To be fair this is a counterpart for being harder to get fired compared to some USA states. It makes the economy less fast to adjust but it makes people’s life less stressful.
IDK my man, having three months of forewarning for resignation sounds pretty cool to me. I don’t really see it as a downside. Especially in Italian law, where you can avoid making things awkward by agreeing with your employer to make the resignation time as short as you both want, as long as those three months are paid out. Blessed.
If you’re hopping within the country, usually the local culture is adapted. I never had issues with it, employers expect you to have a resignation period.
Plus as I was saying companies don’t really like to have a working quitter, so they will usually negotiate for that time to be shortened. Maybe one month so you can transfer your knowledge to somebody else, then you’re out - with the three months money, naturally.
Three months would be excessive in the Netherlands. The legal minimum is one calendar month. When you resign you can always negotiate to shorten the period, but most of the time people will work the remainder of the contract. Also, your new employer might actually think there is something wrong if you can quit your current job faster than the one month.
Yeah one month is the standard practice here too, as a negotiated shortening of the three month notice. It’s good to have the other two months paid out, that’s all I’m saying.
As someone who has dealt with multiple people leaving (two fired, two quit with no warning, and two with warning), I honestly don’t see much value after the first couple days. So honestly, a 1-week period would be plenty, if only to give HR a chance to properly close everything out while you’re still easily reachable.
Even a month sounds excruciatingly long. We have a 2-week expectation here in the US, and it’s more than sufficient to get someone off-boarded, though insufficient to find a replacement. And that’s fine, we just adjust to whatever the new headcount is (usually by cutting out a bit of work after reassigning more important work).
That said, I would appreciate some form of mandatory severance. We don’t have any, and it sucks when the market is poor.
Let’s say you have an opportunity to work somewhere else making 2x more, but you have to wait 3 months. Or let’s say your boss really sucks, but you have to tough it out for 3 months. Or let’s say a close family member dies but your company won’t give you time off to grieve, you just have to put that off for 3 months.
How productive do you think you’d be in those 3 months? I can’t speak for you, but I certainly wouldn’t be giving it my all…
In the US, there’s no minimum for most industries, but 2-weeks is expected (6-weeks in health care apparently). I think anyone can put up with almost anything for 2-weeks, and the 2-weeks isn’t even required, it’s just expected. And honestly, every time we had someone resign, we won’t trust them with new projects anyway, so they end up doing very little for most of those 2-weeks.
Europe’s economy is like an old Volvo. It’s slow but full of safety features in case your hit something. USA’s economy is like a classic Ford Mustang. It goes really fast on the straight but when you hit a bump things can go horribly wrong quickly. ~Mark Blyth
Depends on the country. Where I live, the maximum permitted by law is 30 days (unless both the employer and the employee agree on a different termination period). That goes for both firing and quitting.
Yes of course it does, but standardised employment contract are rather common in Europe - at least in the few countries I worked in, YMMV. There are exceptions of course, but I imagine for Americans the idea of state laws mandating your entitlement to three months of salaries plus severance money must sound outlandish.
Stop calling it Europe then, you’re referring to 2-3 specific countries. There are very different laws and ideas about the “standardized” contract in different countries.
I don’t know what are you talking about. In my country the standard is two weeks and max one month in special cases. I’ve participated in the hiring of multiple people from different European countries and they never asked for more than one month to join in, except when they wanted to relocate.
In France, the standard for software engineers is 3 months. Verified with this official source https://code.travail.gouv.fr/outils/preavis-demission. With convention “Bureaux d’études techniques, cabinets d’ingénieurs-conseils et sociétés de conseils”.
That’s crazy. So if they present a same day resignation note they have to pay a three month salary penalty? That’s just companies stealing workers’ money.
I don’t think I understand your comment, who has to pay a penalty? Who’s stealing what? You can’t do a same day resignation unless the company agrees. If they don’t agree, they can ask you to keep working for 3 months, and if you don’t come to work, they may declare you abandoned your job. Then, they don’t have to pay you, but you’re still officially an employee so you can’t legally start a new contract, they may ask you for a compensation payment and also sue you for damage.
In Spain you may resign before, but they can subtract for each missing working day to the notice period end the money they own you (it is a penalty, not just discounting from salary the days you are not working). In some cases leaving workers use their remaining PTO days to exchange to leave before the period of notice as they have the same value.
So in Spain a greater period of notice can result in bigger penalties when leaving a company, while companies can fire you on the spot (paying the required severance).
It’s often a negotiable point (and should be in your negotiations with any company): the amount of time I give an employer as notice is directly tied to my exit package type stuff.
Here it is defined in the collective bargain. So if you have 30 notice period and want to reduce it to 15 you have to bargain for it through one of the workers’ union present in the negotiations with the company.
If the company fire you they have to pay you, e.g., three months notice, regardless of if they want you to do the work or not.
If you quit without notice, you might have to pay the costs incurred by you quitting early, but that’s not your salary -because they now wouldn’t be paying you.
Costs might be something like the company having to refuse an order because they now don’t have enough people to do the work, or the increased cost of an expedited hiring process.
