You push back the start date until they've finished that process. It's a common request, I've made it several times, my wife has made it several times and it's always been granted in my experience.
>How's that supposed to work, when the process dictates that onboarding begins on your start date?
You remind them that they better finish their background check and sign the final documents fast if they want you on that date.
Whatever is the minimum notice period you have to give your current job (eg. 2 weeks), the countdown starts after you get the real signed offer from the future job.
you shouldn't risk fucking up your career over loyalty for a job that has not even hired you yet. If they want that loyalty, they need to first sign the papers that makes you an official part of their team.
> Whatever is the minimum notice period you have to give your current job (eg. 2 weeks), the countdown starts after you get the real signed offer from the future job.
At least in the US, I know of no requirement for 2 weeks notice, anywhere. It's just considered polite.
> If they want that loyalty, they need to first sign the papers that makes you an official part of their team.
Again in the US, I know of no papers that I've ever had from a company that guaranteed anything important. You might end up with something guaranteeing moving expenses or something, but they can still fire you on day 1, if you even make it that far.
Then you give -10 days notice. 2 weeks is a nicety and not legally required in the USA. Probably not required in many other places as well. It's unfortunate but I've never had a manager get too upset about it.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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!
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.
> 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
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.
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."
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
Also jobs often/usually fire people with 0 day notice and no severance. I don't know why it's an expectation that employees would give notice without any reciprocation.
0 day notice and no severance is unusual, at least for skilled professional jobs in the US. It does happen, but usually only for some unusual circumstance, like some kind of employee misbehavior or a sudden financial calamity for the company. Two weeks notice by the employee or severance by the employer is the most common case on both sides, probably for roughly 80% or so of professional jobs including all of my own. Of course it does suck to be in the outlying 20%, and the anecdotes will trend towards reporting that case, but is the minority. Most actors on both sides behave well, even if there is a substantial minority of problems.
(Edit since some replies seem to have the wrong idea - termination effective immediately without notice is common, but usually there is severance pay except in cases of misconduct or disaster.)
Anecdotally, I have never heard of a US company giving two weeks notice for a termination of any kind. The vast majority of terminations I've seen are immediate, but I've also seen companies give termination dates in the (relatively) far future to employees (generally a couple months, but I've seen 1-2 years).
Severance is also only common in large organizations. I've seen few small startups or bootstrapped companies pay severance when letting people go.
I've seen it once in 25 years. Management told an engineer that she would be layed off/terminated "when she is done with the project she is working on". She milked the project for almost four months and then quit on her own after finding a new job. Turns out she did almost zero work during those four months. Can't say I blame her.
I did something similar about 15 years ago. I worked in a small remote office far from the company's headquarters. On an all-hands call one of the executives let it slip that they were going to shutter our office and close down the remote branch in 7 months. We kind of saw it coming, as 90% of the people who worked in that office had been laid off in the previous months, and we didn't really have any new work coming in or projects left to finish. They didn't just lay us off, though, so the 15 of us that were still there just got paid to go to job interviews for 6 months. It was pretty surreal, but I'm glad we got the heads up regardless.
Same. Never seen a 2 weeks in the US from the company. It's either "get out, now." or else it's a layoff situation where there is usually 2-3 months to let them gracefully out.
Exceptions being PIPs, if you want to characterize it that way; usually a gracious way to push people out without the drama or severance.
I now live in Canada and there are some different requirements re: getting terminated.
I knew approximately two months ahead of a layoff and was offered a stay bonus to stick around until the last day.
I have also worked at two other companies where we informed certain workers of an impending layoff and provided stay bonuses to them. One of them included basically a non-disclosure agreement since the impending layoff was not publicly known yet.
It may not be common knowledge but it definitely happens.
Right, termination is usually done immediately, nobody wants to keep a jilted employee on hand to cause damage on their way out the door. But unless the termination was for some kind of misbehavior, severance pay is most common, even among fairly small companies in my experience. (Maybe not a startup in immediate danger of insolvency, of course.)
