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Comment by game_the0ry | Hacker News Reader

Am I the only one who thinks you should not give a 2 week notice to your current employer when you get an offer, so that in the event your offer gets rescinded, you still have your current job?

I get a ton of push back when I suggest this, but am I being unreasonable when I am trying to look out for my own interests when I know my employer wont? My employer can weather a few bad months, but some people can't lose income for more than one month.

Or are most employees are too scared to piss off some people they might not ever see again anyway?

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This would be good advice in a world where rescinded offers are extremely common and employers refused to take people back after their 2 weeks notice.

However, the opposite is true: Rescinded offers are extremely rare. When it does happen at a company of reasonable size, it’s so surprising that it’s a headline like this one. We’re here talking about it because it’s an extraordinary occurrence, not a common thing that happens all the time.

When you over-index on rare risks like rescinded offers, you start to lose sight of what you risk by doing things like quitting jobs without notice. Your professional reputation may end up mattering more than you think some day, and disappearing from a job without notice is the kind of thing that people remember you for.

Refusing to give any notice because you might possibly have a 1-in-10,000 rescinded offer reminds me of my grandmother-in-law who refused to fly on an airplane out of fear of airplane crashes. She definitely avoided death by airplane crash, but in the process she missed out on a lot of vacations and family events.

Don’t overindex on the rare thing.

This.

I know that HN zeitgeist, weirdly, in some strange way likes to be "interchangeable cogs in a machine" (focus on standard easily employable tech stack, avoid learning company-specific stuff, change jobs frequently, be easily replaceable); but in a LOT of companies leaving with no notice puts everybody (coworkers, management, business, client - real human beings) in a crazy bad spot.

Many large companies have a checkbox on whether a leaving employee is rehireable. I've seen enough people leave then come back, that it may not always be as ok as it seems to burn those bridges - not to mention that in some ways industry is surprisingly "small" - people move and bad reputation spreads. If Bob asks Fatima who worked with James, should he hire him - you can bet this'll come up. And if that feels like a low hypothetical risk - it's a lot higher than risk of rescinded offers.

> but in a LOT of companies leaving with no notice puts everybody (coworkers, management, business, client - real human beings) in a crazy bad spot.

Not my problem.

Luckily for them, I stay because I practice overemployment.

I mean, it is your problem if you like any of those people and expect them to maybe be part of your career network in the future. I know I'd have a hard time considering referring someone who gave zero notice when quitting. Sure, it's just business, but that's some pretty anti-social behavior. The person who had to stay behind to clean up the mess you left is unlikely to ever want to help you in the future, or take your call if you want to hire them onto your team at some point

You can certainly make it less abrupt in other ways - let people know beforehand or such, but if I showed up on Monday and one of the other senior folks on my team just was gone with no notice and didn't talk with me again, it would be hard to just treat that as normal.

There’s this one cool trick I learned where labor solidarity means telling coworkers ahead of quitting but not managers. Also not everyone needs “their network” to get jobs. This employee karma from fucking management I’m always threatened with has never been real in any industry I worked in.

There's definitely ways you could do it well that don't make a mess - telling your coworkers ahead, or at least the ones who would have to take your workload. Or subtly making sure to knowledge-share before you leave.

I'm saying this from experience of people doing things as mundane as just moving to another team within the company with little to no notice. Yea, it "fucked management", but I also had to spend 3 months dealing with the mess they left behind, and inherited half-working code that they clearly had neglected because they knew they were about to leave.

Labor solidarity isn't just "I screwed capital so it's all a positive". You have to... I dunno, support your fellow laborers. I certainly don't think it's some moral failing to have abandoned a job with no notice, but implying that this is just "fucking management" is missing how much it can really pile stress and bad conditions onto the fellow employees you leave behind.

