- It's considered professional for employees give their employers two weeks notice before leaving. It's considered completely reasonable for employers to terminate employees and not even pay them for the rest of the day.
- It's considered unprofessional to talk about what you're getting paid.
- It's considered normal for potential employers to do background checks, call references, and even run credit checks on potential employees. Ask a potential employer for references or any information on their financials, and that's weird. The latter is particularly strange, because the employer is paying the employee, so the employee has a much larger interest in making sure the employer can pay them.
I have never worked anywhere that did not provide notice or some severance. Even at a startup that cut 50% prior to going down in flames, they paid those half that were released two weeks pay and two weeks insurance coverage. (even though they were asked to leave immediately)
Large corporations tend to offer minimums plus based on years of service at termination.
Even termination with cause (performance, not legal) will generally be after a half year of 'remediation' training, then plenty of notice to find a new job.
The other thing is that you seem to be speaking as a developer. Everyone knows that our industry treats employees better than average. You really need to look at the broader landscape though.
I think this is a misleading (although frequently stated) comment.
Large companies I've worked for have a bureaucratic procedure before they fire anyone, and generally allow people to save face even when they really want you gone.
Technically it's "at will", but I think it's primarily the mom & pop businesses that are going to fire on a whim.
Furthermore, you are implying that there are no constraints on companies in the US, like for instance the WARN act.
Talk to some people in the hospital business who are over 50. I have a friend who worked for a huge hospital, was good at her job, had been doing it for many decades. One day an HR person called her into the office, said she needed to take a test, and said she had to leave that day until she took the test, administered by some 3rd party. A younger worker, doing the same job, also didn't have this credential they invented, but she got to stay. She wasn't making as much money because she hadn't been there as long.
My friend had a couple of weeks to study for this test, which was about the physics of the machine she had been using for 30 years. She failed the 1st time, they wouldn't tell her her score, and wouldn't tell her what she got right or wrong. The test itself was ridiculous: how many of us could explain in detail the physics of how our hard drive works? She was given a small severance and told to sign papers that I'm guessing gave up her rights to sue. And besides, it's well known in my area that suing a hospital is a fool's errand. The local lawyers do so much business with hospitals that they won't even take cases against them.
If you tell someone "your job ends today, but we'll give you a month's pay if you sign these papers", many people have no choice but to sign: they can't afford to have zero income starting today.
https://businesstown.com/articles/should-you-pay-severance-w...
For other terminations .... there should be a performance improvement plan in place and you should have seen it coming for a long time.
Only the most severe, egregious situations should result in a off-the-cuff, surprising firing.
[I'm not saying that everyone lives up to this standard, but it's the way it should be.]
Not everyone works at "firms": this is extremely common in food service, for example.
> Talking about how much you get paid is not only normal it’s protected by law
Citation? I've worked at least one place where it was explicitly against the rules to share what you were paid with your coworkers (although this was years ago--I'd be happy to hear if the situation has changed).
> you should definitely be doing both legal and financial research on any perspective employers.
Obviously, but you simply don't have the same tools to do that. Have you tried asking employers for references?
The NLRB has taken action against companies that have attempted to use such handbook policies against workers: https://www.nlrb.gov/rights-we-protect/enforcement-activity/... (click the pin on Missouri, it isn't direct-linkable :()
I routinely ask my perspective boss for references. I also routinely ask for financial data before accepting a job. It has never caused even an eyebrow to be raised.
Nope.
Future potential employees. If I go on glassdoor and read about this happening I'm either going to
A: raise my rates as I need to keep a larger emergency fund to deal with these guys
B: decline to work there at all
They end up only ever getting entry level kids to work for them. The system sort of works in that regard if you come from a non-traditional background you can work for a year or two at a job like that, skill up and move on.
Murder also happens all the time and it is not okay. Something happening does not mean it is okay.
So where does the sentiment that it is completely okay come from?
> It's considered unprofessional to talk about what you're getting paid.
This is no longer the case. Some companies have even taken the transparent route where everyone's salary is publicly available.
> Ask a potential employer for references or any information on their financials, and that's weird
You can work for a publicly traded company if you really want access to financial data. Even some startups will provide it if you just ask.
You can also glean insight through sites like Glass Door. They have existed well over a decade now. This issue mainly stems from employees not habitually doing enough due diligence on companies, unless there are legal and financial barriers that I missed.
OK. You can't just assert things and then when someone disagrees challenge them to come up with their own explanation. The null hypothesis is "I don't know".
> The situation is pretty much dictated by supply/demand and both sides take advantage.
If that hypothesis is true, then they can use that hypothesis to explain the existent phenomena.
Why would that be the case? It is true that supply/demand largely explains what happens in the job market. It is also true that there are are socio/political/cultural forces at play. For example, supply and demand is not a good explanation for why you can't come into most work environments in your undergarments.
Sure, when we get to ridiculous cases. But things just short of that, supply/demand is a huge contributor to. Showing up to work in shorts and flip flops? How acceptable this is depends a lot upon how hot the job market is.
Of course, no matter how hot the demand situation is-- it is never going to cause one to tolerate behavior so egregious that it scares away other employees and makes the supply picture worse.
