Every farewell message follows the same template. Gratitude first, warm memories in the middle, something honest buried in paragraph four, then a fast pivot back to gratitude before anyone can dwell on it. In most cases, it is one of the most heavily edited pieces of writing the person leaving the company has ever produced.
These paragraph fours are the most honest testaments to your company's culture you will ever receive. Better than any survey - nobody trusts those enough to answer honestly. Better than any workshop from an expensive culture consultancy - some companies pay a lot of money to extract exactly this kind of signal. To me, farewell messages are a treasure trove, and I always read paragraph four multiple times.
The polite framing is not an accident. It is a person doing the emotional labor of leaving on good terms while still telling the truth. Read past the thank-yous and fond memories of past projects and there is usually a precise diagnosis: a specific initiative that felt forced, a role that quietly vanished, a mood that shifted and never fully recovered. It's not about what happened. It's not about what went wrong. It's about how something felt to that one person, given the circumstances and their context, at that particular point in time. Their perception, their view, and how it affected them emotionally. So much so, that they left the company over it. It's all in there, if you carefully read paragraph four. And then read it again. Granted, it's wrapped in heart emojis, and gets reacted to with a thumbs up instead of an actual conversation, but it's there.
Paragraph fours are the best exit interviews.