Then you give -10 days notice. 2 weeks is a nicety and not legally required in the USA. Probably not required in many other places as well. It's unfortunate but I've never had a manager get too upset about it.
Many companies are essentially antagonistic with all IT resources. It's very common where positions are not well paid or the company is not tech-centric, eg Mike Ferry Organization
Facebook was classified as a competitor, Amazon was not.
Amazon has rapid termination processes as well but I’m not as clear on their criteria.
If you work for a big technology company and are jumping to a perceived competitor, and/or if you have access to sensitive information, then you should expect that the day you give notice will be your last day.
Which is nonsense, because it’s the employee that chooses when to tell the employer. If I want to exfiltrate confidential data, I’ll do it first, then I resign.
It’s different on layoffs, where disgruntled employees could break havoc.
If you exfiltrated confidential data prior to tendering your resignation then no one remaining in the organization is responsible for your actions. It may trigger a policy review to minimize the exfiltration of confidential data, but no one remaining is accountable. Moreover, the exfiltration of confidential data will put you in felony land and your employer will prosecute. You're guaranteed to lose your new job too, and likely never work again.
No, what most employees do instead - for those who do these kinds of things, which is exceedingly rare - is destroy data. That is extremely damaging to an enterprise.
There are plenty of motivations to get your rear end away from the keyboard! Some are legally mandated, depending upon which industry you're working in.
Think about making a 2x2 matrix (nod to Pascal’s wager):
Across the top: fire immediately, don’t fire immediately.
Down the side: employee is benign, employee is malicious.
There’s only one square where the company is at risk- bottom right.
The algebra is easy: terminate immediately and the company is not at risk.
If entire countries can run on the other squares, why can't the US?
Not unusual in the finance industry, somewhat unusual (but I have heard of it) in "more pure tech". Probably also more common the further up you get in the corporate hierarchy.
So the employee could destroy data first, then resign.
> If you tender your resignation and I continue to provide you access to the systems then I'm accountable for having continued your access to those systems.
Well, if the employee is still an employee, and they need access to the systems to do their work… what would the alternative be? How could you honour the pre-resignation time otherwise?
I’m perplexed by the sudden drop in trust at resignation time. If an employee is trustworthy, why should their attitude change just because they resigned? And if they aren’t trustworthy, you have a problem even before their resigning.
I saw Apple do this. Not to me.
My friends in health and finance have said they have similar mandates. Us folks in IT can mess up too many things to be granted continued access. We need to be cut off.
Even prior to working for a utility I've worked at places where people were escorted off the property by security when they tendered their resignation. Their personal items in their office would be packed up and shipped to them. This has been going on for decades.
There was one job I had where I was so well-liked and we had considerable mutual respect that I was still granted visitor access to the facilities, meaning I required an escort. I no longer had access to any of the systems, but I could guide those who did. That worked out really well, too. Heck, they negotiated an extra six weeks instead of two and paid me 50% more to boot! That made a helluva impression at my new company! Then I got a great sign-on bonus at my new company! Boy, those were the days!
I have almost 30 years in tech and thankfully have never run across that. But I can see how that could be a thing for other companies/industries.
Every place I have worked I have given 3 week notice, and every potential employer has been ok with me starting in 3 weeks (except one).
The one exception was a company that balked at my request to start in 3 weeks in order to give my current employer time. They countered with "Well, take it now and start immediately, or leave it. You must not be serious about working here." I countered with "You are probably looking to hire people with no sense of responsibility to their current employer". Bullet dodged.
I have quit before I have started. I accepted an offer from a company (after being jobless) but my interaction with their HR the day before I was to start was so rude and combative that after I left, called my future boss there (who I really liked) and told him I was rescinding my acceptance. I then grovelled back to another job whose offer I had turned down (and they re-made the offer). It all worked out.
It's bound to be cheaper to pay the two weeks than to pay the increase in unemployment insurance premiums for every remaining employee in perpetuity. In that sense, it's short-sighted to not pay you through your notice period.
https://www.hg.org/legal-articles/fired-after-giving-notice-...
I'm pretty sure this lawyer knows a thing or two. And anyway, nothing is open-and-shut. Giving notice isn't "cause for termination" by any reasonable standard.
