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There are also situations where you have a few weeks' notice in exchange for some kind of severance package - mainly in situations where an entire department or similar is getting laid off and there is work that needs to be done to finalize or handover things.
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Mar 20, 2017 18:42
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Neco posted:Okay now I am curious. Do workers in IT in the US usually get two / a few weeks' notice when they get fired and the employer doesn't absolutely have to (legally)? I guess I have only heard about gross misconduct where people are (understandably) fired on the spot. Do people who have the ability to turbofuck an organization get the chance to act spitefully when they're informed that five years of hard work are being rewarded with a layoff and MAYBE unemployment benefits because someone wants a new Porsche and sees IT as a cost center? Really, just ask "what would a psychopath with no constraints on its behavior do" and you'll probably have the answer to what corporate America would do.
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Mar 20, 2017 19:52
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Not getting any sort of advance notice or severance package for anything but getting fired for cause is super unusual and lovely.
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Mar 20, 2017 19:54
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Plorkyeran posted:Not getting any sort of advance notice or severance package for anything but getting fired for cause is super unusual and lovely. Happened to me on Friday 
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Mar 20, 2017 21:08
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Neco posted:Okay now I am curious. Do workers in IT in the US usually get two / a few weeks' notice when they get fired and the employer doesn't absolutely have to (legally)? I guess I have only heard about gross misconduct where people are (understandably) fired on the spot. Not at the low levels. There's no reason to. At higher levels in the org chart things get complicated. You'll often see things like, "Director Bob and Acme Co have mutually agreed to part ways. He'll be staying on till the end of the month."
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Mar 20, 2017 21:33
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You'll also see at that level "so and so has decided to leave and devote more time to their family".
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Mar 20, 2017 23:11
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Had to jump on a call tonight to make sure a major deployment went well. After explainin a bunch of poo poo I checked back in with my boss 50 minutes later. Asked him how it was going and he said "good! I'm about to run the finale migration" and I said "WAIT - you gotta say the magic words" then linke dhim to this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HKK4KmDlj8U and this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T4kBRC2co7Y computers can be fun
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Mar 21, 2017 02:58
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Neco posted:Okay now I am curious. Do workers in IT in the US usually get two / a few weeks' notice when they get fired and the employer doesn't absolutely have to (legally)? I guess I have only heard about gross misconduct where people are (understandably) fired on the spot. US employment is usually at-will, which means that I could in principle be out on my rear end tomorrow. In practice, most major tech firms are going to be very slightly less lovely than that, because they want a smooth transition when people leave and they don't want to spook remaining employees more than they have to. That means a couple of weeks notice, and possibly some severance. It's still very skewed in favor of the employer by most European norms. It's even more fun when your visa is tied to your job: if I'm fired I also have one month to get out of the country. For comparison: if I were fired back when I still worked in Sweden I'd have a union-mandated 4 months notice (legal minimum was 2 months in the 2-4 year bracket), plus the company would by law have to fire a more recently hired engineer first unless they could prove that I wasn't qualified for that engineer's position. It's one hell of a difference.
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Mar 21, 2017 03:48
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Xerophyte posted:For comparison: if I were fired back when I still worked in Sweden I'd have a union-mandated 4 months notice (legal minimum was 2 months in the 2-4 year bracket), plus the company would by law have to fire a more recently hired engineer first unless they could prove that I wasn't qualified for that engineer's position. It's one hell of a difference. Hahaha. If I had to come up with literally the 100% polar opposite of this it would be the US system.
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Mar 21, 2017 03:56
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KoRMaK posted:Had to jump on a call tonight to make sure a major deployment went well. After explainin a bunch of poo poo I checked back in with my boss 50 minutes later. Asked him how it was going and he said "good! I'm about to run the finale migration" and I said "Hold onto your butts!" and "Ah ah ah! You didn't say the magic word!" were regularly played clips at my old job. Also "Entrance of the Gladiators," when we had a process failure that blew up the production environment. In cases where the blow-up needed to be fixed by open-palm-smashing a fix into production, we'd get a remix of Bill O'Reilly's "Do it live!" rant. On Fridays where people tried to get work done too late in the afternoon, it was "Bang the Drum All Day." Good times. Bad speakers.
