If you’re unsure whether to quit your job or break up, you probably should
80000hours.org
80000hours.org
You know how to tell when the economy is in the last 25% of an economic expansion? When everywhere you turn is another white collar professional under the age of 30 in the middle of an existential crisis. Brace for impact, because we're all about to punched in the fucking mouth. And some of us are going to be like, "What? I thought things were just supposed to keep getting better every year. We've had one breakfast yes, but what about second breakfast? Elevenses? Afternoon tea? Dinner? Supper?"
Best as I can tell, the data for this article was collected via freanomicsexperiments.com over the course of a year. But I didn't see what year the experiment was conducted. And I'll bet you all my bitcoin the experiment data was not collected during any year from 2008-2012. Job markets, like credit markets, are very elastic. It's easy to find a replacement job right now, and it's also easy to qualify for a home loan.
Can you elaborate on that? I feel like you’re talking about something quite important but I can’t really grasp what it is.
This is certainly the advice given if you're ruthlessly careerist, and it can be a good strategy if you're still looking for that dream role, but it can also backfire on you.
As someone who often needs to recruit I pay fairly close attention to the stability of an applicant's career. In general I don't like to see a lot of job-hopping unless it's in the early years of someone's career, because it can be hard to find a role you really like. Periods of contracting are another exception, although some evidence of stable employment for some period is also beneficial.
Recruiting is hugely important, but sucks a lot of time and effort from a team, and incurs significant costs, both direct and indirect. If you've been working for a decade and have never been in a job for more than 2 years that can be a pretty big turn-off.
You could of course argue that because I'd prefer to recruit people who will stay for more than 2 years, the roles I have available may not suit you.
Bottom line: there's a trade-off you're potentially making by behaving this way, which is fine, but it's important you understand that fact. Still, it's a good idea to start looking for a new job before you've started to hate the old one (bitter experience speaking right here): leave on a high because it'll probably set you up much better for the future.
In hindsight, I shouldn’t have taken the job in the first place, but I had just been laid off.
I knew they weren’t going to make me full time and as a contractor who was already being watched closely I couldn’t have multiple “doctors appointments”, take advantage of flex time, etc. I needed to focus on getting a job full time.
It was 2012, the economy was looking up and I figured I could get s job relatively quickly through my network of recruiters. I walked out noon on Monday and called a recruiter. I had a phone interview with a division of what was then a Fortune 10 company on Wednesday, in person Thursday morning and an offer Thursday evening making $10K more than the job I was laid off from three months earlier.
Yes that was partially dumb luck and not something I would try again.
The practicals of doing this will vary of course. There are many factors to keep in mind and a lot of them are personal/subjective.
It might not always be simple or easy but if you're in a bad and unfulfilling relationship then it's up to you to swallow hard and move on. Staying is lost opportunity.
A divorce has both higher emotional cost - especially if you have kids and are close to your in laws - and financial costs. If my job causes undo stress and hardship, I will leave at a moments notice. If my marriage is causing me stress and my spouse is willing to put in the effort to help us come to a better place, I’ll do what it takes to make things better. I’ll go to marriage counseling, but there is only so much you can do in an organization.
You might decide to live with this but again, if you started thinking about it to the point where you consider breakup then it's likely a serious enough issue and it doesn't get better.
This shouldn't stop you from trying to the point where by all definitions the relationship is dead. There's no rule for this other than a rule of thumb. But that one pretty much suggests at that point you are just delaying the inevitable. Unless all you actually need to fix it is time.
I was working as an M&A analyst at an investment bank, and this job has an implied shelf-life. A typical program is two years, and some people stay on for a third year as an "Associate I". Your options for jobs after an investment banking analyst program are much narrower than I estimated when I left college to seek my fortune. Analysts will usually go one of three places: private equity (or venture capital depending on your background), corporate finance (M&A at a big company), or hedge fund. The sad truth that haunts me to this day is, I thought my duty was to quit when my time was up. An Associate I position was not available at my bank after my two years, so I decided to leave. I interviewed for a few positions before leaving (one of them serious), but I didn't receive any offers. I was burned out and really just want to get out of there. One of my coworkers asked me what I planned to do when I left. I said, "Whatever the hell I want." One other serious misestimation on my part: turns out I was not enthusiastic about fighting for a job in an industry that already had too many people fighting for not enough scraps.
