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Comment by dangrossman | Hacker News Reader

@gradstudent Most employment in the US is at-will; either party can terminate at any time without reason.

It may be technically at-will, but anyone can tell you that you have to be very careful when firing an employee.

Employment may be at will, but the courts are full of lawsuits against employers for wrongful termination/dismissal. If you've ever dealt with a large HR dept you know that one of their main jobs is to prevent lawsuits brought/caused by employees.

"Wrongful termination" is largely a myth. I know a lot of educated professionals who believe they have the right to a "fair" termination, but except for very specific instances, it isn't the case, and these threats go nowhere.

In most cases, unless there is a smoking gun, employers just sidestep the issue by targeting "layoffs", rather firing for cause.

The bigger issue HR deals with is sexual harassment or discrimination cases. And, even nuisance lawsuits can be expensive to deal with, and HR/clerical staff is a lot cheaper than lawyers.

I myself have witnessed the "layoff with a nice severance bonus". It actually seems to work out nicely for both parties.

I had a boss whose philosophy was "Four weeks severance is cheaper than hiring a HR manager", and it did seem to work out pretty well. The company still had to deal with a 'nuisance' lawsuit, but was something totally out of the blue.

You're absolutely correct about sexual harassment. Many years ago I had a temp job filing records in the legal dept. of the American Medical Association. They had a large filing room chock full of settlement documentation against doctors for sexual harassment.

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