Better have a solid alternative in-place before throwing away social or income sheet capital. Up and quitting (hopefully with notice) without a plan isn't smart or professional.
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.
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.
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.