I required a lot of time and self-reflection to not get some combination of angry, sad, and ashamed when recounting my time in finance. One thing that still upsets me today is, I was a naive 25 year old who didn't even understand the terms of my employment. I was not a contract employee; our agreement was employment-at-will, and I was under no obligation to leave. Yet, the HR department at my bank hardly even acknowledged that I was leaving. Someone told me to leave my keycard and Blackberry on my desk before I left. No exit interview or discussion of any kind. They really let me down because I was clueless. Could I have asked a lot of questions? Yes! And if you are in a similar situation, learn from my mistake. Ask a lot of questions, and find the right people you need to be asking. The thing you should understand about investment banking is, it tends to be a conservative environment with a strong hierarchy. Analysts are at the bottom of the hierarchy. The best analysts are those who efficiently do what they are told to do. I was very good at not complaining even when things sucked, and I was pretty good at the actual work too. But unfortunately, when I thought I was being told to leave. I followed that order too well, and I didn't complain.
This?
It won't go to the top of the pile itself, and if you insert new grain at the bottom of the pile, you have to elevate the existing pile anyway.
> It would turn into beer
I'm confused - are you suggesting reasons you should use a big hole in the ground or reasons you shouldn't use a big hole in the ground?
From the paper, data was collected starting from January 23, 2013 for roughly a year.
I don't actually own any bitcoin ;)
Hobbits = dilettantes (or vice versa). This would explain so much.
Quitting your job if you have kids a wife and a mortgage is a much more complicated topic than just saying "F* this I'm going to raise cows in the Montana"
It's complicated to move internally in a corporation , so thinking as to moving to another company to another position when you have responsibilities it's pretty much like playing the Russian roulette with your finance and your situation.
I’m not saying everybody should stick it out in terrible situations but “you only live once” is not the reason you should be flipping the table if you have people depending on you.
I wonder if that's a better paradigm than the more individualistic one we have in the West.
This is backwards though.
Avoiding being selfish is exactly what makes the person turn alcoholic, suicidal, depressed etc. Else they could just say "fu" to their family, debts, responsibilities etc and go start a new life.
It's not like they enjoy being depressed or suicidal or abusing some substance etc and do that for selfish reasons. My point was about how trying not to be selfish and sticking to it that can end up making things worse (including for others).
But I don't think this stability actually exists. Lots of things can turn on you and your family at any moment, and then you are not ready, because you haven't been taking the necessary risks, haven't been taking care of yourself, out of a sense of duty.
I think people generally function best when they optimize for themselves compared to optimizing directly for others, because if you do not optimize for yourself, you rot, and then you cannot help said others anyway. Optimizing for others can be very difficult and inaccurate. Put on your mask before you put on your child's mask.
Optimizing yourself should already take care of unnecessarily rash YOLO decisions since you wouldn't want to be left without any money yourself, either. But holding on to awful positions out of a sense of duty, ehh, that seems to be how people get to a really bad place (i.e., depression, alcoholism, infidelity). And, ultimately, there's not just duty to your specific family, but also to society, and you can't change society when you are always just going with the flow.
It also creates a rather sad picture for said family.
How is changing jobs like Russian Roulette? Since both salary compression and inversion are real phenomena, the statistically best way to provide better for your family is changing jobs.
From personal experience, and not living in Silicon Valley, I changed jobs 3 times in the last 4 years and made $45K more. I changed jobs 5 timed in the last 10 years and made $65K more. Before that, I stayed at one job 9 years and only made $7K more in year 9 than year 2 with measly 3% raises and bonuses being cut.
I generally try to stay at a job for 3 to 4 years, but my last job at HP, cut my knees off when the spun me over to DXC and our benefits costs tripled. To keep the same benefits would have amounted to a 10% pay cut. I probably would not have taken the job if it's benefits had been as offered post merger, so I had no qualms in quitting as soon as I could line something else up.
I can see this causing me an existential crisis in three years. Using my usual framework of basing jobs on technology, environment, and money, will I be able to move from an environment I like where I make “enough” to jump ship to stay on the technology train? Especially when we are at a point where more money won’t have any effect on our current lifestyle by much or will I get complacent? The next stage of my career to make any appreciable salary jump is going to require me to go into management (not happening) or work for a consulting company that will definitely be more stressful and more traveling.
