Hacker News Reader

Comment by bprieto | Hacker News Reader

The post might not be as shocking as it appears. In most of the EU you seldom can fire an employee without weeks of notice. The way she tells the story, it seems as if the employee was told his contract would terminate, but he was still working for the company when he was needed.

Still, I don't find strange that an employee who knows his days at a company are counted is not willing to respond to an after-hours phone call.

View on HN

Looking for a job is also time consuming and in most of the EU the employee that got the firing notice is legally allowed according to the employment law to work shorter hours, say 6 per day instead of 8, in order to search for another job.

From the story it also seems that after-hours work is based on "volunteering" and thus not paid extra compared to regular hours, so it's not a surprise that an employee that got fired is not motivated to volunteer for doing work after-hours.

Apparently it's a big shock for some people that employees have needs and obligations, like a family to take care of. Receiving a notice that you've been fired can be very stressful, even if your skills are very in-demand.

  In most of the EU you seldom can fire an employee without weeks of notice

This is true. What you can do, though, is let an employee go immediately and pay his salary for the notice period.

Banks do this quite often on employees, who could create huge damage for the bank. For example traders.

A friend of mine was a trader of some long term with a particular bank and, because of his length of service with the bank, had to receive a few month's notice of termination.

They terminated him and made him come in to work to sit in a featureless room with only a table and chair -- no computer, nothing. He'd rather stay at home and garden or whatever, even it meant finishing up early, but they wouldn't let him. He always said that he must have seriously pissed someone off in HR.

Note that (1) the employee was let because his role was not necessary anymore, then suddenly he is needed (2) outside office hours.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com