Maybe it's never bitten you, but I know if any of the folks I've worked with who have disappeared with no notice from my team asked me to work with them, I'd be having a hard time trusting them. Maybe they don't care, and they think I'm some corporate stooge or whatever, but when you're totally fine throwing me into the machinery of capitalism to advantage yourself, what would stop you from doing that again?

People leaving teams sucks, which is all you seem to be describing.

What do you do to management when they hurt you this way (firing/reassigning team members without notice)? How do you fight the corpos? What are some techniques you've come across to cause pain for management that somehow doesn't harm labor? Why aren't your complaints just the voice of management saying that I harmed you (when another way of looking at it as that I liberated myself. Are refugees "throwing their countrymen into the machinery of tyranny"?)?

About as anti-social as saying "thanks for your time, today will be your last day, and there will be no severance."

Yes, which is... anti-social, right? And which you would judge a company for?

>> Not my problem

That is a personal choice and perspective you make, comfortably from a throw away account.

Honest question, what is overemployment? I never heard that term before.

Work two or more full time jobs at the same time remotely. Each company assumes I am exclusively their own employee.

Ok, your choice. You do know that you risk loosing both if they find out? And in my neck of the woods they will, since full time employment pays into social security and employers receive feed-bavk in the form of their respective contributions.

Nothing I'd recommend, and just for loosing employment, but also for mental health.

All that of course goes for two full time jobs. One full time job and some side jobs are acceptable. And unfortunately for some a necessity to make ends meet.

The mental health thing only matters if you are personally vested in your work and care about what you do.

A lot of the overemployed don't. They are trying to walk a fine line and do the absolute minimal required to remain employed at each job. They also care a lot less about being fired from one job since they a fallback.

Again, personal choices. We all rationalize our own morality :-). You can probably tell how I feel about that level of deception, but as long as you're not in my circle of coworkers or friends, have fun :-).

> likes to be "interchangeable cogs in a machine"

This is totally a response to the employer side. When companies are laying off people en masse with little regard to either performance or years of service rendered, they reveal themselves to regard their workforce as interchangeable cogs. We are living in a market that encapsulates the adage, “your company will let you go without a second thought.”

My understanding of why companies cannot purposely show that they take perf or years of service into account has more to do with labour law than a lack of caring. You cannot take into account perf in a layoff - if you did, you are not allowed to call it a layoff, AFAIK.

That doesn't sound right at all. You would want to lay off the bottom performers, it isn't a lottery. Imagine if a company said 'we need to get rid of 20% of our labor cost' and just ran a random number generator and got rid of the people who's number came up.

No, you want to get rid of just enough of the top performers to significantly lower labor cost while keeping enough that they feel safe. You can shed as many of the bottom performers as you like without worry. Gotta make those top performers do 2x the work for one paycheck.

Companies absolutely take perf and years of service into account for layoffs. It’s not always the same process or formula but those are popular terms in such a formula, along with pay, location, role.

And that is a reason to turn yourself into indispensable cog, not the best replaceable there is.

> And that is a reason to turn yourself into indispensable cog, not the best replaceable there is.

For centuries, organizations have been adjusting themselves to ensure that all employees are as easily replaceable as they could possibly be, not to mention outright powerless.

I recommend watching the Netflix documentary "American Factory". If I recall correctly, there's a low-level manager who tried to turn himself indispensable at the expense of the company's workers and he showed a lot of surprise once he himself was fired.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Factory

"Indispensable" people leave for greener pastures or get laid off anyways. This happens all the time. A company that has too many indispensable people is a company that has too many single points of failure.

Apparently nobody cares, because both consumers and employees keep flocking to the same soulless behemoths en masse to get their fix and their CVs padded.

Also, employees will dump their employer the second they can. Let’s not pretend this is a one-way street.

> (...) but in a LOT of companies leaving with no notice puts everybody (...) in a crazy bad spot.

Do you think gratuitously firing employees doesn't leave them in a bad spot?