The biggest problem I see is how different benefits can be and cost from company to company. From the simple (like comparing payroll deductions),
Yes that is simple. Because of the ACA, you can basically be guaranteed a minimum quality of coverage. Yes the cost can be more or less, but that’s just a number when you are comparing total comp.
In our case, there is a known upper bound in health care cost. If it’s too expensive on my job, we switch to my wife’s coverage - she works for the state.
to the complex; time spent in office, time spent working, commute time, coworkers, quality of health coverage, quality of work, vacation accrual.
Commute time is known up front, not really a risk. Adjust your required compensation accordingly. You can also gauge the type of technology they use up front.
When you're evaluating a decision, you have partial information about the extremes. If you've been with someone for a year, you know how bad your worst fight was. Chances are though, whatever it was is a sampling from a distribution that you've only sampled a small amount of.
Your eventual worst fight will be worse, because when you have more samples chances are the extremes will be more extreme. (BTW if you're evaluating algorithmic trading strategies you need to think about this.)
If you're already thinking things are bad enough to consider leaving, you can look forward to them getting worse even if the underlying dynamics are no different.
Note the asymmetry and the importance of the extremes. Everyone who has a breakup story also had good moments and may have mostly enjoyed their average day. But you choose to leave because of the lows, not the average or the highs.
But you also need to sample across different partners. How many partners do you need to sample to evaluate whether the fights you have are on the better or worse end? Then there's only so much time in life. Also you change and get more mature. I don't think I learned that much from the relationship I had at 19 than at 25 and again at 30. Choosing one partner for life, while not impossible, is pretty flawed because you never know how both of you will change over the next 10 years. Plus the general problem with us humans that we're just never content with anything for extended periods of time. The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence. By that logic, don't even start a relationship ever. Stay single, so you don't have any responsibilities. Slightly dissatisfied with your current job? Put in your two weeks notice and see where life takes you. Shouldn't be to hard to eventually get another job in tech. Moving shouldn't be an issue at all. Unemployed for a year? No problem, you got plenty of savings, since there is no nonsense like college funds for any kifds going on in life. Only that eventually you might wonder if your life might be incomplete without having raised your own kids... That green grass stuff again...
The one thing you can be certain of is you and your partner will change. Perhaps the solution is to develop some tolerance to that change if you want a long relationship.
Your outlook makes it sound like you have as little effect over your own relationship as you do over the stock market.
- How do you argue? Is your partner denigrating? That’s a personality trait and an immediate no.
- Do they have an addiction? If you are married, you can try to work through it if they want to get better, but statistically it’s a long shot. But if you are just dating, why bother?
- Are they materialistic? Are they just in the relationship for what you can do for them?
- Are they honest?
Etc.
Granted, even this information gets tainted: narcissist parents, for example, might come across as their parents being nice, but them not being nice to their parents.
You can tell a lot about someone by how they treat someone they don't like. Some people get downright cruel with people they don't like, and it's a huge red flag because some day they may find reason to not like you. You're just setting yourself up to become a target once you find yourself on their bad side.
You sometimes see this when someone's hating on a public figure. They insult the person's weight, appearance, and speculate about their sexuality. I am never surprised when these people turn out to be abusers and harassers.
Trust me, if you stay married long enough, there are going to be times that you don’t like yout spouse and vice versa. That’s when you really see what you are both made of. Over time the rebound either gets faster as you learn how to disagree civilly - or worse.
I think this is also why words of affirmation and acknowledgement are so important, like taking the five seconds it takes to say you appreciate your partner, and thank you for clearing the table after dinner yesterday.
The title might be better as "If you’re pretty sure whether to quit your job or break up, you probably should"
People can be deeply sure, and even be able to articulate very well, that X is very bad for them (job, relationship, habit, etc) but still not be able to quit it.
In a similar sense, doing x for a period of time until you can quit and never do it again is also a decision, and it has its own circumstance, but it is also a sure decision.
What I read what they said, is I don't like x, but I have reasons y,z,\omega, so should I stop x? That is what I call "unsure", even if you don't like x. The reason I think so, is because you're still open to keeping x, even though you hate x, and you have the ability to say no to x. Then, why say no to x, and lose y,z,\omega anyway? Which is worse? x or not y,z,\omega?
