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Career advice no one gave me: Give a lot of notice when you quit

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Re: Career advice no one gave me: Give a lot of notice when you quit

#151

Post by scarmig »

EliRivers wrote: post #136
chickenpotpie wrote: post #125

No, no, no, no a billion times no to this absolutely not no The moment you give your resignation, there are good odds your company will say "we accept your resignation effective immediately. Goodbye." Sometimes it's a blanket company policy to do this, sometimes it's because they know you're going to a competitor and they don't want you to start training for your new job, sometimes they were on the fence about you st…

The moment you give your resignation, there are good odds your company will say "we accept your resignation effective immediately. Goodbye." Genuine question; is this a US thing? I've never, ever seen this or heard of it happening. I don't think I've ever worked at a company that didn't state in the contract the notice period. I have seen companies decide they don't want that person on site anymore when someone quits…

I did this in my first job, giving two months of notice because it was the right thing to do for my colleagues and the company since it'd allow transition time and continuity.

Then I was let go immediately. Which was an unexpected hit, though luckily the new company let me move my start date up. This was a tech company with around one hundred employees, and I was in good standing (my then manager later recruited me for a position at a different company).

The best approach is to always give two weeks formal notice on a Friday morning, with the expectation that there's a chance you'll not be coming back on Monday. Best to do all the transition preparation work before that moment. If I've got a manager that I trust, I let them know with a bit more informal advance notice.

ETA: on the other hand, I gave a month or two advance notice to Google, and they were happy to have me stay until my resignation date. My sense is that it's smaller companies that tend to do the immediate layoff.

Re: Career advice no one gave me: Give a lot of notice when you quit

#152

Post by sitkack »

How many times has David resigned this way? Twice!

I have seen probably close to 100 people give notice in my life. Many get the door as soon as they resign. Many get 2x the workload while the wrap things up. This is straight up naive advice.

One guy gave his 6 weeks notice, his last day would be two weeks after bonus payout. He was a super critical eng on a component in a system that brought in a couple hundred million in revenue. He had started documenting the systems, setting up meetings. HR informed the team that his last day would be the following friday. In 5 working days. It screwed the team and it screwed him. There was no backsies.

Why anyone would trust a corporation not to fire them immediately is being willfully naive. If one does do this, have all your ducks in a row and expect your last day to be the moment you submit your resignation.

Check with local labor laws and structure your resignation for maximum "impact" for whatever your definition of that word is.

Re: Career advice no one gave me: Give a lot of notice when you quit

#155

Post by PragmaticPulp »

EliRivers wrote: post #136
chickenpotpie wrote: post #125

No, no, no, no a billion times no to this absolutely not no The moment you give your resignation, there are good odds your company will say "we accept your resignation effective immediately. Goodbye." Sometimes it's a blanket company policy to do this, sometimes it's because they know you're going to a competitor and they don't want you to start training for your new job, sometimes they were on the fence about you st…

The moment you give your resignation, there are good odds your company will say "we accept your resignation effective immediately. Goodbye." Genuine question; is this a US thing? I've never, ever seen this or heard of it happening. I don't think I've ever worked at a company that didn't state in the contract the notice period. I have seen companies decide they don't want that person on site anymore when someone quits…

US person here who has participated in a lot of online advice/mentoring forums. I've never once seen a tech company immediately "fire" someone who says they're resigning like the parent comment claims.

The only exceptions I can think of were when people gave multiple months of notice that they were going to quit and already had declining performance due to e.g. unhappiness about the job. If you're not performing well and you tell your employer that you're quitting in a few months, they're not really interested in giving you more paychecks to perform poorly. IMO, that's not exactly unreasonable either.

Some companies will restrict the employee's access for the notice period and remove their work as a way of protecting company information from last-minute exfiltration (it happens a lot more than you'd think), but those employees are still paid during this time period. They're also obligated to answer questions and attend meetings about handoff, although in some cases this may amount to zero work.

But no, it's not common for US tech companies to fire employees immediately for resigning. I don't know where the parent commenter got the idea that this is common.

Re: Career advice no one gave me: Give a lot of notice when you quit

#156

Post by projectazorian »

monster_group wrote: post #9

This is terrible advice. Great that it has worked for the author but it does not mean it's a good idea for everyone. 2 weeks is the standard and as long as you give that you maintain good relations. Most people are not as valuable or important as they like to think they are. I have seen very important people leave / fired and things still go on. (Twitter is still working - isn't it?) Once you tell that you are leavin…

There’s a lot of merit to taking a week or two beyond the standard. 2 weeks isn‘t a lot of time to hand off all your work, go through the usual HR bureaucracy, and make sure you have contact info for anyone you might want to stay in touch with after leaving.

If it’s an amicable departure 3-4 weeks can be a lot less stressful for everyone.

6-8 weeks is kinda weird though, unless you‘re extremely senior and on critical path for a lot of things, or you‘re using up accrued PTO.

Re: Career advice no one gave me: Give a lot of notice when you quit

#157

Post by addaon »

gnicholas wrote: post #149
addaon wrote: post #93

Disagree with this on several levels. One specific challenge comes as tech companies push more and more compensation to bonuses and other must-be-present-to-win approaches (RSUs, etc). If you leave shortly before a trigger date, you've essentially been working the entire previous year at a discount, since your contractual bonus for the time you worked will never be paid. If you continue significantly past a cliff, th…

I've heard of employers paying signing bonuses to make up for the fact that an employee is leaving a partially-accrued bonus on the table at the employer he's leaving.

Sure, getting your bonus bought out provides some superficial relief for this problem. But if your next employer thinks that your value is high enough to buy out your bonus, they likely think that independent of the current date (modulo a special case where your value /now/ is significantly higher than it would be in another quarter or whatever). Your next employer gets no value from the fact that you're leaving previous money on the table; if they offer to buy out a bonus, stay, get that bonus, then remind them that they thought you had that additional value and you'll take at as a signing bonus now, thank you very much.

Re: Career advice no one gave me: Give a lot of notice when you quit

#158

Post by gedy »

EliRivers wrote: post #136
chickenpotpie wrote: post #125

No, no, no, no a billion times no to this absolutely not no The moment you give your resignation, there are good odds your company will say "we accept your resignation effective immediately. Goodbye." Sometimes it's a blanket company policy to do this, sometimes it's because they know you're going to a competitor and they don't want you to start training for your new job, sometimes they were on the fence about you st…

The moment you give your resignation, there are good odds your company will say "we accept your resignation effective immediately. Goodbye." Genuine question; is this a US thing? I've never, ever seen this or heard of it happening. I don't think I've ever worked at a company that didn't state in the contract the notice period. I have seen companies decide they don't want that person on site anymore when someone quits…

Happened to me last year, US startup said "let's wrap this up today and not drag it out".

Re: Career advice no one gave me: Give a lot of notice when you quit

#160

Post by jdminhbg »

Pet_Ant wrote: post #140
masfuerte wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dumb question: why would you get severance if you resigned?

Because of resigned effective of a future date. Any termination of employment before then is either a with-cause firing or a layoff where severance is required. Seems like an interesting idea. Give as much notice as possible and then see if they bench you until then.

> Any termination of employment before then is either a with-cause firing or a layoff where severance is required.

If they're paying you until that future resignation date, it's not a firing or a layoff, is it? The part that your employer is responsible for is your salary, not providing you with things to do.

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