How come that a family needing to pay rent and make ends meet doesn't benefit from the same level of concern you're giving to a manager having to go through the trouble of replacing an employee?

Just because many companies behave poorly does not mean there is not a code of reciprocal obligation between workers and companies. If a company lays someone off and gives them no severance, you would judge that company more harshly than if they had given them severance. Similarly, if a worker leaves with no notice, people judge them poorly. When you break the rules people judge you.

> Just because many companies behave poorly does not mean there is not a code of reciprocal obligation between workers and companies.

What code are you talking about? Either you're referring to worker protection laws or collective bargaining agreements. If you're not referring to either of those, you're just projecting personal expectations that no one meets.

> If a company lays someone off and gives them no severance, you would judge that company more harshly than if they had given them severance.

Your frowns don't pay a man's rent.

> Similarly (...)

There is absolutely no similarity. At all. If a worker gets fired, he loses his livelyhood. If an employee quits, a few employees have a to-do item in their task queue.

You're talking as if companies don't hire people dedicated to hiring and firing.

I think the super-hot job market in tech from 2012ish to 2022ish has really led a lot of people to underrate having a good professional reputation. When you were competing with 10 other companies to try to get a candidate, you couldn't be too fussy about "hey, why do you have a string of short tenures," or "did you get a kinda lukewarm reference from so-and-so."

So now we've got people saying, "Hey, don't worry at all about making your employer mad," in an environment which favors employers over employees. It's shortsighted, unless we return to ultra-hot job market in a year and this is a one-time difficulty.

The mass layoffs this year, almost universally executed on seemingly arbitrary criteria with little regard to performance or seniority, would seem to indicate that employers certainly don’t care about making employees mad. Any pretense of reciprocity has been destroyed this year.

Yes and no … Just because somebody does not care about making an employee mad, it does not mean they will get a job if they do.

You might think your employer is horrible, but it’s the ones that smile and stay how great the company is that will get hired.

When you NEED a job, people will go back to being company-pleasers.

There never was any pretense to begin with, people just happened to realize that lately. In tech that is.

That being said, your relationship is with your, former and current, co-workers. I am rather good in blowing bridges up if I think someone else put them on fire first. But even then, I took great care of who was on the other side, as much for my own sake as for the sake of my reputation and relationships with others.

Because even if you don't give a single f** about your employer, your co-workers will remember as would you. Especially if all of a sudden the job market is favouring employers again.

It's always been the case.

But now it happened in FAANG so it burst the bubble of the proportionally few who used to feel special.

It didn't even really happen in FAANG. FAANG employees are still doing extremely well. FAANG companies are still holding onto tons of unproductive headcount which they would prefer to let go were it not for the employee backlash that'd follow. There are lots of people making lots of money who would be cut in any other competitive industry. I know because they're honest about it during their lunch hour. People read these stories about companies going about layoffs in a ham-fisted and counterproductive way, and jump to the conclusion that managements are all mustache-twirling robber barons whose main dream in life is to feed their employees into meat-grinders. The more conservative and reasonable conclusion to draw from the poor layoff execution is that FAANG management teams aren't very competent people managers, and are especially incompetent when it comes to layoffs, since they don't do them often.

You say this like you're a big realist, but it's the opposite.

Like, let's say we're in a world in which everybody is just a hard-edged economic realist and no sentiment or loyalty ever gets involved in anywhere. That's the world where you don't want to piss off your employer.

It's the world where employees are super valuable and coddled where all this, "well, I'm just showing them what it feels like to be me" is a viable tactic. That's the world where they care about your reciprocity arguments.

The point of building a good professional reputation is not for the benefit of employers everywhere. It's for you. To the exact extent that you think that employers are faceless soulless monoliths that don't give a shit about you is the extent to which you should stack the deck most in your favor for getting hired. If reference calls are going to be like, "Hey, I think that Bob has a really good heart and a ton of potential," then okay, maybe your minor indiscretions are NBD. To the extent that reference calls are, "I would not hire Bob again," that's when you really want them to say, "I would happily hire Bob again."