I guess the reason is especially in Western culture, we put way too much stock in internal motivations, and all of psychology and history teaches us that internal motivations often end up being BS, fancy stories we tell ourselves anyway. Often times, material context matters a lot more than internal reasons. It's not moods don't matter at all, and I'm not saying we're just machines, but people seem to seriously discount one's context these days.
Anecdotally, I don't know a single person that has regretted leaving a job when they decided to (disclaimer: most people I know work skilled jobs). Even when people come back to the same company, it's usually on a different team and with a 30% bump in salary. So I generally agree, once you're thinking about it, it's probably time to go, you'll only end up better off.
Relationships are a lot more nuanced, hence the lesser benefit the article reports versus leaving jobs. I'd want to see it broken down by relationship length, age, happiness level and other factors before making any serious decisions based on this article.
Higher amounts of money yield diminishing returns. It's difficult to balance it with the added benefits of a low stress job (or one with a better commute, friendlier colleagues, etc), but putting the effort it's totally worth it. This includes being honest with yourself about what makes you happy in a job, which is actually much more difficult than it sounds (as it always it when you need to be honest with yourself).
I'd wager it comes down to taking control of your life. Even if life is "harder" by most measures after the change, knowing that you have the ability to make a change without the world ending is powerful. A new job, new year, new relationship, etc, etc is a chance to reset and do things "better" this time around.
Even if this particular change doesn't work out for the better, it changes your mindset.
Yes, it's glorified impulsiveness. Quitting is one solution. But it isn't the only one.
The study itself is better reading. It finds "people may be excessively cautious when facing life-changing choices" while conceding "that the research subjects who chose to participate in the study are far from representative...as there may be sample selection in which coin tossers complete the surveys, and responses might not be truthful" [1]. Furthermore, in allowing participants to choose the question they wanted to answer with a coin flip, it selected for questions to which thought had already been devoted.
The conclusion is best interpreted as "if you've thought through a big decision and remain unsure, there is preliminary evidence that you might want to risk going for it." Not that the moment a trace of dissatisfaction crosses your mind, you should give up.
You can see it as a specialization of the endowment effect also.
Seems to me like almost of the opposite of what everyone around the world is doing.
But you're in good company thinking that.
If you want to actually live your life as a conscious being, stop looking at what other people are doing and decide what you want. It's scary and it's not for everyone.
The things that do affect your happiness in a big measureable way are whether or not you're poor. Being rich doesn't make you happier, but being poor absolutely makes you unhappier, so does being unhealthy and being lonely.
If you're not poor, healthy, and have human companionship there doesn't exist any external goal that will actually make you happier long term. So take what simple pleasures you get, enjoy accomplishing any goals you want, but never think some different career or object or hobby will make you happier. It won't.
I see this is true in today's world, but I don't think there's any evidence that this is a permanent state of affairs. I have a hope that there is a recipe for a permanent human elevation of mood that we just haven't unlocked yet.
The hedonistic treadmill is trivial to dodge, but it does require resources.
This should be how you treat new things. OTOH, while economists say “sunk costs are sunk” and should thus be disregarded, in real life switching has often-underestimated costs (including reputation) so skipping out on things at the first sign of trouble is usually bad.
But the problem I have with it is that this is essentially the life advice you'd get from a good friend after the 3rd beer in the pub, yet it's on Mark's website where he presents it as dating advice in a way that makes it sound like it's the truth and everybody should do it. I would've wished for at least one sentence where he declares "Fuck Yes or No" his own thought experiment or approach to dating.
But I guess more cautious and less self confident writing doesn't make as much money.
It is pretty widely held advice in investing, at least.
To be fair he wasn't the original source either.
It sounds like the takeaway is that if you're on the fence about any of these issues, you should quit your job, break up with your romantic parter, don't have kids, don't get engaged, and start your own business?
To me, it looks like the common thread through all of these is that happiness goes hand in hand with independence and freedom.
Exactly how my life turned out and no one looks to me as a shining example of how one should achieve happiness in life...though I do have independence and freedom in droves.
A "so-so" job (or relationship) is worse than a terrible job, because a terrible job at least motivates you to look for something better.
Whenever I ended a so-so job, project, or relationship, the result was always "I should have done that sooner," not "I shouldn't have done that."
