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Comment by gambiting | Hacker News Reader

"both of them would lose their job next week with zero notice."

What kind of 3rd world country do you live in where this is legal? I just want to point out that businesses needing to balance their workforce is normal. Living in a society where letting go of employees without notice is not. Maybe that's the part that needs to be addressed as a matter of urgency, not the management's delusions of AI capabilities - those will verify themselves very quickly in practice - employment law takes time and effort to change

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My last job I was notified via text message on a Saturday that I didn't need to come back into the office Monday. The USA has basically zero protections for employees.

Yep. My company, based in the US, did that to most of our US team. Being somewhere with decent employment regulation meant that they kept us and not the US guys.

https://www.dir.ca.gov/dlse/TerminationOfEmployment.pdf

So, USA is the answer?

The good US workplaces will give you a few months of severance, but you can still expect to receive an email late Friday night that says "don't come in on Monday". They typically don't want fired/laid-off employees in the office at all (in theory for "security", but mostly to prevent labour organisation)

That's fine - being paid for your time in lieu of notice is practiced even in countries with very strong employee protections. That's still "notice" as far as I'm concerned.

To be fair, what is often called "zero notice" actually means "you are fired, this is your notice, and for the next N weeks until your employment ends, you don't need to come in anymore as we have already revoked your access, but of course we pay you the salary that you are entitled to." That us just much longer to say and less catchy too.

Yeah well in the US employees can be fired at will. However in the post it seems the author didn't tell his reports they risked/were about to getting fired. I don't understand that kind of loyalty to your employer, esp. when, as is the case here, the employer has zero obligations towards their staff.

Would it make much difference if you got two weeks or a months notice. Out of the bad things corporations do this seems a long way down the list.

The most outrageous sentence frankly is

"we can't ship your stuff because of some material restriction or let you pick up a box with some dignity, so we destroyed your stuff"

Really? never heard of anything like this even when I was in the states. If anyone tried this anywhere in Europe the case would almost certainly end up in a parliamentary questions session.

If you want something outrageous, I was fired as my dad was on his deathbed, he died before my 2 weeks notice finished and that created a lot of heat since I did not send them their laptop in my last day as I was busy preparing his funeral instead. They did not care, it was surreal, and I completly lost faith in humanity as a result

I think it's pretty normal to have like one/two week notice period in most of the work except for maybe in Europe where the notice period can be 3 months

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