We were told the company was shrinking by almost half once we hit 1.0 on our project, which was still six weeks away. We would get extra severance if we stayed and if we hit the deadline.
i have worked full-time at 6 different companies in engineering and management roles (admittedly none larger than ~300-500 people) and this wasn't the case for anyone at any of them, and have also never heard anecdotes from people in my life in general about this happening to them.
i don't not-believe you, but I would be super surprised if the 80% figure is accurate
the more common thing i've seen time and again is someone giving two week notice and then being told to not bother with the last two weeks (and not getting paid for it either). after one of my employers did this to a coworker i liked who was relying on that final paycheck for rent, i quit a couple months later with 0 notice "because it seems like you guys don't do 2 week notice here". I got threatened with a baseless lawsuit for that cheeky stunt and they abused DMCA claims on my consulting website to try to get it taken down
Don't know what the law is like in most states in the US but in the EU if the employee has been with the company for longer than 6 months it wouldn't even be legal to fire with 0 notice & no severance - generally companies wants you out asap but continue paying your salary for the minimums require by law. In my experience at least 2 weeks and more commonly 1+ months (I've seen people get 3 months, that have worked at the company for several years).
This of course doesn't apply if the employee did something like outright breaking the law or the terms of their contract (rare).
I think it goes without saying that the EU is different.
Here in Germany, in fact things are problematic in the other direction. For the last 2 hires I made, their previous company forced them to work through their 3 month notice period.
It's unreasonable for the company to want you to stick around for 3 months before you switch jobs, but it's not unreasonable to ask a company to let an employee who has been with them for years 3 months' (notice or severance) before they fire them (as the power balance is not equal - the employee is supposedly dependent on that salary for their livelihood and not everyone can instantly land a new job after being laid off).
Overall even as a business owner myself I prefer the pro-employee German system over the free-for-all American one.
Many, but definitely not all. And Google and other big tech companies usually have “at-will” employment on both sides. Just know that it very well might be an option for you.
Other countriesin the world, besides the US. In European countries you can't just tell someone tonnit come tomorrow and not pay anything. Sure you csn tell them to not come anymore if you want to keep your secrets or whatever but the company has to pay for this notice period like the person was working there.
When I or colleagues have changed jobs then we have given a month or more notice, continued working etc. Only when someone is fired for total incompetence or just not showing up you don't want to see them anymore ever in the office so the company pays for the notice period time.
Varies by province in Canada but generally there is a fixed amount of time you need to be at the company before they can just kick you out. For example in Alberta if you've been with an employer longer than 2 years you must give them 2 weeks. They can terminate you immediately after you resign, but they own you 2 weeks of pay.
Likewise, if the company lays you off, they have to give you up to 8-weeks notice depending on how many years you were with the company; 10+ years warrants the full 8-weeks, while 2-4 years in service gets you 2-weeks. These are also mandatory minimums; some companies or employees with contracts or collective agreements may get / offer more.
Plenty of loopholes there, like for "just cause", and some industries are "exempted by custom" or by law, like construction or forestry.
I have never worked for a company that does the background checks, drug screens, etc on your start date,
Typical process that I have had both as employee and a manager is
1. Offer Letter
2. Offer Accepted
3. Pre-Employment Activities start. Start Date is set 2 weeks out
4. Pre-Employment Activities Completed 1 Week out
5. New Employee Starts.
It would/should not be an issue for an incoming employee to request a start day 2 week after Pre-Employment Activities are cleared if they wanted to give notice
I don't think it's that uncommon. I have personally worked at two companies that didn't do the background check until after employment (which I would never do again), and I've heard this anecdote a few times from others.
hmm I know for some position there has been a high first day no show rate, I wonder if that is what drives that position? Background checks while not super expensive are not cheap either and if you have a high number of people noping out before the first day I could see where they would want to mitigate those costs.
With the changes in drug laws, and this I have seen some companies starting to forgo pre-employment drug screens, which IMO is a good thing.
I am not sure what value most of these Pre-Employment checks provide anyway really.
These were US-based startups, to be clear. I would be surprised if very many larger companies did it this way since they generally have a formal process for this.