It would be interesting to know how this turns out on the long run.
I also think that in real life, these decisions are not always about you alone.
It's the same thing at work, where my boss pays me because he wants me to work for him, and I want to work for him because he pays me and he's a good boss. He doesn't owe me a job and I don't owe him work beyond what he's already paid me for.
So I don't see how these decisions are about anyone but me.
In my early twenties, frustratingly surrounded by many hot girls, especially ones who showed interest in me, I considered breaking up with my girlfriend (whom which I was in a long distance relationship, which added pressure) at the time to experience more. I mean, I won't be 24 forever. Love is great, but experience is a part of life too, right?
Well, I stuck with her. I've traveled around the world with her and we're eventually planning for marriage once I can permanently move to be with her. I am the happiest I've ever been.
BTW, finding out that staying in both cases would end up being the right decision took a while, it's really on looking back years later that I realize which decisions were right or wrong.
One of the things I think I can actually attribute to wisdom that can come with age is this idea: you know only in the short term what you want, what you like to eat, what kind of hobbies you like, etc., but you don't really know what you fundamentally or deeply want in terms of career, lifestyle, etc. You really don't, so second guessing yourself isn't something like "falling short" because the default should be super sure of what you want. It just means you're not sure.
Maybe you would have been even happier on the other path. Who knows?
(I find it interesting that proposal is worth over -5 happiness points after six months, in the table in the article.)
And you're right, I don't know the counterfactual. Also, I don't know if I'm deluding myself or not. The thing is, I don't care because I'm happy now compared to back then.
Not only are people terrible at judging the outcome of our long-term plans, we're also terrible at judging relative happiness over long periods of time.
(I'm not saying people should stay in uncomfortable situations. But you should be honest with yourself why you want to leave.)
3.5 years later I left with a Masters degree, then left hard sciences entirely and now on self-training make a lot more money in IT.
I really should've left at 1 year and started looking for Junior sysadmin positions then.
Of course I suppose had I done that I probably wouldn't have developed the relationship I did with my now wife, but objectively the experience career-wise was a colossal waste of time and money, but which I lacked the life/career experience (or people able to give relevant advice) to correctly assess.
Guy breaks up with girl Goes gym (2 months) Guy finds girl (6 months)
I'm sure we have these chemicals which effect emotion to be overtly opportunistic about life around periods with new sexual partners to encourage reproduction. But I'm just an alien
1) If you have a job the HR person deems you as more attractive as someone wants you. Similar to a relationship, when you are dating, all the other girls want you.
2) If you have a job, you can throw around a funny number, ask for more lieu time, vacation time, and basically control your interview process.
3) If you have a job while applying to a new one your resume doesn't show employment gaps which you have to explain in the future.
A better recommendation, would be: trust your "instinct" and act on it with purpose.
Books which are good for helping lay out such a mental framework include:
- https://www.amazon.co.uk/Decisive-How-Make-Better-Decisions/...
- https://www.amazon.co.uk/Too-Good-Leave-Bad-Stay/dp/07181417...
You guys will fall for anything, won't you?
"The causal effect of quitting a job is estimated to be a gain of 5.2 happiness points out of 10, and breaking up as a gain of 2.7 out of 10!"
I believe that's on a scale of 1 to 10 (or 0 to 10?) someone rated going from a 3 to an 8 (on average) based on quitting a job they were /considering/ quitting. I will note that they probably did have other opportunities lined up; quitting a job and becoming unemployed without benefits strikes me as a most probably unhappy circumstance.
Similarly the relation change ended up netting 2-3 "points" of difference for a relationship. So 5 became 7 or 8.
Edit (not for formatting):
I didn't check the details on the statistics, so I don't know how LIKELY a positive outcome vs negative outcome was from those changes. It's possible that there's a split where a subset was VERY happy with the change and some were ambivalent/unhappy as a result.
I really don't see the connection. Anybody please enlighten me?
Lesson I've certainly learned: No need to burn bridges, but waiting for the "perfect time" to leave a tech job (e.g. all projects wrapped up, other job fully lined up, etc.) is a futile exercise. Just be considerate with 2 weeks notice, say you want to explore other opportunities or whatever, and move on.
Why is it considered bad form to quit without notice, but if a company lets you go without notice, it's "just business"?