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Mar 21, 2017 04:07
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CPColin posted:"Hold onto your butts!" and "Ah ah ah! You didn't say the magic word!" were regularly played clips at my old job. Also "Entrance of the Gladiators," when we had a process failure that blew up the production environment. In cases where the blow-up needed to be fixed by open-palm-smashing a fix into production, we'd get a remix of Bill O'Reilly's "Do it live!" rant. To quote myself form the other thread KoRMaK posted:Cross postin the good times https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z4uj5NZS7g8 You and your ilk sound like good people. Hopefully I see you out there in teh wild some day production cowboy
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Mar 21, 2017 04:21
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Xerophyte posted:For comparison: if I were fired back when I still worked in Sweden I'd have a union-mandated 4 months notice (legal minimum was 2 months in the 2-4 year bracket), plus the company would by law have to fire a more recently hired engineer first unless they could prove that I wasn't qualified for that engineer's position. It's one hell of a difference. Here in Iceland, you are legally entitled to a month's notice when at 0-6 months and 3 months after that. The custom in IT is that you don't work your notice, you just get payed for that period (usually a lump sum) and don't work. There are exceptions, of course, but that's the rule of thumb. You're also legally entitled to 2 working days of payed vacation every month, which works out to 24 days per year, which is actually a little over a month off (weekends and bank holidays don't count towards your days off). Maternity leave is 9 months total split between the parents, with each parent taking at least 3 months of that. Oh, and if you work more than 40 hours per week, your employer is legally mandated to pay you overtime, or compensate you in a equivalent manner. I know US people are probably tired of hearing about this poo poo, but drat, I'm just baffled by your total lack of worker's rights. I've been tempted to get a job in the US from time to time, but I just couldn't deal with it. You people gotta organize and get some drat rights. Anyway, development talk - I've been working at the same place since graduating in 2014, and I've been working on the same, decades old system since then, doing bugfixing and incrementally adding new features. We're starting a major new version, which will include a couple of brand new components built from the ground up, and god drat I'm having a blast. Making something new from the ground up, using the tech that I want to use, designed the way I want it, without the baggage of a decade of legacy development to work around, is a absolutely amazing fresh breeze. Making new poo poo is great, you guys. Maintaining old poo poo is fun too, but nothing beats a clean slate.
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Mar 22, 2017 19:45
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Yeah greenfield project are really nice, just make sure to keep an eye open for scope creep. As far as worker rights lacking in the U.S.A. my biggest WTF is the lack of paid maternity, everything else the huge salary can somewhat compensate but no time off during such an important moment in your life just seem so... heartless to stay polite.
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Mar 22, 2017 21:09
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It's amazing how these so-called "workers' rights" are useless to anybody with enough self control to have savings.
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Mar 22, 2017 21:56
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sarehu posted:It's amazing how these so-called "workers' rights" are useless to anybody with enough self control to have savings. Not a deep thinker eh?
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Mar 22, 2017 22:04
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sarehu posted:It's amazing how these so-called "workers' rights" are useless to anybody with enough self control to have savings. No they aren't. Source: Have savings and worker's rights.
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Mar 22, 2017 22:06
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sarehu posted:It's amazing how these so-called "workers' rights" are useless to anybody with enough self control to have savings. The autism is off the charts with this one.
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Mar 23, 2017 00:30
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I sometimes don't know how to feel about these issues. On one hand I work with federal employees that are incompetent and impossible to fire. On the other hand, I am a contractor and I've personally seen great workers get cut for the stupidest of reasons.
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Mar 23, 2017 02:59
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Rubellavator posted:I sometimes don't know how to feel about these issues. On one hand I work with federal employees that are incompetent and impossible to fire. On the other hand, I am a contractor and I've personally seen great workers get cut for the stupidest of reasons. Thb I really don't care that much about WORKERS RIGHTS but the double standards piss me right the gently caress off. Like the concept where you're expected to give two weeks notice and yet the reverse is not at all true. Also we have anti-rights here in the states. I just quit a job where I had three full weeks of accrued PTO. The company stole (and yes, I mean to use this word because it's straight-up wage theft) 100% of that compensation from me because they're based out of a state that hasn't banned the practice.
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Mar 23, 2017 03:04
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My biggest issue with these discussions is the sometimes implicit assumption that the stronger the workers rights, the better: in that there is rarely an argument explaining why the specific level of rights being advocated is the right level. Would a requirement of 1 year advance notice to let someone go be better than 3 months? If not, is 3 months the right number? More? Less?
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Mar 23, 2017 03:52
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It's an issue of labor economics. It's a complex field, but fun to dig into.
