As a consultant you must see far higher hourly rates than a normal permanent employee.
I.e., I had a client about 6 months ago who got rid of me when he no longer needed help with $STOCK_MARKET_STUFF. Then he needed more $STOCK_MARKET_STUFF done recently - I wasn't "unmotivated" as a result of him terminating our relationship previously.
2) It appears that after-hours on-call work wasn't ever actually a part of the employee's contract - they shouldn't have been doing them anyway. When you know you're no-longer part of the team, why exactly would you go above and beyond? Show up, do good work in the hours you're contracted for and don't pick up the phone after hours.
The employee is treating it as a time:money transaction and since there is no ongoing deal why give away your time for free?
One is that the CEO was asking for a bunch of "above-and-beyond" work. The other is that there was an implicit agreement for such work, but Belgian law made it impossible to explicitly contract for. In the former case I have no problem with the employee, in the latter case he sounds like a pain to work with.
And make no mistake, there is an implicit contract at nearly all jobs. Typical clauses might be "CTO filters BS from above so developers can do real work" or "go ahead and take reasonable flex-time in spite of what the official policy is, but be available for crunch time". Even in a flexible place like the US, it's simply logistically impossible to encode everything in a contract. The closest anyone has come to it are union work rules, disaster that they are.
What "find an employee with passion" really means is "find an employee who's attitude fits better with the implicit contract".
Considering Google has a datacentre in Belgian that presumably has 24/7 availability, I find this hard to believe. I presume Belgian has security guards, nightfill and a fire brigade also.
> What "find an employee with passion" really means is "find an employee who's attitude fits better with the implicit contract".
I read this as "find an employee who is too scared, too naieve or too stupid to enforce the explicit contract they signed".
If you want someone to do the work, you need to contract it. Anything else is abusive management.
The relevance of 1) is responding to this in your original post:
"Additionally, it sounds like the employee was treated well."
If Belgian law required say, two weeks notice and the CEO gave the guy 12 weeks I'd be more forgiving of her, but if the bare minimum of law is being implemented then she deserves nothing extra in return.
Firstly, the benefit relationship of all contracts, implicit or otherwise, is asymmetric: the benefits accrued to the employer will be greater than those accrued to the employees: to do otherwise would erode profits, and put the company out of business. Some companies have 'enlightened' opinions about how to extract good work from their employees, but it is still done with the goal of being more profitable. Arguing from the poor practices of other companies is not constructive.
With respect to the particular situation, once the employee had been placed on notice, it seems to me that the implicit contract was broken, unless the employer was just as willing as they were beforehand to offer the 'implicit benefits' to the employee, which seems unlikely. Indeed, the situation really seems to be that the employer is asking for all the benefits on their side of the implicit contract, without offering anything in return.
Finally, for me the implicit contract is not really between the employee and the employer, but between the employee and their coworkers. Whenever I have gone above and beyond, I haven't been doing it for the company, but for the people I work with. However, my experiences are limited to medium sized companies, so things might be different in smaller environments.
Now you might still be motivated in thinking that they'll employ you for future contracts; but if you're not a contract worker that motivation doesn't really work out.
If that's not going to be the case, then trade offs that someone might make to invest in that long term relationship cease to make sense.