We were talking about risks. You can be pretty sure, and then a judge rules against you. Are you willing to take that risk? (Sure, maybe you know a judge. Or you live in a state with fewer worker protections. IDK, but I'm not making this up, and laws vary from state to state.)
The financial risk is small, can often be less than the cost of paying the salary over those 2 weeks. The risk the person is going to lawyer up is also fairly small, but at that point you just settle, you've probably lost the gamble at that point. If let it go to court, you're definitely going to lose on a financial perspective.
Either way, it's not a hill I'd die upon, my policy has always been to pay it out because it's just the right way of acting from an ethics perspective. I think the link you posted makes sense in our current world, but it's also using CA as an example and my gut tells me where I live is not as progressive; along with ~half or more of the US.
As far as risks go, increasing UI premiums is one risk; it might be easy to invent a valid cause for immediate termination when someone gives notice, but also quite transparent in terms of ethics as you say. Concretely, that would also be leaving employers at a greater risk that word gets around with the remaining employees, and then you likely won't see employees giving notice anymore, or affecting morale of the remaining employees, or what else.
https://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/tools-and-samples/hr-...
To be fair, I'm pretty sure that I won't find the precedent I'm looking for in my own state either, but the link above is interesting: if your company has a policy that employees must give notice to quit, whether it was legally enforceable or not, with a termination after notice is given that policy could be used as evidence against you!
I guess it's a good idea to have a firm grasp of the law and review your own company's policies regularly, to be sure they align with the law! For another example in the same vein, I thought that only California made non-competes illegal but there are at least two other states, and it may be illegal to try to enforce a non-compete at a federal level soon.
https://www.foxrothschild.com/publications/ftc-proposes-rule...
(Not that this has anything to do with notice or unemployment...)
In this case, you probably weren't actually required so if you really wanted to take the full vacation, you should probably be have been "I won't be here on Monday."
(Edit since some replies seem to have the wrong idea - termination effective immediately without notice is common, but usually there is severance pay except in cases of misconduct or disaster.)
i don't not-believe you, but I would be super surprised if the 80% figure is accurate
the more common thing i've seen time and again is someone giving two week notice and then being told to not bother with the last two weeks (and not getting paid for it either). after one of my employers did this to a coworker i liked who was relying on that final paycheck for rent, i quit a couple months later with 0 notice "because it seems like you guys don't do 2 week notice here". I got threatened with a baseless lawsuit for that cheeky stunt and they abused DMCA claims on my consulting website to try to get it taken down
I obviously don't know anything about the company, but it sounds like you dodged a bullet by leaving.
Severance is also only common in large organizations. I've seen few small startups or bootstrapped companies pay severance when letting people go.
Exceptions being PIPs, if you want to characterize it that way; usually a gracious way to push people out without the drama or severance.
I now live in Canada and there are some different requirements re: getting terminated.
I have also worked at two other companies where we informed certain workers of an impending layoff and provided stay bonuses to them. One of them included basically a non-disclosure agreement since the impending layoff was not publicly known yet.
It may not be common knowledge but it definitely happens.
We were told the company was shrinking by almost half once we hit 1.0 on our project, which was still six weeks away. We would get extra severance if we stayed and if we hit the deadline.
That is not typical nor the norm.
Most companies have established PiP policies, and severance even in the cases of "for cause" terminations (though that is rarer)
"Fire with 0 day notice and no severance" is more likely to be found at startups, and/or small owner led companies with no real policies, or HR Depts.
This of course doesn't apply if the employee did something like outright breaking the law or the terms of their contract (rare).
Here in Germany, in fact things are problematic in the other direction. For the last 2 hires I made, their previous company forced them to work through their 3 month notice period.
Overall even as a business owner myself I prefer the pro-employee German system over the free-for-all American one.
This is only true in the US.
When I or colleagues have changed jobs then we have given a month or more notice, continued working etc. Only when someone is fired for total incompetence or just not showing up you don't want to see them anymore ever in the office so the company pays for the notice period time.
Likewise, if the company lays you off, they have to give you up to 8-weeks notice depending on how many years you were with the company; 10+ years warrants the full 8-weeks, while 2-4 years in service gets you 2-weeks. These are also mandatory minimums; some companies or employees with contracts or collective agreements may get / offer more.
Plenty of loopholes there, like for "just cause", and some industries are "exempted by custom" or by law, like construction or forestry.