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Mar 23, 2017 03:55
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This is part of why sometimes I grab a bunch of documents related to pay, performance reviews, etc. (not company protected IP or anything) before I leave a job - to protect myself and to retain evidence if I need to hire a lawyer. Thankfully, I've only had one employer I wouldn't trust (out of incompetence primarily) and by the time I left I burned through PTO zeroed out my balance sheet, so to speak. However, in cases of firings you normally don't exactly get much of a chance to retrieve these docs, so you have two options of perpetual vigilance of your docs or just never getting in a situation where you'd be fired.
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Mar 23, 2017 03:58
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Steve French posted:My biggest issue with these discussions is the sometimes implicit assumption that the stronger the workers rights, the better: in that there is rarely an argument explaining why the specific level of rights being advocated is the right level. Would a requirement of 1 year advance notice to let someone go be better than 3 months? If not, is 3 months the right number? More? Less? There are macroeconomic studies of the effects of various labor laws, most of which conclude that fewer restrictions is better for GDP. A few don't, because labor economics is not an exact science. For employee satsifaction and security, clearly more protection is in fact always better but there are also steep diminishing returns. Opinion on which of those axes public policy should bother optimizing and how to weight them varies wildly between individuals and societies so it's not likely you'll be able to get a consensus answer to what the right number is. I will say that I don't think any of the approaches mentioned in the thread are fundamentally untenable or anything. Sweden has strong unions and very strict employee protection laws, which probably does hamper startups and entrepreneurship and does make companies more hesitant to hire more people unless they're sure there's a long term need. On the other hand, employees are typically take the long-term view and have high job satisfaction and performance, and the Swedish tech industry is booming. The US has no techie unions whatsoever and minimal employee protections, which likely does help startups be agile and innovative (and also assholes). On the other hand, far as I can tell SV engineers jump ship all the drat time so there's a continuous stream of brain drain in every team, but the US tech industry is booming. I'd also say that my quality of life as an engineer in San Francisco is not significantly different to my quality of life as an engineer in Gothenburg when everything is factored in, but that might be cultural bias talking.
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Mar 23, 2017 04:32
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Xerophyte posted:Sweden has strong unions and very strict employee protection laws, which probably does hamper startups and entrepreneurship and does make companies more hesitant to hire more people unless they're sure there's a long term need. On the other hand, employees are typically take the long-term view and have high job satisfaction and performance, and the Swedish tech industry is booming. Sweden's labor market is a big reason why its immigrants do such a poor job of integrating.
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Mar 23, 2017 05:32
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Steve French posted:My biggest issue with these discussions is the sometimes implicit assumption that the stronger the workers rights, the better: in that there is rarely an argument explaining why the specific level of rights being advocated is the right level. Would a requirement of 1 year advance notice to let someone go be better than 3 months? If not, is 3 months the right number? More? Less? Like everything else in life, there obviously is a balance to be struck. A year's advance would be absurd - In my view, every bit as absurd as zero notice which is legal in some US states. I think either extreme (way too stringent employee protection and mandated benefits vs practically zero) is harmful for both parties, employer and employee. If it's too hard or impossible to lay people off, businesses will suffer, which will cause workers to suffer in the long term, as well.
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Mar 23, 2017 18:39
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In some US states (California, Massachusetts, for example) this effectively exists -- mandatory vacation payouts. They put enough crimp on the ability of small companies to operate -- you end up having to keep extra cash around -- that they've switched to "unlimited vacation." We're talking less than a month's worth of notice here. Multiply by 20 employees and you've got to keep ~$200K around. Of course, people can take this payment in advance, by using their vacation hours. If you should get a payout for getting laid off or fired, why not give people the option of receiving a lump sum payment in advance, in exchange for no payout if they get removed from the company? Is not being able to make such a deal also a worker's right?
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Mar 23, 2017 19:44
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It may work in the short term, but I don't think "hop to the employer that isn't currently treating employees like poo poo" scales. Like 5 years ago did none of y'all get a check from the literal cabal of billionaires colluding to suppress industry wages? Or are you convinced your personal negotiation skills can make up for the deliberate actions of folks who can buy and sell you a few dozen times before lunch? Regardless of "can," should they have to? Would your personal negotiating position not be helped by Microsoft giving 6 figures for entry level folks?
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Mar 23, 2017 19:58
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revmoo posted:Thb I really don't care that much about WORKERS RIGHTS but the double standards piss me right the gently caress off. Like the concept where you're expected to give two weeks notice and yet the reverse is not at all true. Also we have anti-rights here in the states. I just quit a job where I had three full weeks of accrued PTO. The company stole (and yes, I mean to use this word because it's straight-up wage theft) 100% of that compensation from me because they're based out of a state that hasn't banned the practice. Was this something you knew about ahead of time? I can't imagine any other reaction to that than being "Go on 3 weeks vacation, start new job, call up on day 22 saying you quit." And this is from someone who wanted to burn the poo poo out of someone for basically doing that. The difference is the company we were at acted like adults.
