Speak with Former Employee

3rd-level Legacy Systems & Zombie Projects

Casting Time: 1 minute
Range/Area: Special (requires a phone number, personal email, or mutual professional connection previously established)
Components: S, M (a severance agreement, referenced but not consumed)
Duration: 10 minutes, or until the recipient stops responding
Classes: Engineering Manager, HR Business Partner, Product Manager

You contact a former employee of a target organization and may ask them up to five questions concerning their former role, decisions they made, or systems they built. The former employee answers to the best of their willingness, which is affected by how the organization is currently believed to have treated them: a former employee who departed on good terms answers helpfully and in detail; one who was affected by a casting of Reduction in Force answers evasively, incompletely, or declines to help without payment.

This spell cannot compel information the former employee never possessed, and cannot compel disclosure of anything covered by a non-disparagement agreement they signed on the way out.

At Higher Levels. When you cast this spell using a spell slot of 4th level or higher, you may contact one additional former employee for each slot level above 3rd, and may offer a consulting fee to bypass the non-disparagement restriction for any one of them.

Flavor: “hey! long time no talk lol. quick q — do you remember why the billing service retries failed payments 3 times instead of just using exponential backoff? no rush!” — message, sent 11:47pm