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I worked at Google for -10 days

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Re: I worked at Google for -10 days

#441

Post by throwaway2037 »

dheera wrote: post #126
mschild wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On a general level sure maybe, but for this particular case, there was little economical need for Google to have any layoffs. They're swimming in money and are highly profitable. Pulling the rug out underneath a new employee who is days away from starting and moving his whole life to a new country is simply shitty behaviour.

> there was little economical need for Google to have any layoffs The trouble is, public companies like Google aren't owned by their execs anymore. They've lost control to a bunch of idiots on Wall Street. They optimize for stock price, not employee satisfaction, not customer satisfaction.

    a bunch of idiots on Wall Street
Usually, those "idiots" are pension funds, mutual funds, and ETFs owned by retail investors. And, this is normal for a mature company to no longer have insiders control the vast majority of voting shares.

Also, Netflix free float stock is no longer controlled by a few people. It is widely held, and it hasn't lost sight of its mission. It continues to optimize employee and customer satisfaction with great success for their stock price. (No, I am not a shill for Netflix.)

Re: I worked at Google for -10 days

#442

Post by joshmanders »

cortesoft wrote: post #397
joshmanders wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds to me like the company didn't plan correctly or have adequate staffing in place for the workload. If they did, an abrupt loss of an employee wouldn't put them "in a tough position" I hope you don't die and put them in a tough position for not giving a 2 week notice beforehand.

I am not saying they wouldn’t survive without the two week notice, that isn’t the same as saying it wouldn’t be difficult. Same with my death. I am sure that would be hard on my team. I don’t understand your position. Any time a coworker leaves, it is hard to deal with. That doesn’t mean people shouldn’t leave or that anything is being done wrong; if someone leaving causes ZERO difficulties, then why were they employ…

> I don’t understand your position

My position is that in the US at least we're an at-will employment country. Companies very rarely give notice of termination, it's usually on the spot. While yes if you want to give notice, go right ahead, but lets stop shaming people for treating companies the same way they treat us.

Re: I worked at Google for -10 days

#443

Post by logicalmonster »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #392
logicalmonster wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't see what one has to do with the other. It is incredibly connected. There is business risk introduced for making an offer. Increasing that risk means that the vetting process can be increased to make up for that extra risk incurred. If companies feel they need 4 or 5 rounds of interviews today before making an offer and you all of a sudden mandate that there's more of a risk for making an offer, they might d…

> There is business risk introduced for making an offer. Increasing that risk means that the vetting process can be increased to make up for that extra risk incurred. Why does it increase the risk? Are they regularly screwing over hires like this? If so, it's good to force the behavior change. If they only screw over hires like this in economic downturns, then "more rounds" wouldn't affect that so they wouldn't add m…

I understand your perspective here. I think everybody is rightly outraged and has their blood boiling when they hear stories about employers screwing over hires. I'm right there with you for wanting fairness and a good process.

What's the solution to improving job-seekers lives though? I think this is a case where the incentives are really counterintuitive and solutions that sound good are the wrong ones to make peoples' lives overall better.

On the surface, it sounds great to focus on a goal oriented outcome and give employees better protections and make firing harder. Giving Americans European style workers rights sounds great. But in practice, I think that just makes the hiring process a nightmare and makes it a risk for businesses to try and add anybody because there's always a chance that things don't work out for some reason. This is why there's so many stupid rounds of interviews and hoops to jump through for every position now.

I think we'd go a long way to making hiring much better by doing the counterintuitive thing: making firing much easier and reduce business risk as much as possible. Make the risk for businesses nearly zero for hiring anybody because it's so easy to reverse things if they don't work out, and all of a sudden the incentive for multiple round interview processes goes away because you'd want to rush and snatch up anybody you like and want to give a shot without risking losing them in a 6 week multi-round interview process.

Adding more risk for hiring IMO just increases how awful the hiring process will become.

Feel free to hate me for saying all of that. I know it sounds bad on the surface and I can't really articulate this theory in a way that's perfectly convincing. But this is one of those things that for some reason makes perfect sense to me and is a strong gut feeling as the correct thing. Also note that I'm a job seeker at the moment, and I'm saying all of the above through a self-interested lens of wanting to make the hiring process as simple as possible.

Re: I worked at Google for -10 days

#444

Post by AlwaysRock »

irrational wrote: post #246
AlwaysRock wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then you give -10 days notice. 2 weeks is a nicety and not legally required in the USA. Probably not required in many other places as well. It's unfortunate but I've never had a manager get too upset about it.

At my company, there is no 2 weeks. The day you give your two weeks notice is your last day. We might pay you for those two weeks, depending on circumstances, but your building and network access is cut off within the hour. So, I personally would not give my notice until the day I actually want to be my last day.

This is pretty common. Even more so outside of tech. I did sales for a while and this was normal.