That's really more of a cultural question, though, where the culture obviously takes the kind of job into account. Specifically, showing up to a programmer job in shorts and flip flops is going to remain accepted in most places even when the job market gets less hot, until culture changes for some unrelated reason.
The supply-demand situation is only relevant when people are going against the culture.
I was disagreeing with the one-sided claim, "The situation is pretty much dictated by supply/demand and both sides take advantage."
But you said something more balanced which I agree with: "It is true that supply/demand largely explains what happens in the job market. It is also true that there are are socio/political/cultural forces at play."
The parent might be a generalisation but you're objecting based on the thinnest sliver of contrary occupations. Seems like the parent could well be on the money for all menial roles?
How medival servitude explains any of this better is beyond me.
I'm too busy to do the research for you, but Amazon warehouse workers are the first examples that come to my mind.
Amazon has the highest turnover of any Fortune 500 company in 2013. That’s because their workers quit. They have options even at a low wage. That’s why they recently raised wages.
https://www.cnbc.com/2017/04/20/only-4-percent-of-uber-drive...
https://www.ibtimes.com/amazoncom-has-second-highest-employe...
Yes and how do they find a better job without education? You are very fortunate that you were able leave that behind you. But do you realize there are millions of people in this world who have no means of pulling themselves out of the dirt?
It wasn’t easy or fair in preindustrial times. People worked a few hours less on average, but they received less wealth in exchange and had no opportunity to educate themselves and grow wealth. Serfs were not given a choice of job or even the ability to leave or marry without their lord’s permission. Peasants were stuck for life, unlike someone who works low paid 2-3 jobs today.
Not the kind that counts to most employers (college degrees). That form of education has never been more expensive.
Why speak if you have little experience in it? Maybe people with actual experience like the below poster will prove your inferences wrong
edit: I should also mention having options is not really a blessing when they're all bad.
Ever done manual labor? Or something that requires both intense manual labor and intellectual problem solving, like carpentry or many of the building trades?
Or think about all the various fields that require intense intellectual output, with nothing like the rewards and security of software engineering.
We've got it good. Though, really, the ideal would be for all workers to be treated more like we are, and less like replaceable, abusable cogs in a machine.
Yes, this career has been awesome. Awesome, and fun. Non-stop learning the entire time.
I can think of literally 1000s of jobs that are easier
There was a sitewide IT town hall in NY when I was there and some senior MD brought this problem up. "We're investing a lot of money in training people and then having difficulty retaining them." From the crowd of around 1000 a voice cried out "Stop training them!"
To flip it around - do you feel other people who leave the company did something shameful ? Do you see judging from others (especially outside of co-workers where it's incentive based) ?
I think as job market turns from oversupply to undersupply the culture changes simply out of nececity.
Loyalty in the work place is a one-way street. It goes from the worker to the company but not the other way around.
It absolutely is cultural.
I'm not saying that anyone should feel ashamed to negotiate for better compensation (quite the opposite!), but I'm also not sure that you can look at those little uncooked narcissists and conclude "this is how a human being naturally behaves". I think it's pretty normal for a person with mature emotions to feel at least a bit bad when making demands.
Source: personal experience
What kind of garbage comment is this statement? Argue the points of disagreement but saying something offensive like this serves no purpose and is just plain wrong, rude and disgusting.
Do you think your local development market is remotely representative of the nature of national employment trends in general? And you accuse the OP of "over-generalization"?
Well that's not true. There are laws strictly regulating the supply and demand from the labor side of things.
Even today, I software development and especially sillicon valley is a bit of outlier - people in our industry change more often then in other industries.
…proceeds to extrapolate from "my local dev market" to economy with thousands of sectors and tens of millions of workers without a trace of irony or self-awareness. Um, ok.
As others have pointed out, being in software engineering at this particular point in time is probably not super representative.
I find that the main thesis is actually pretty sound. Historically speaking, the current (capitalistic) labour / production system is a direct descendant of the medieval feudal labour relations that existed in Europe 900 years ago. When you truly look at it, they are pretty identical in their core mechanics. There is a class system, there is servitude, there is limited social mobility.
It's just that the outer appearance is different, that some aspects are improved (in degree, not in kind, if I'm making myself understood), and finally that the technological advances mask the inequality and the problems in the system (a world where one person has 500$ and the other 500,000$ seems better than one where one has 1$ and the other 1,000$, but they are equally unequal).
This apply here also. Thank you for laying it out for me
Your entire post is overgeneralization and dramatizing to prove some poorly thought out hypothesis but this here is the most obvious example. When there is enough choice people change jobs all the time - the demand in my local dev market went through the roof last couple of years for multiple reasons - I see people change 2 jobs within a year, demand all sorts of things - last round of job interviews I did the interviewers spent double the time explaining why their company was a great fit for me instead of actually interviewing me for position - compared to the usual narrative of asking why I fit them.
The situation is pretty much dictated by supply/demand and both sides take advantage. Firing and quitting can have negative implications for both sides, just depends on scenario.
I don't see where shame enters the equation.