You overlook that if you premise “employers are faceless soulless monoliths”, then they would care as little about good behavior as bad. As far as references in tech go, they seem usually an after the fact formality, than anything.

At any rate, all of this is trading in hypotheticals. I don’t actually favor quitting with no notice, but in such an extreme case, I would assume it was done with sufficient justification that one’s colleagues, perhaps even one’s direct manager, would be sympathetic to the quitter.

You act like coders are okies. People at Google were frequently getting 2-9 months of severance, with benefits for most of those. Stop pretending like tech employers generally are behaving with "no sense of reciprocity." It's embarrassing and no one in any other field of work is going to buy your sob story.

Not until they get rid of the indignity of open offices. A gilded cage is still a cage.

And FAANG is not all tech.

Agreed that rescinded offers are not something to worry too much about. And, worst case scenario, you can often go back to your old team if you left on good terms.

It would be nice, though, if you had some certainty of some support, though switching jobs inherently entails some risks. If you're recently hired and there are to be layoffs in the next month, you will absolutely be on the chopping block. I'd love there to be something like unemployment insurance, except effective immediately such that spectacularly bad luck while switching jobs doesn't ruin you (and ideally that imposes some penalty on the hiring employer, who recklessly hired you and put your well-being at risk) and large enough to maintain people's fixed costs. That's more of a <10% risk in a down market (I'd guess... <1% in a good market) than a plane crash risk.

It seems simpler to just implement UBI and robust safety nets for everyone.

UBI is ridiculously expensive, it's not simpler in any way.

This entirely depends on how common rescinded/delayed offers are. We're seeing a general normalization of the following behaviors at major tech employers.

- Rescinded offers - Delayed start dates

Unfortunately, people's ability to maintain professional behaviors is entirely dependent on those behaviors working out. When Visas and other critical life factors are on the table, you can't blame someone for being protective.

reminds me of my grandmother-in-law who refused to fly on an airplane out of fear of airplane crashes

Totally. It's just like a black fly in your chardonnay.

Not exactly true. Has happened with so many companies recently(Google, Amazon, Coinbase etc..,). And it hits most employees hard since they might be someone who just got laid off. This is even harder with people on visas who might be running out of time to find a new job or leave the country. Also, this happens more in a tougher economic climate where the people with rescinded offers are left in a really hard place. A lot of people on visas might have also planned their exits a few months before since visa transfer and everything takes a while. And lot of companies with hiring freezes will 100% refuse to give your job back.

I think most people operate under the presumption that both parties are acting in good faith. Obviously, there are instances where that isn't true. Choppy economic conditions lead to both sides of the table bending or even breaking norms.

I tend to put stock in giving two weeks of notice as I think it's polite. That being said, I've never had the rug pulled on me, either.

Companies never give anyone 2 weeks notice. They do not deserve it, and no one should give it, unless they have passion about the team and project they are leaving, and even then they should just wrap that up before giving notice.

Most large companies that do layoffs give over a month of notice+severance. Perhaps they're not required to, but to be given less than a 2 week heads up with no severance is pretty rare.

How large? I don't think Allstate does this and they're Fortune 100. There were layoffs/a reorg back in 2018 in at least Allstate Benefits division but I don't think anyone got severance. I think everyone with more than X years of service was automatically not considered for severance. I know there are many former coworkers who are still there who certainly aren't still there because of their talent. Age is the only factor that comes to mind.

That's just... Not even remotely true in my neck of the woods.

Everywhere I worked at:

- if individual is not performing, people spend months trying to help them gear up before even considering laying them off

- if large layoffs are happening, there's time and severance. Even the ones we see in the news and perceived as sudden and unfair, the notification may be unexpected, but you're rarely laid off effective tomorrow.