I don’t know how common costs are in France, but the UK has the same rules and essentially no one ever claims costs. You need to really fuck over your employee in a very explicit and well documented way for this to even be considered.
The main disadvantage is you will have a bad reference if you leave without notice.
So a company with a higher revenue may reclaim higher costs, even if they paid like shit? Doesn’t look fair to me.
In Spain that penalty for not complying with the notice period is automatic. Also companies hiring don’t care for references unless they know directly the person that wrote it (so only useful for small indistry sectors).
It works both ways, if they fire you, you still have a job for 3 months at least. Giving you plenty of time to find a new job. You also get half a day per week (paid) to use for soliciting other companies.
Generally it is more devastating to lose your job than it is to lose an employee. Since you have plenty of other employees who can temporarily fill in, while you generally have only one job that pays for everything you do.
Maybe this is a difference between countries, but is fired for cause and laid off treated different? Like I can understand and appreciate the protections if your position is eliminated or something. In the US we have unemployment insurance where you can get I think 3/4 of your normal pay if laid off. But if you get fired for cause then you’re on your own.
No, why you got fired does not in fact affect your need to eat food and house your family, so it’s not a factor.
And if you are “laid off”, ie the company says they don’t need your job anymore, you are usually entitled to a pretty nice redundancy payment too - plus the usual.
Really depends on the employer. One gave me a nice 3 months severance for being laid off. Another only gave me a weeks notice and only two weeks of severance. That sucked since bills continue to come in but now you gotta take a savings hit unless you can find a job in 2 weeks.
I ended up finding another job, but it took a few months and now I’m trying to crawl out of that debt hole.
I live in the Netherlands, and fired for cause is very hard over here. Basically the employer needs solid evidence of misbehaviour, and even then most judges will still rule in favour of the employee.
I guess there’s a limit here too. I’ve never made enough when having to reley on unemployment to hit the max. I just looked it up though and looks like its a bit over $800 for the weekly max.
Thats how it works in apparently most of europe. In poland for example its based on your tenure. With 3 month being the max after you work there for more than 3 years.
If you are not important enough for the company and want to start your new work earlier it can be negotiated down i think.
3 month bullshit for resign? What kind of work contract is that?
Let me introduce you to Europe
To be fair this is a counterpart for being harder to get fired compared to some USA states. It makes the economy less fast to adjust but it makes people’s life less stressful.
IDK my man, having three months of forewarning for resignation sounds pretty cool to me. I don’t really see it as a downside. Especially in Italian law, where you can avoid making things awkward by agreeing with your employer to make the resignation time as short as you both want, as long as those three months are paid out. Blessed.
It could make you miss you a job opening that needs someone earlier. Hadn’t have the issue myself, but I guess it happens.
If you’re hopping within the country, usually the local culture is adapted. I never had issues with it, employers expect you to have a resignation period.
Plus as I was saying companies don’t really like to have a working quitter, so they will usually negotiate for that time to be shortened. Maybe one month so you can transfer your knowledge to somebody else, then you’re out - with the three months money, naturally.
Three months would be excessive in the Netherlands. The legal minimum is one calendar month. When you resign you can always negotiate to shorten the period, but most of the time people will work the remainder of the contract. Also, your new employer might actually think there is something wrong if you can quit your current job faster than the one month.
Yeah one month is the standard practice here too, as a negotiated shortening of the three month notice. It’s good to have the other two months paid out, that’s all I’m saying.
As someone who has dealt with multiple people leaving (two fired, two quit with no warning, and two with warning), I honestly don’t see much value after the first couple days. So honestly, a 1-week period would be plenty, if only to give HR a chance to properly close everything out while you’re still easily reachable.
Even a month sounds excruciatingly long. We have a 2-week expectation here in the US, and it’s more than sufficient to get someone off-boarded, though insufficient to find a replacement. And that’s fine, we just adjust to whatever the new headcount is (usually by cutting out a bit of work after reassigning more important work).
That said, I would appreciate some form of mandatory severance. We don’t have any, and it sucks when the market is poor.
You wouldn’t because everyone is expecting you to do the right, corporate thing, so they’ll gladly wait for you to gracefully terminate your old job.
In tech anyways.
Let’s say you have an opportunity to work somewhere else making 2x more, but you have to wait 3 months. Or let’s say your boss really sucks, but you have to tough it out for 3 months. Or let’s say a close family member dies but your company won’t give you time off to grieve, you just have to put that off for 3 months.
How productive do you think you’d be in those 3 months? I can’t speak for you, but I certainly wouldn’t be giving it my all…
In the US, there’s no minimum for most industries, but 2-weeks is expected (6-weeks in health care apparently). I think anyone can put up with almost anything for 2-weeks, and the 2-weeks isn’t even required, it’s just expected. And honestly, every time we had someone resign, we won’t trust them with new projects anyway, so they end up doing very little for most of those 2-weeks.
