Twelve months notice | Hacker News Reader

Twelve months notice

cdixon.org

21 pointsashishk9 comments

This is exactly what I did when I emigrated to Canada from the States. I let the company I was working for know that I was applying for landed immigrant status and that they could count on me until the immigration process was done and I had a job in hand for the move.

It took about ten months from start to finish, but they appreciated the openness, honesty, and (most importantly) hard work that I put into the company prior to emigrating.

Were we a startup? Um. No, more a small player. But I would have done this whether it was a small company or a large company because I respected the people I worked with. If I didn't respect them, then they'd exactly get the two weeks (and that happened more than once, too).

Generally good advice, but a year is a long time in the startup world and what do you do if you get a really good job offer that won't wait? Seems like this is a pretty common occurrence as it has already happened to me and I am only 6 months out of school. Without going into a lot of detail, I started at a company shortly after graduating and two months later got a job offer at another startup that was better in almost every aspect and decided to bail.

Sure, if you have an urgent opportunity, sometimes you need to take it. But I had an employee once who suddenly quit to go to _med school_ - to which he had applied over a year earlier and never told us. It was devastating to the project he was on, the team, and to me personally since I had vouched for the hire.

In his defense, he was fresh out of college and thought it wasn't that big of a deal. So I sat down with him and explained that it WAS a big deal for a company our size, and he was super apologetic.

"twelve months notice" is definitely just general advice, and certainly a long time in the startup world. However, I think it's just an illustrative example. What the author appears to be saying is that in social circles where your reputation matters, don't be a dick. I think the author was just using "twelve months notice" as an explanatory example.

In summary: Don't screw people over unless you work in an anonymous, transactional industry, which startups aren't.

I agree. I think the time is arbitrary, it is the communication itself that is important.

When I took a position with a small company way back when, I told them up front that I had a summer job working for my dad for 3 weeks each year. They were very accommodating.

This does not address the lack of time off for a vacation, but that is another post...

unless you work in an anonymous, transactional industry, which startups aren't.

I've found through both first- and (close) second-hand experience that this generalization doesn't hold.

The OP's poing about assessing openness and honesty of the management is well taken.

Is 2 weeks a legal requirement in some states? I have yet to see that here in California, except once in an employment contract for a company headquartered in NJ.

The advice I generally give is also Golden Rule based, which is to give the amount of notice one reasonably believes would be given in a layoff. This is, of course, easiest with a company that has already gone through such a thing, having already set an expectation.

Wouldn't any law against at-will employment be tantamount to slavery?

There are pockets of the latter approach in larger industry. I was fortunate enough that my frustration at truly ignorant policies caught the attention of our CTO, who happened to value openness and honesty over legalistic relationships.

I've found the freedom to be unabashedly open about my search for fulfillment in my work to be an incredible source of inner peace and job satisfaction. It's humanizing.

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