Re: I worked at Google for -10 days

#445

Post by AlwaysRock »

vikingerik wrote: post #258
93po wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also jobs often/usually fire people with 0 day notice and no severance. I don't know why it's an expectation that employees would give notice without any reciprocation.

0 day notice and no severance is unusual, at least for skilled professional jobs in the US. It does happen, but usually only for some unusual circumstance, like some kind of employee misbehavior or a sudden financial calamity for the company. Two weeks notice by the employee or severance by the employer is the most common case on both sides, probably for roughly 80% or so of professional jobs including all of my own.…

I've never had notice of a firing or severance so I don't know how common it is.

Re: I worked at Google for -10 days

#446

Post by comonoid »

stickfigure wrote: post #345

I'm not sure why anyone hasn't brought up the elephant in the room. OP, you're now an unemployed male of draftable age living in Russia, which is doing poorly in a war with your neighbor. Depending on how the anticipated Ukranian spring offensive fares, extremely bad things could happen to you very soon. You already made yourself mobile. This would be a good time to take a six-month vacation anywhere outside Russia.…

When I left Yandex (pre-pandemic), I was told that I can return with no conditions in 3 months. I believe it is a general practice as I had non-senior position and was considered an average performer.

So, his situation is not as dire.

Re: I worked at Google for -10 days

#447

Post by conductr »

yebyen wrote: post #426
conductr wrote: post #405

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm pretty sure they can accept your resignation effective immediately and it not be a firing. Post dating it is a nicety you offered and they declined.

Of course you can be terminated at any time, but that would not be your resignation anymore. You are an at-will employee at all times. You can be fired, or you can quit. But let's not conflate the two. https://www.hg.org/legal-articles/fired-after-giving-notice-... I'm pretty sure this lawyer knows a thing or two. And anyway, nothing is open-and-shut. Giving notice isn't "cause for termination" by any reasonable stan…

> Are you willing to take that risk?

The financial risk is small, can often be less than the cost of paying the salary over those 2 weeks. The risk the person is going to lawyer up is also fairly small, but at that point you just settle, you've probably lost the gamble at that point. If let it go to court, you're definitely going to lose on a financial perspective.

Either way, it's not a hill I'd die upon, my policy has always been to pay it out because it's just the right way of acting from an ethics perspective. I think the link you posted makes sense in our current world, but it's also using CA as an example and my gut tells me where I live is not as progressive; along with ~half or more of the US.

Re: I worked at Google for -10 days

#448

Post by Dylan16807 »

logicalmonster wrote: post #443
Dylan16807 wrote: post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There is business risk introduced for making an offer. Increasing that risk means that the vetting process can be increased to make up for that extra risk incurred. Why does it increase the risk? Are they regularly screwing over hires like this? If so, it's good to force the behavior change. If they only screw over hires like this in economic downturns, then "more rounds" wouldn't affect that so they wouldn't add m…

I understand your perspective here. I think everybody is rightly outraged and has their blood boiling when they hear stories about employers screwing over hires. I'm right there with you for wanting fairness and a good process. What's the solution to improving job-seekers lives though? I think this is a case where the incentives are really counterintuitive and solutions that sound good are the wrong ones to make peop…

> Adding more risk for hiring IMO just increases how awful the hiring process will become.

I'm not disagreeing with that in general, but I want an explanation of where the additional risk would come from in this situation. And why, because of that specific risk, companies would do something like add more hiring rounds.

If the additional risk is just getting stuck with an employee during a downturn, more hiring rounds wouldn't affect that, so there would be no reason to add them.

Also it seems like it's currently pretty easy to fire people. I'm not at all confident you could reduce the hiring process by making firing even easier. And how do you propose handling the people that already have jobs and need a commitment before quitting them?

Re: I worked at Google for -10 days

#449

Post by glitchc »

jupp0r wrote: post #231
glitchc wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Form a guild. Other professionals have organizations to protect them, engineers should too. This is the way.

What existing organization would have prevented what happened to OP?

None. A guild would fight with government for rights on his behalf.

Re: I worked at Google for -10 days

#450

Post by hinkley »

RussianCow wrote: post #274
vikingerik wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

0 day notice and no severance is unusual, at least for skilled professional jobs in the US. It does happen, but usually only for some unusual circumstance, like some kind of employee misbehavior or a sudden financial calamity for the company. Two weeks notice by the employee or severance by the employer is the most common case on both sides, probably for roughly 80% or so of professional jobs including all of my own.…

Anecdotally, I have never heard of a US company giving two weeks notice for a termination of any kind. The vast majority of terminations I've seen are immediate, but I've also seen companies give termination dates in the (relatively) far future to employees (generally a couple months, but I've seen 1-2 years). Severance is also only common in large organizations. I've seen few small startups or bootstrapped companies…

Once here too.

We were told the company was shrinking by almost half once we hit 1.0 on our project, which was still six weeks away. We would get extra severance if we stayed and if we hit the deadline.

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