Wrong on the large layoffs point. Plenty of them occurred with no warning this year. And often with little to no justification, not only to the individuals let go but even simply from a business rationale.

Them:

> in my neck of the woods.

> Everywhere I worked at

You:

> Wrong

How can you tell them they are wrong in _their_ experiences?

Because their experiences are not reflective of larger industry trends.

They didn't claim their experience was universal. They explicitly qualified their statement. So, you said they were wrong in _their_ experiences, which is calling them a liar and a bad interaction overall. If you'd simply replied that their experience perhaps wasn't indicative of the industry as a whole, _then_ you would have contributed something meaningful to the conversation.

There's one's own experience, and then there's empirical data. Your comment isn't adding any value to this discussion because it's just one in a sea of hundreds of millions.

Hell what about that mortgage company where people found out they were laid off because they couldn't log in to their fucking laptops?

Mortgage company? Shit, that's how some people at Google found out they were laid off.

Meta's layoffs: 16 weeks severance + 2 weeks per year employed. https://about.fb.com/news/2022/11/mark-zuckerberg-layoff-mes...

Google's layoffs: 16 weeks severance + 2 weeks per year employed + accelerate 16 weeks GSU vesting. https://blog.google/inside-google/message-ceo/january-update...

Amazon retail workers: 60 days of employment in which they aren't expected to come to work. https://www.cnbc.com/2023/01/20/google-amazon-microsoft-meta...

Etc. The idea that companies would "never give anyone 2 weeks notice" is deeply unconnected from reality.

I'm not sure that's the norm though. FAANG is typically outlier for X Y Z... I would guess that something like 90% of companies don't do severance. Hell, 16 weeks plus 2 weeks per year of tenure is GENEROUS. I'm honestly not sure why they are doing that, unless it isn't voluntary (e.g. some law in CA).

The idea that companies would never give anyone 2 weeks notice is probably closer to reality than the inverse of that assertion.

WARN requires certain employers in most circumstances to give 60 days notice or pay at least 60 days of severance when laying off

> Hell, 16 weeks plus 2 weeks per year of tenure is GENEROUS.

You call it generous, Germany calls it the law (depending on tenure, with some other European countries having a similar timeframe), and somehow non-FAANG non-tech companies are also able to stomach it. This is obviously very influenced by a very high demand for stability in Germany, but I also find it crazy how little people in other countries expect from their employers.

I’ve thought about moving to Germany. I know “the grass is always greener” but god damn is it true you guys can have a 4-day workweek, you just get paid 20% less?

Very much depends on the employer still (and there are quite a few political debates ongoing on whether 4 day work weeks should be incentivized, or whether they are the worst thing ever).

Anecdotally, for experienced devs, it is something that is commonly demanded and granted. For entry level positions it's quite common, but more and more people are asking for it quite early in their careers (even outside of tech).

I know nothing about Germany, but FWIW several web references suggest that severance pay in Germany is "Standard severance pay in Germany is 50% of one month’s wages for every year of service. This increases to a maximum of 12 months’ salary for employees under 50 years old."

This is significantly less generous than FAANG layoff severances.

I think that FAANG companies are indeed more somewhat generous than the norm. It's just easier to find the details of severance packages for big companies than mid-sized/small, because they're much more reported on.

However, I think you're going WAY too far in the other direction to suggest that "no severance" or "only two weeks of severance" is closer to true than not. I've seen a lot of mid-sized companies give 30 days of severance.

Sometimes the boss gives a wink and a nudge though

It is kind of funny, from the other side of the pond, that as soon as lay offs start, the loose labour protection laws in the US seem to be less cool. I remeber when people complained that the long notice peruods in Europe as such a pain for start-ups and employees alike. See how the perspective changes when your own paycheck is on the line.

On the other hand when you get unemployment in the US you are still taking home more than a European.

On the other, other hand, as a European, your kids don't have to go through active shooter training at or fear to be killed there.