Both sides can agree by contract to terminate the employment immediately (Aufhebungsvertrag) and those contracts often stipulate a severance, but for example they also often stipulate that any wages from jobs you take on in that period get deducted from the severance payment.
My point was: severance differs substantially from a notice period. If you’re laid off with severance, you can go and get a different job the next day. If you’re laid off with a notice period you cannot. You must show up and work the next day. If you don’t, you’ll be terminated without notice. A common thing that people do is that they call in sick after either being served or handing in their notice - same thing happens. Immediate termination.
Citation: http://m.hensche.de/Arbeitsrecht_aktuell_Kuendigung_vorgetae...
Calling in sick after handing in your notice is also a standard reason to send you to the Amtsarzt who will check your doctors diagnosis.
Calling in sick when you are, is not usually grounds for a termination, but that’s not what’s being discussed here.
Either way, it is not an immediate termination, there is a long procedure to follow. I have to repeat again, there are very few circumstances where an employee can be immediately terminated.
Which could have been clear from the context.
> Either way, it is not an immediate termination, there is a long procedure to follow
Which would be? Have you read the court decisions I quoted, especially the one from the BAG? The lengthy process was as follows: The employee threatened to call in sick if holiday was not granted on May 25th. He did not show up for work on May 27th. The first immediate termination on June 1st had a formal error and was rejected. The second immediate termination from June 7th was formally upheld. The only reason that the case was sent back to the previous court is that the previous court did not confirm whether the employee was indeed ill.
That's not exactly "lengthy". It's not always easy to prove that the employee was not sick, but legal literature is full of examples.
> I have to repeat again, there are very few circumstances where an employee can be immediately terminated.
That's true and I never pretended otherwise. Most cases for immediate termination are based in the fact that the employee knowingly attempts to defraud the employer. Trying not to show up for work if you've been fired or quit on your own is a prime example of that. The fraud is in trying to get a wage that you haven't worked for.
How does unemployment work where you are? Why would a previous employer be involved in the process of you claiming unemployment? The only thing I can think of, and also why they would be inclined to fight it, is if the payments come out of their pocket. If that's the case, then isn't that sort of just severance but with a different name slapped on it?
You can also get in a limbo where you accept an offer from employer A, give notice to your current employer B, then employer A rescinds the job offer from you before you start or even early in employment. The state then considers you not having been employed with employer A and having quit voluntarily from employer B, so they deny unemployment payments
Even if they tell you to go home and not come back, they still have to pay out the notice period and other outstanding amounts. It usually works out that you're covered for a month or two before you start to lose out financially.
I've never actually encountered it myself (and in fact just had to look it up [1]) but if you're made redundant then there's also a mandatory redundancy payout which starts at 4 weeks' pay for an employee who's been there between 1 and 2 years, and scales up to 16 weeks for employees of 10 years or over.
(The one time I've been 'made redundant' it was never official, I was working for a games company and they just kind of stopped paying us so we eventually just kind of stopped going. Lots of people lost significant amounts of money in owed wages.)
Edit: As for noncompetes, I think they're pretty universally held to be unenforceable attempts to bluster employees into believing they can't leave, but I can't imagine a company which actually tried to enforce one would ever be able to hire quality staff again. It'd be suicide.
[1] https://www.ilo.org/dyn/eplex/termdisplay.severancePay?p_lan...
There are exceptions (e.g. firing “for cause” such as sexual misconduct or embezzelment) but they are really exceptional. And if the company folds and can’t pay that, the government will, and likely criminally indict the officers who let the company fold without taking care of the severance payment.
As a result of this strict lawful requirement, there’s an industry of regulated escrow middlemen who collect 8.33% of monthly salary from employer on behalf of severance. If employee is terminated for cause, employer may get it back. In all other cases (including going bust), it goes to the employee.
If a company folds, notice periods are capped at three month, and no, officers will not be indicted for any future failed payment. Officers may be indicted for delaying the an Insolvenz, failing to pay taxes or social security or embezzling money in the process, but costs for future wages are not on the list. There is something called Insolvenzgeld which may pay for some of the wages, but it’s capped to 5400 EUR/month and covers the outstanding wage payments for the three month _before_ the company was declared insolvent.
However, the whole social security system makes loosing or quitting a job less of an hardship. Even though quitting a job yourself now means that you’re not receiving unemployment payments for the first three months, you’ll still be covered after that, lowering the overall risk.
