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Comment by nine_k | Hacker News Reader

From my experience, none. "Utterly unfortunately, today was your last day with the company. A separation agreement has been sent to your personal email. Your corporate access is being revoked. Thank you for your contribution!"

Being fired for poor performance is all about ample warnings, issuing a PIP, etc. The company wants the employee back on track. Being laid off is a situation that an employee cannot fix with their efforts. There's no incentive to work this week if it is already known that you are going to be laid off next week, but some employees might consider a prank or even minor sabotage as a helpless act of protest. It's safest to dismiss the laid-off ASAP.

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It’s also not legal in much of the world to do that, thankfully. There’s weeks/months to negotiate collectively with the company, possibly organise a strike with those not at risk of redundancy or even just to say goodbye to coworkers.

This works if you have a trade union. I'd hazard to say that at least 99% of software engineers in the US work on "at-will" employment agreements, and do not belong to any unions.

A separation agreement usually stipulates paying 2-3 months worth of salary, and extending the benefits similarly. I don't see how it is worse than spending a couple of extra weeks in the office, and receiving the same.

(Also note that employees that are harder to lay off also get hired with much more reluctance.)

In several countries that I'm aware of, collective consultation is a requirement above a certain number of redundancies even if there is no trade union agreement in that workplace.

Collective bargaining could achieve far more than 2-3 months of pay. I've personally seen cases of over double that much pay, reduced numbers of redundancies, sacking a few directors instead of a few workers and in one case even preventing the redundancies entirely by forcing management to reduce other costs.

Of course, you are likely to fare much better if the workplace is already unionised, so join/build a union now!

The US has the WARN Act which requires companies to give 2 months notice of large layoffs. There are a number of loopholes however and the company doesn't need to give any specific employee 2 months advance notice, so the good employees start their job hunt while everyone else hopes to survive the culling.

PIP is not “wants the employee back on track”. It’s “documentation of a performance problem and good faith attempt at remedy to justify firing”.

"Employees might sabotage stuff" is something parroted constantly and there's never any proof it is a significant issue.

It's not common, but it absolutely happens: https://www.courthousenews.com/man-behind-s-f-system-lockout...

Early in my career in the mid 2000s, the startup that was on the same floor as mine laid off a QA person, who then showed up the next day and fatally shot the CEO and head of HR. Our CEO called me and told me not to come in that day.

This[0] is just the first result searching and it is from this week too. But it is not uncommon. Insider threats to infrastructure exist at all times of course but a disgruntled employee with administrative access and knowledge of the infrastructure can do a lot of damage quickly.

[0]: https://flaglerlive.com/it-attack-firing/

A single person can cause a lot of damage.

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