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
(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.)