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Comment by irrational | Hacker News Reader

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.

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That has never been the case at any company I have ever worked for. My impression is that two weeks notice with continued access is pretty standard so long as you're leaving on good terms.

his username is literally irrational... kinda makes sense

> That has never been the case at any company I have ever worked for.

Many companies are essentially antagonistic with all IT resources. It's very common where positions are not well paid or the company is not tech-centric, eg Mike Ferry Organization

At Microsoft, the standard practice is that if you say you're leaving to take a job a company they consider a competitor, they cut off all your access at the end of the day, even if your manager wants you to stick around for knowledge transfer. If it's not a competitor, it's up to you how much notice you want to give. If you say you're leaving but don't say who your next employer is, they assume it's a competitor.

Facebook was classified as a competitor, Amazon was not.

I can confirm based on my experience that at Microsoft, depending on a lot of factors like your level, role, information you have access to, and where you’re going, that they may terminate immediately as soon as you give them notice.

Amazon has rapid termination processes as well but I’m not as clear on their criteria.

If you work for a big technology company and are jumping to a perceived competitor, and/or if you have access to sensitive information, then you should expect that the day you give notice will be your last day.

> that they may terminate immediately as soon as you give them notice.

Which is nonsense, because it’s the employee that chooses when to tell the employer. If I want to exfiltrate confidential data, I’ll do it first, then I resign.

It’s different on layoffs, where disgruntled employees could break havoc.

That's not how Corporate Accountability works. If you tender your resignation and I continue to provide you access to the systems then I'm accountable for having continued your access to those systems.

If you exfiltrated confidential data prior to tendering your resignation then no one remaining in the organization is responsible for your actions. It may trigger a policy review to minimize the exfiltration of confidential data, but no one remaining is accountable. Moreover, the exfiltration of confidential data will put you in felony land and your employer will prosecute. You're guaranteed to lose your new job too, and likely never work again.

No, what most employees do instead - for those who do these kinds of things, which is exceedingly rare - is destroy data. That is extremely damaging to an enterprise.

There are plenty of motivations to get your rear end away from the keyboard! Some are legally mandated, depending upon which industry you're working in.

Which is still bonkers. Plenty of people with high level access have notice periods of 6 months in some European countries and work their remaining time after giving notice or at least part of it, because they negotiated the 6 down to 2 or 3.

If an employee has been malicious during their tenure then other systems should have detected and caught that. That scenario can be decoupled from the termination scenario.

Think about making a 2x2 matrix (nod to Pascal’s wager):

Across the top: fire immediately, don’t fire immediately.

Down the side: employee is benign, employee is malicious.

There’s only one square where the company is at risk- bottom right.

The algebra is easy: terminate immediately and the company is not at risk.

And for some reason there's a particular country in this world where this is interpreted in one way and one way only (well not 100% true either but the odds of being treated one way are waaaaay skewed towards what you're saying) while in other countries it's interpreted in other ways and they're all just fine. I've personally witnessed and been part of the other squares over my entire career.

If entire countries can run on the other squares, why can't the US?

Some countries selectively put some people in the "you have a very long notice period" and "you will not be working for us, but still be paid, during your notice period" (so-called gardening leave).

Not unusual in the finance industry, somewhat unusual (but I have heard of it) in "more pure tech". Probably also more common the further up you get in the corporate hierarchy.

> No, what most employees do instead - for those who do these kinds of things, which is exceedingly rare - is destroy data.

So the employee could destroy data first, then resign.

> If you tender your resignation and I continue to provide you access to the systems then I'm accountable for having continued your access to those systems.

Well, if the employee is still an employee, and they need access to the systems to do their work… what would the alternative be? How could you honour the pre-resignation time otherwise?

I’m perplexed by the sudden drop in trust at resignation time. If an employee is trustworthy, why should their attitude change just because they resigned? And if they aren’t trustworthy, you have a problem even before their resigning.

> I can confirm based on my experience that at Microsoft, depending on a lot of factors like your level, role, information you have access to, and where you’re going, that they may terminate immediately as soon as you give them notice.

I saw Apple do this. Not to me.

Many companies require staff to leave immediately upon tendering their resignation - including non-IT companies like mine. You tender your resignation and all your access is removed within 24 hours. I work for a utility company that manages what the Department of Homeland Security classifies as 'National Critical Infrastructure', i.e. generation plants, transmission, distribution, metering, and FERC mandates your access is cut off ASAP. You'll get paid for your last two weeks, but you can't do anything.

My friends in health and finance have said they have similar mandates. Us folks in IT can mess up too many things to be granted continued access. We need to be cut off.

Even prior to working for a utility I've worked at places where people were escorted off the property by security when they tendered their resignation. Their personal items in their office would be packed up and shipped to them. This has been going on for decades.

