Maybe they needed or wanted a reason to fire them. If that’s the case, it was all ready to go on HR.

I doubt that firing on such a short notice properly followed the correct procedures, in the UK that's an automatic loss at tribuneral.

I mean it only happens in movies when an employee gets fired and immediately put his stuff in the box and leaves the building. In real life there are labor regulations that don't allow this, there is the notification period et cetera

That's simply not correct, at least in the US. The process I've seen is the employee is taken to a meeting room, they're told they've being let go, they're walked to their desk to retrieve their personal belongings, and they're walked out the door. From the employees perspective one minute they're working like normal, and perhaps a half-hour later they're standing outside unemployed.

I’ve seen this before.

Get an email the day before to deactivates someone’s access at X time. Next day they get called into a meeting 10 mins before X and then escorted to their desk and out a couple mins after.

I've had similar experiences, where I'm told in the morning to be available to handle an account deactivation immediately at X time, and then at X time I'm given the name.

What really sucks is when you have to do it for one of your teammates. :-(

Depends. Even in Germany the company can simply decide to get you physically out right now as long as they keep you on the pay roll for the legal notice period.

I saw this go down right in front of me once. She technically still worked for us for 2 weeks I believe, but I saw HR approach her, bring her out of the room for a few minutes, then she came back and started quietly packing things into a box, and left within the hour.

I don't know the full details, I think she did have some kind of warning weeks before, but ignored it because she thought she was immune to being fired. She was the worst developer I've ever worked with so far though, personality-wise and skills, she definitely lied in her PHP interview. That's also on that company though, I have no idea how she passed that interview (okay, I do have an idea, no programmers ever spoke with her).

> I mean it only happens in movies when an employee gets fired and immediately put his stuff in the box and leaves the building.

It's not only in the movies. I've seen it done in real life a number of times. In the US, anyway, this isn't prohibited by law.