That's not true. An employee cannot be immediately terminated for not showing up to work ONCE. Doesn't matter if it's in the notice period or not.
If it's something that your employer does, ask you to show up on the next day while you are on garden leave, then immediately terminate you, it's serious ground to bring them to court.
Note that in this case, additional infractions were committed, but the court specifically pointed out hat each infraction on it own would have been sufficient grounds for termination. And this was even without handing in a notice.
It’s certainly not the regular case that your employment will be terminated immediately for being late or not showing up once, but if you hand in your notice and don’t show up the next day without a damn good excuse, this will be treated as exactly what it is: cheating your employer for a wage. And that’s a standard ground for immediate termination.
Also note that just not showing up without a good cause entitles the employer to withhold your wage. So now you’re still employed, cannot take another full-time job and don’t get wage nor unemployment payments. Good way to footgun yourself.
> Not to mention that often, when you do give notice, they'll fire you simply to avoid paying you the final two weeks
This makes no sense. Companies will make your life hell and do anything to get you to quit so they don't have to fire you. If they fire you without cause, you can make an unemployment claim against them-- but if you quit on your own, that's on you.
In my experience, it's more common that they'll enact your resignation immediately yet continue paying you as though you were working the next two weeks, to mitigate any final acts of sabotage or exfiltration.
In my experience, it's not uncommon that they'll enact your resignation immediately, and that's it. No wages, no pay, you resigned, so goodbye.
> This makes no sense. (snip) If they fire you without cause, you can make an unemployment claim against them
Companies are not necessarily rational actors, they are wholly controlled by people who can sometimes be just as rash or impulsive as any other person. Especially at smaller companies, pure spite can have a non-trivial amount of play in the hiring/firing/resigning process.
And what is the employee really going to do, file for unemployment? The employee already has a new job (that's why they resigned in the first place), so it's a pretty safe gamble they aren't going though that hassle, just for the two week gap.
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If the company falls on hard times and lays people off, that's "just business" and "no hard feelings". But if an employee leaves for a different job, that's a minor betrayal, and gets treated as such. This response is not appropriate, but I've seen it often enough to know it happens.
The two week period is for your teammates' benefit. Not your company or the project. Any manager that knows they're losing someone is going to much rather spend money on hiring and ramping up a replacement than continuing to employ the person who's leaving. She won't care what you do.
But it is just one paycheck out of 24 per year that will now be returned to the budget. Shutting the door on an employee who's trying to be professional and give 2 weeks notice makes a manager look petty and sends the message that the project is in maximum cost cutting mode - that gaining a single paycheck for one person is worth depriving the other employees of any chance of getting needed knowledge or context from the person who resigned. To me that's a sure sign that layoffs are coming.
But still, I agree it wasn't smart; the smart move would have been to recognize the impending burn out early on and work with my employer to keep it from getting to the quitting point.
I recovered for a couple months before I started job searching again. Within a month of starting the job search, I had a new job.
I think quitting without a new job isn't always a dumb thing to do. I think in our cases it was the smart thing to do.
I did this, moved to a new city, it was great for my mental health and I ended up at a MUCH better job in the end.
you guys okay?
Which one? Both?
Once you sleep with her, marry her. Sorry for being conservative here.
Here's my reasoning. If you are expecting someone else to make you happy, you're in for disappointment. It's just human nature, one or both of you is going to disappoint the other. My apparently contrarian take on relationships is when you are ready to become selfless and start concerning yourself with making other people happy instead of yourself a) congratulations, you are now an adult human b) you can find someone that you can decide is worth the effort, and then stick to it.
And you may be surprised to find that selflessness and happiness are highly correlated. That's also human nature, IMO how we are hardwired to live as social beings. There's some great ancient literature on the subject, and I don't think it is a principle which changes much over time and culture.
It’s also not being a good role model for your kids to set the expectation for them to stay in a unhealthy relationship.
True, marriage should never be treated as disposable but if only one person is working on it, it’s timr to leave.
That's horrible advice for relationships...and makes the assumption that women will only sleep with a guy as trade for a wedding band.
I've heard rumors that women will actually sleep with someone they have no interest in having a long term relationship with for pure entertainment value -- think I was watching Nova or something, dunno?