There was one job I had where I was so well-liked and we had considerable mutual respect that I was still granted visitor access to the facilities, meaning I required an escort. I no longer had access to any of the systems, but I could guide those who did. That worked out really well, too. Heck, they negotiated an extra six weeks instead of two and paid me 50% more to boot! That made a helluva impression at my new company! Then I got a great sign-on bonus at my new company! Boy, those were the days!

Wow!

I have almost 30 years in tech and thankfully have never run across that. But I can see how that could be a thing for other companies/industries.

Every place I have worked I have given 3 week notice, and every potential employer has been ok with me starting in 3 weeks (except one).

The one exception was a company that balked at my request to start in 3 weeks in order to give my current employer time. They countered with "Well, take it now and start immediately, or leave it. You must not be serious about working here." I countered with "You are probably looking to hire people with no sense of responsibility to their current employer". Bullet dodged.

I have quit before I have started. I accepted an offer from a company (after being jobless) but my interaction with their HR the day before I was to start was so rude and combative that after I left, called my future boss there (who I really liked) and told him I was rescinding my acceptance. I then grovelled back to another job whose offer I had turned down (and they re-made the offer). It all worked out.

One of my employer's had that policy too; until I quit. They made an exception and wanted me to stay to help transition. I did help where I could (because I liked them and knew they needed it, I know I didn't have to)

I worked at one company that was like that, but it was a result of the CEO being pretty awkward about people leaving the company, something he wasn't used to until huge growth hit. That's a red flag IMO.

I quit a place that had the opposite, you were required to work your last two weeks, no vacation. It was frustrating because I had mapped out using up my vacation before the job change, unaware of the policy.

What are they going to do? Fire you?

Even worse, they might even try to _hire_ you!

Sounds like you should've been "sick" during those last 2 weeks.

If I quit and gave two weeks notice (and expected to be paid for that time), I would absolutely expect to be working for those two weeks doing the whole handoff thing which is why notice is often the custom. Past that, I'd expect vacation to be either paid out where those are the rules or taken after "last day of work" (which has some benefits for the employee).

In this case, you probably weren't actually required so if you really wanted to take the full vacation, you should probably be have been "I won't be here on Monday."

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

Your company is doing the something that is legal but still a jerk move.

Not really, they could be exposed to risk and it's typical to just pay you for the 2 weeks and cut off access so the risk is mitigated

Not paying out the 2 weeks would be sort of a jerk move. But simply cutting a check and saying "It's been good having you" as they show you the door is perfectly reasonable in some circumstances.

The risk isn't that you'll call them a jerk, it is that when your new job falls through, your old job can no longer credibly claim that you left voluntarily because they moved your quit date. You were fired. So you'll be able to claim unemployment and the business' unemployment insurance premiums could rise.

It's bound to be cheaper to pay the two weeks than to pay the increase in unemployment insurance premiums for every remaining employee in perpetuity. In that sense, it's short-sighted to not pay you through your notice period.

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 standard.

We were talking about risks. You can be pretty sure, and then a judge rules against you. Are you willing to take that risk? (Sure, maybe you know a judge. Or you live in a state with fewer worker protections. IDK, but I'm not making this up, and laws vary from state to state.)

> 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.

It is a courtesy to give notice, and one must generally be prepared to extend courtesies in order to receive them in kind. You sound like a person who understands all of this. It is certainly going to vary from state to state.

As far as risks go, increasing UI premiums is one risk; it might be easy to invent a valid cause for immediate termination when someone gives notice, but also quite transparent in terms of ethics as you say. Concretely, that would also be leaving employers at a greater risk that word gets around with the remaining employees, and then you likely won't see employees giving notice anymore, or affecting morale of the remaining employees, or what else.

https://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/tools-and-samples/hr-...

To be fair, I'm pretty sure that I won't find the precedent I'm looking for in my own state either, but the link above is interesting: if your company has a policy that employees must give notice to quit, whether it was legally enforceable or not, with a termination after notice is given that policy could be used as evidence against you!

I guess it's a good idea to have a firm grasp of the law and review your own company's policies regularly, to be sure they align with the law! For another example in the same vein, I thought that only California made non-competes illegal but there are at least two other states, and it may be illegal to try to enforce a non-compete at a federal level soon.

https://www.foxrothschild.com/publications/ftc-proposes-rule...

(Not that this has anything to do with notice or unemployment...)

In what way would they be exposed to risk? If I had a desire to exfiltrate to your competitor, I would just not bother telling you I'm leaving, exfiltrate, and give zero notice. Having this policy just makes you look like an idiot.

Nah, it’s pretty normal. Particularly for sales positions.

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