One thing people, and it seems this is a problem among the higher paid HN espcially but not exclusively, is tgat money is not everything. And comparing life quality based on how much money someone has is quite frankly pretty sad. And something the truely rich couldn't care less about.

Oh, and I forgot, us poor underpaid Europeans tend not to have student debt in any shape or form. Also something to consider.

The flak is always thickest when you are over the target.

Next time you leave a job, look closer at the COBRA documents for what it would cost to continue the healthcare. Thankfully, you can roll the dice and opt-in retroactively for a month or so.

As some one in the US, I'd rather have the EU safety nets compared to the US unemployment rate.

I don’t think rescinded offers are very common, certainly not as a percentage of job changes. While you are entitled to not give notice doing so puts your managers and coworkers in a bit of a lurch. This accumulates ill will that offsets all the work you did to generate good will. As your career advances your best way to find a good job is through your network of past managers and coworkers. Burning through your goodwill as some sort of social protest against the state of tech employment is certainly an option, but it’ll hinder your chances of getting greater roles of higher trust based on your reputation vs cold applying into places that don’t know you.

As a manager I’ve always asked people to go home immediately throughout my orgs, though. I appreciate when people offer notice and I’ll pay them for a period to be available if we need it, but ultimately:

* a dead body stinking up the team doesn’t help

* if you need someone for two weeks to transition work, you aren’t managing your teams well to begin with. Everyone should be important but no one should be indispensable.

Is there a problem with "I am leaving but feel free to call me with questions while you transition"?

I have certainly done that in my career, but it was more because I couldn’t stand to stay there a minute longer. The right answer is to ask if it’s ok. Yes it’s asymmetric and in that sense unfair, but it’s important to realize your manager and your coworkers don’t decide to lay you off without notice. But if you walk away without notice, they’re the ones who feel burned. The layers of management that decide layoff policy don’t even notice when you quit and how you quit.

If you're in a role that is even remotely security sensitive, including having any kind of direct communication with clients, odds are also pretty high that they'll just accept your resignation immediately and not have you work out the two weeks.

It's more or less the same reason they typically don't give notice to people in those roles when they're getting laid off and just surprise them with it out of the blue. There's slightly less risk you'll say or do something harmful when you're the one who chose to leave (and if they have half a brain, they should realize you could already have done whatever you were going to do in the previous two weeks too), but it happens a lot.

> If you're in a role that is even remotely security sensitive, including having any kind of direct communication with clients, odds are also pretty high that they'll just accept your resignation immediately and not have you work out the two weeks.

Not my experience at all, from many high-level roles with access to everything. I've always stayed at least 2-3 weeks for a clean transition.

Congratulations on being an exception to the "pretty high" odds, I guess. I'm glad people haven't been like that to you.

My point isn't about me, it's to say this is the norm. In well over 20 years of a career, I've also seen a lot of coworkers resign and not even once have any of them been kicked out the same day.

I am coming around to this line if thinking much more lately. Especially if you work at a big company in a fungible role. The power imbalance is such that it costs the company essentially 0% of their assets to abruptly terminate you, but for most people it would start a countdown to financial ruin measured in weeks to months. The only snag is that I would feel remorseful for the former coworkers I would be saddling with undue additional workload.

>I would feel remorseful for the former coworkers I would be saddling with undue additional workload

Huh? How do you control the workload of your team, especially as a departing IC?

Do you mean you're a manager who piles on the work then quits?

I think he meant if he leaves, his coworkers would have to take on his tasks. That’s why I like sprint based development - if my boss wants me to do something unplanned, he has to remove something planned first.

Yeah, after almost a decade of “agile” I’ve never seen this to be the case other than when I was super green. Usually, everything’s high priority and it needs to be delivered by day XYZ/ASAP regardless of sprint alignment or milestones.

