In other words, you can either complain or explain to your heart's content. What good it will do you or the company is less predictable. Typically, the information in an exit interview is summarized and passed along to your supervisor or manager, which may not be useful if your supervisor is part of the problem. Providing an incompetent person with the news that someone thinks they are incompetent will not magically shock them into competence. The information must reach someone higher on the food chain, outside of the incestuous circle in which the problems originally developed.

One HR department told me they also pass the information on to the Director of IT if there are compelling issues that required his or her attention. The other HR department passes crucial information directly to the top management team. So, at the very least, the system has the means to collect unpleasant information. But whether such feedback is ultimately buried or acted upon depends on who receives it.

In my experience, having endured several exit interviews during my IT years, HR's main priority is to assess your mood and determine whether or not you intend to sue the company. Rather than trust that the information you have will reach the right person, insist on telling it directly to the person who has the authority to act on it.

Which gets us back to the original question: Should you tell? And, whatever your decision, what criteria should you use to arrive at it? The welfare of coworkers is certainly a worthy consideration. But your relationship with your peers is problematic and can arguably be considered as a factor discouraging full disclosure. If you like your coworkers, you'll be reluctant to harm them, knowing that your information may well result in a further shakeup of IT. Therefore, you would have to weigh the potential of helping the company against the possibility of hurting your friends. If you dislike them or have judgments about their competence, you probably won't be highly motivated to warn them of their impending demise.

But assuming you spoke up, would you even be believed, or would your disclosures be dismissed as sour grapes? In the case of our reader, he had been employed by his company for over eight years. Under the circumstances, a reasonable question for Human Resources to ask is: Where have you been? If there is no record of him sounding the alarm somewhere along the way, his silence would be viewed as a passive endorsement of the status quo and a last minute lament would be dismissed as a parting shot on the way out the door. However sincere, death bed conversions are always viewed as self serving. If, on the other hand, he has been trying for eight years to right a tilting ship and has been ignored, he can assume, without further troubling his conscience, that the ship doesn't want righting.

Of course, even if he had told the truth, there's no guarantee that management would have listened. Anyone who aspires to the role of corporate messenger had best prepare to be slain.

For all of their talk of employee empowerment, corporations have a peculiar habit of discounting the opinions of their own employees and listening to outsiders, be they consultants or new arrivals. It's what I call the New Guy Syndrome, and here are its symptoms. Lets say the company assigns you a project. You examine the specifications, review the time line, appraise the available resources, and conclude that the job cannot be completed on schedule. You communicate your findings to management. Nothing happens. You voice your concerns again, louder this time. Still nothing changes except that you start getting a reputation as a can't-do-complainer and a guy who's not a team player. Meanwhile, the project is a mess and eventually they get tired of your complaining and let you go. Then they hire the New Guy for twice your salary and give him the same project to oversee. He examines the specifications, reviews the time line, appraises the available resources, and concludes that the job cannot be completed on schedule. He communicates his concerns to management. And management says, "Oh, you're the New Guy, you must know what you're talking about. Here's the resources you need."

How many times have you seen some variation of that? Like teenagers who will believe anything as long as they hear it from someone other than their parents, perhaps the bad news has to be delivered by an outsider--preferably an overpaid outsider--in order to be believed.

Having said that, there are a number of compelling reasons to share what you know. Perhaps the most important was articulated by our reader who said it simply feels like "the right thing to do." If his evaluation is accurate and there are potentially thousands of jobs on the line, telling the truth requires but a small investment of time and no risk to the teller. When the ship is sinking and you know where the hole is, walking away without plugging it seems exceptionally spiteful.

Who knows, you may actually be believed. If the IT department is as incompetent as you think, evidence from many different sources must have already trickled upward. Top management, perhaps unfamiliar with information technology, may already be concerned but uncertain of what action to take. You can bet that the manager of such a department would be working overtime to cover his butt. Perhaps the only thing top management needs to initiate meaningful change is confirmation of their concerns from someone within the department.

Certainly history suggests that a single person who refuses to maintain silence in a dysfunctional system can hugely impact that system. Daniel Ellsberg was the beginning of the end of Nixon; Cynthia Cooper exposed WorldCom's phony accounting practices; Sharon Watkins wrote Ken Lay the smoking-gun memo about Enron's unethical financial dealings. By telling the truth, you're not undressing the emperor, merely confirming what others see but are reluctant to affirm.

Ultimately, whether you share or withhold your information should be guided by intent. What is your intention for sharing or retaining what you know? Is it to right a wrong or to injure the innocent? Are you educating the ignorant or punishing the guilty? Are you preventing further damage or adding to the damage already done? Do you embody revenge or renewal?

However compelling the arguments may be on either side of the issue, what I believe to be true is this: When action is the honest reflection of personal integrity, few regrets follow.