Europe’s economy is like an old Volvo. It’s slow but full of safety features in case your hit something. USA’s economy is like a classic Ford Mustang. It goes really fast on the straight but when you hit a bump things can go horribly wrong quickly. ~Mark Blyth
Depends on the country. Where I live, the maximum permitted by law is 30 days (unless both the employer and the employee agree on a different termination period). That goes for both firing and quitting.
Yes of course it does, but standardised employment contract are rather common in Europe - at least in the few countries I worked in, YMMV. There are exceptions of course, but I imagine for Americans the idea of state laws mandating your entitlement to three months of salaries plus severance money must sound outlandish.
Stop calling it Europe then, you’re referring to 2-3 specific countries. There are very different laws and ideas about the “standardized” contract in different countries.
I don’t know what are you talking about. In my country the standard is two weeks and max one month in special cases. I’ve participated in the hiring of multiple people from different European countries and they never asked for more than one month to join in, except when they wanted to relocate.
In France, the standard for software engineers is 3 months. Verified with this official source https://code.travail.gouv.fr/outils/preavis-demission. With convention “Bureaux d’études techniques, cabinets d’ingénieurs-conseils et sociétés de conseils”.
That’s crazy. So if they present a same day resignation note they have to pay a three month salary penalty? That’s just companies stealing workers’ money.
I don’t think I understand your comment, who has to pay a penalty? Who’s stealing what? You can’t do a same day resignation unless the company agrees. If they don’t agree, they can ask you to keep working for 3 months, and if you don’t come to work, they may declare you abandoned your job. Then, they don’t have to pay you, but you’re still officially an employee so you can’t legally start a new contract, they may ask you for a compensation payment and also sue you for damage.
In Spain you may resign before, but they can subtract for each missing working day to the notice period end the money they own you (it is a penalty, not just discounting from salary the days you are not working). In some cases leaving workers use their remaining PTO days to exchange to leave before the period of notice as they have the same value. So in Spain a greater period of notice can result in bigger penalties when leaving a company, while companies can fire you on the spot (paying the required severance).
It’s often a negotiable point (and should be in your negotiations with any company): the amount of time I give an employer as notice is directly tied to my exit package type stuff.
Here it is defined in the collective bargain. So if you have 30 notice period and want to reduce it to 15 you have to bargain for it through one of the workers’ union present in the negotiations with the company.
No, not at all.
If the company fire you they have to pay you, e.g., three months notice, regardless of if they want you to do the work or not.
If you quit without notice, you might have to pay the costs incurred by you quitting early, but that’s not your salary -because they now wouldn’t be paying you.
Costs might be something like the company having to refuse an order because they now don’t have enough people to do the work, or the increased cost of an expedited hiring process.
I don’t know how common costs are in France, but the UK has the same rules and essentially no one ever claims costs. You need to really fuck over your employee in a very explicit and well documented way for this to even be considered.
The main disadvantage is you will have a bad reference if you leave without notice.
So a company with a higher revenue may reclaim higher costs, even if they paid like shit? Doesn’t look fair to me. In Spain that penalty for not complying with the notice period is automatic. Also companies hiring don’t care for references unless they know directly the person that wrote it (so only useful for small indistry sectors).
In theory. It’s just standard contract law. You violate the contract, so you have to make the other party right.
In practice, the court is likely to go, “You should’ve hired someone else to do the work. No costs”
I have 6 months in Germany, all managers at my company get this. I find it a bit too much, but it can usually be negotiated
India too.
It is actually really nice.
It works both ways, if they fire you, you still have a job for 3 months at least. Giving you plenty of time to find a new job. You also get half a day per week (paid) to use for soliciting other companies.
Generally it is more devastating to lose your job than it is to lose an employee. Since you have plenty of other employees who can temporarily fill in, while you generally have only one job that pays for everything you do.
Maybe this is a difference between countries, but is fired for cause and laid off treated different? Like I can understand and appreciate the protections if your position is eliminated or something. In the US we have unemployment insurance where you can get I think 3/4 of your normal pay if laid off. But if you get fired for cause then you’re on your own.
No, why you got fired does not in fact affect your need to eat food and house your family, so it’s not a factor.
And if you are “laid off”, ie the company says they don’t need your job anymore, you are usually entitled to a pretty nice redundancy payment too - plus the usual.
Really depends on the employer. One gave me a nice 3 months severance for being laid off. Another only gave me a weeks notice and only two weeks of severance. That sucked since bills continue to come in but now you gotta take a savings hit unless you can find a job in 2 weeks.
I ended up finding another job, but it took a few months and now I’m trying to crawl out of that debt hole.
I live in the Netherlands, and fired for cause is very hard over here. Basically the employer needs solid evidence of misbehaviour, and even then most judges will still rule in favour of the employee.
3/4th of your normal pay??? Lmfao
What state do you live in?
In California you max out at less than $2000 per month. Which won’t even cover rent.
I guess there’s a limit here too. I’ve never made enough when having to reley on unemployment to hit the max. I just looked it up though and looks like its a bit over $800 for the weekly max.
Thats how it works in apparently most of europe. In poland for example its based on your tenure. With 3 month being the max after you work there for more than 3 years. If you are not important enough for the company and want to start your new work earlier it can be negotiated down i think.