My boss and I plan tasks at the start of each sprint, and once the tasks are chosen the only way to add a more is to remove something from the sprint. Asking more output from me than what was agreed upon would be similar to me asking my boss for more money. In both cases it’s perfectly reasonable to refuse the request (unless I underperform or am underpaid), and if either side is not satisfied, part ways.

Same thing would happen if he got fired, or needed to take a leave of absence. What happens next is not his responsibility.

The workload is determined by the employer, not the workers.

There’s another risk you’re not accounting for: Reputational damage.

The professional world is smaller than you think. A few years from now you may want a job with someone who works with someone who knows your old boss. They’ll ask for a reference because it’s so easy to find these connections in the era of LinkedIn. When someone leaves a company without notice, that tends to become the thing they’re remembered by. And it’s not a good look.

The risk of a rescinded offer is vanishingly small. Choosing to optimize to avoid that tiny risk in exchange for a near guarantee of damaging your reputation is not a good trade.

I'm not sure that's really an issue in the era of remote work. The word on the street is that it's hard to find a SWE job these days. There's also a lot of talk about RTO (return to office). The two are not necessarily correlated industry-wide, though it may appear that way. If it's really that it's hard to find a SWE job, remote or no, then I wouldn't worry about professional reputation. I'm not sure that you can make an impact/gain real seniority without both impressing and pissing off people.

Hey, it's an at-will employment place, that goes both ways.

If your company would like that to be different, they have the option to offer you a contract that stipulates notice periods for either side. (And that means you are guaranteed employment during the notice period, IIRC). They chose not to.

So they are ipso facto OK with you leaving without notice.

It's crazy how so many people don't get this. There is no loyalty from the company, so employees should not give any loyalty back.

The employer version of this is severance, not a notice period. Your logic is flawed.

Getting severance is better than a notice period anyway because you can get a new job and still get the money.

The employer version is bringing you into a meeting with HR and telling you you've been let go. Sure, sometimes people get severance, but I've never worked anywhere that does that.

> The employer version of this is severance, not a notice period.

So I can assume that there will be contractual severance allowances in my employment contract?

Maybe, but not in the last several I've signed, with large and small companies.

Severance is entirely at will as well, unless you have a contractual guarantee. Logic remains.

That may be what we see happening more and more in the future. The recommended "give two weeks notice" will be something we stop recommending to young grads (or any other employee for that matter). As employers push in the direction of distrust, the employees must do what's right for them in reaction to this distrust.

I would go the other way: If an offer is rescinded then 3 months of salary is to be paid. For going back to your employer I think if you have a good relationship and the position is not filling it should be a nobrainer.

I am in touch with my former coworkers and some managers. Over my work career sometimes i followed them, sometimes they follow me. I may not have loyalty to the company, but i have loyalty to my team.

This! I am putting my job, as in the thing I was hired to do and achieve first (sometimes at the expense on my relationships with other people, as this turned out to be not helpfull, who'd have thought, I try to not do that as much anymore) as long as I am supposed to do said job. I am loyal to my team, as long as long as we do that job together. Both things stop if the job is no longer a thing. But then there is a core group of people I worked with, that forms a team sorts that extends across jobs, companies and even industries.

The moment I realize I cannot be loyal to my team anymore, and there are different eeasons for this, it is time to step back and think about what to do next.

I don’t think rescinded offers are common enough to bother.

It’s rarely about companies, and often about people. That manager you pissed off by not giving any notice may talk trash about you in backchannel reference checks; or maybe you want to keep the relationship going to leave the door open for future employment opportunities; the industry is small and many people bump into one another more than once in their careers.

> That manager you pissed off by not giving any notice may talk trash about you in backchannel reference checks

This is potentially illegal. Look up "tortious interference".

> or maybe you want to keep the relationship going to leave the door open for future employment opportunities

In my experience, my boss is usually pissed about me leaving anyway, even with 2-week notice. And then they try to backfill my position ASAP anyway.