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Mar 23, 2017 20:39
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Hughlander posted:Was this something you knew about ahead of time? I can't imagine any other reaction to that than being "Go on 3 weeks vacation, start new job, call up on day 22 saying you quit." And this is from someone who wanted to burn the poo poo out of someone for basically doing that. The difference is the company we were at acted like adults. No it wasn't. It kind of hit me after I quit and when they asked for a exit interview I told them sure, if they were going to be paying out my earned PTO and they said no. I then spent several furious hours poring over state laws (three states involved, weird situation) and my employment contracts and realized that yes, in several states, it's totally legal to revoke earned PTO upon termination. I'm not talking about PTO that resets every year either, I accrued that poo poo month by month and they absolutely stole it from me, regardless of what the law may or may not permit. I have to mail them a letter shortly, because part of my contract stipulates that I tell them where I moved on to after quitting, so I'm going to be running everything by an attorney one last time to be sure.
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Mar 23, 2017 22:23
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Speaking of PTO, the company I'm thinking of going to offers less of it than my current place. Something lovely like 11 days per year plus 1 day per year with them. I'm at like 20 at my current place. How willing to negotiate on PTO days are places usually? I could maybe do 15 days but any less is a big step backward in terms of quality of work/life balance.
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Mar 23, 2017 22:59
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sarehu posted:In some US states (California, Massachusetts, for example) this effectively exists -- mandatory vacation payouts. They put enough crimp on the ability of small companies to operate -- you end up having to keep extra cash around -- that they've switched to "unlimited vacation." We're talking less than a month's worth of notice here. Multiply by 20 employees and you've got to keep ~$200K around. Of course, people can take this payment in advance, by using their vacation hours. Requiring three months of notice would also help prevent a mad scramble for cash.
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Mar 23, 2017 23:05
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sarehu posted:In some US states (California, Massachusetts, for example) this effectively exists -- mandatory vacation payouts. They put enough crimp on the ability of small companies to operate -- you end up having to keep extra cash around -- that they've switched to "unlimited vacation." We're talking less than a month's worth of notice here. Multiply by 20 employees and you've got to keep ~$200K around. Of course, people can take this payment in advance, by using their vacation hours. Hi, I'm the guy who's perfectly confident that I'm going to be receiving a paycheck in two weeks from my 20-person company that has less than $200K in the bank
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Mar 24, 2017 01:42
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Makeout Patrol posted:Hi, I'm the guy who's perfectly confident that I'm going to be receiving a paycheck in two weeks from my 20-person company that has less than $200K in the bank That's not the discussion point though. The discussion is the alleged state law that you have to keep fluid enough funds to payout 100% of the paid time off of 100% of the employees in case every last one quits the same instant. It's not about base payroll.
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Mar 24, 2017 03:08
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Hughlander posted:That's not the discussion point though. The discussion is the alleged state law that you have to keep fluid enough funds to payout 100% of the paid time off of 100% of the employees in case every last one quits the same instant. It's not about base payroll. I think the point was that a company with 20 people that has trouble keeping 200k ready is a company that's not long for this world anyway.
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Mar 24, 2017 03:28
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In California IIRC the state can even dip into C-level employees' personal wealth to pay employees' last paychecks. Maybe conditional on certain facts. I don't know how that applies to vacation payouts. I don't think it has to be in "the bank."
sarehu fucked around with this message at 03:31 on Mar 24, 2017 |
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Mar 24, 2017 03:29
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sarehu posted:In California IIRC the state can even dip into C-level employees' personal wealth to pay employees' last paychecks. Maybe conditional on certain facts. I don't know how that applies to vacation payouts. I don't think it has to be in "the bank." Good.
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Mar 24, 2017 03:31
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Strategically, how would one start a programmers' union in the US?
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Mar 24, 2017 04:00
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Bongo Bill posted:Strategically, how would one start a programmers' union in the US? With VC cash and in the Bay area, same way you start a programmer's anything else in the US.
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Mar 24, 2017 04:05
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Realistically the second anyone tries it they'll be out of a job, replaced by H1Bs, or just straight offshoring everything. 
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Mar 24, 2017 04:10
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Call it a consulting firm.
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Mar 24, 2017 05:05
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