, and that’s just as true when it comes to a thank-you note for a job interview, or a note of goodbye to co-workers and staff. And we need that softening human touch more today than we ever have before.

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