> the industry is small and many people bump into one another more than once in their careers.

I switched into tech from a very small industry. Tech is huge in contrast to a lot of other industries. And people bumping into each other has a smaller affect than interviewing for better job.

Illegal maybe depending on your jurisdiction but it’s something that happens more often than you think.

I am not here to convince you to give notice, but only stating the reasons people do give a courtesy notice. As always there are people who don’t see the need to observe certain courtesies, but they are the exception not the norm.

Well, in the US at least, you're not obligated to give notice, but yes you could (and will) burn bridges.

> ...you could (and will) burn bridges.

You burn bridges when you leave anyway. I have never had go back to an old employer, and I have worked at a lot of companies.

Personally, I focus on building new bridges, rather than maintaining old ones that don't lead anywhere new.

I have gone back to a previous employer once. Got separated/divorced shortly after changing jobs so just needed to go back to a place where I already had a support structure built.

At any rate, you're not just burning bridges with companies, you're burning bridges with people. Your team mates are the ones who get royally fucked over when you leave with no noticee and (therefore) no handover. They're also the ones who have the choice to invite you along for the ride when they land roles in cool new companies, or to block you if/when you apply to those companies.

I have worked in tech for 20+ years and have never held it against people who left with no notice. I still provide a positive reference or bring them with to new orgs, as long as they’re competent and decent people. No one owes notice.

I only don’t provide positive references or don’t bring with shitty people, even if you’re exceptional talent.

Why do people take it personally when you leave abruptly. It is a job.

Do you also hold it against people who are laid off with no handover?

As a teammate I recognize it's THE COMPANY'S fault that they had one person saddling so much work that their departure fucked everything up.

I've never gone back to a company I've left before, but more than once I've gone back to working for someone I reported to before, at a different company.

The analogy is flawed, because the "old bridges" can move and wind up along your path forward.

I've never gone back to an old company.

But I have worked for a previous manager again. He left the original company too, but set up contracting as an outside consultant to the software we built. He'd hire me to do some of the work as needed. Great gig for him, not bad for me.

That's not that rare of a setup if you're working on large B2B software packages.

It's not uncommon to leave a company A go work for company B and a few years later go work for company C hired by a former colleague you met at company A, who perhaps now has some important role there.

That's favourable for both parts. Your former colleague that hires you knows you and your qualities. And it's also good for you because you have some edge in the negotiations because you know you have a strong sponsor.

There is always an upside of being a good colleague with the largest amount of people. That increases the chances you're finding yourself in this favourable networking situation. And it also makes life better for everybody involved when it doesnt

> You burn bridges when you leave anyway.

Not usually and you shouldn't.

> I have never had go back to an old employer

People do go back to old employers. I've had old employers reach out trying to hire me back.

The most important point though is that it's people, not companies. Those people will move around to other companies and you want them to try to hire you again.

Companies don't give you two weeks when they let you go. Why should you give them shit?

Because unfortunately the power dynamic is such that people will know you quit on the spot and it’ll burn networking opportunities down the road.

Less an issue at a big enough company though so there’s that.

Maybe they won’t remember. Maybe they’ll think you had a valid personal reason.

Maybe you’ll go the rest of your life never finding out how they felt because of the myriad reasons you won’t run into those people.

Giving notice is risk aversion.

As someone who’s gone out of their way to give three weeks’ notice, I’m not one to test the limits- though I’ve realized extra time given is hardly appreciated. But I’m not about to condemn others for taking risks against an uncaring corporate structure.

You say tomato, I say salary continuation.

What are you talking about? I have a 3-month notice period; that goes both ways. I'm assuming you're from USA where employees have very little rights?

Yes, I'm from the US. Despite many of the comments here stating the contrary, I've been working in large tech companies for 30 years, and almost every termination has been an immediate walk out, severance or not. At one of the companies which I won't name, they didn't even let people go to their desks to get their personal items.

At will is at will

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