But what's the rational the other way around? When an employee resigns, they obviously know that they are resigning before actually handling in their resignation. If they wanted to leave with something, surely they would have already stolen it? Or it's just an expectation of lazyness, in case nothing has been stolen yet?
If the employee should later indeed be found to have taken IP or other assets during their last weeks at work, it would reflect poorly on whomever decided they should work during the resignation period.
Hence, you let them go immediately, so you can shrug and say 'well, we did what we could' in case of problems down the road.
Firing in this way when someone’s done nothing wrong would be constructive dismissal and prohibited by law.
The fact that Amazon treats their resigning employees in this way doesn’t increase my trust in them.
It actually just makes them look viscous and petty.
Who would want to be placed in the position of saying yes I was fired because I was suspected of being a security risk?
And if you're already on a back channel, then you don't care about playing fair.
Feels a bit silly to me.
If you go to a competitor and aren't open about it? You might find yourself terminated with no additional pay.
And it makes sense. At Amazon, most people have varying levels of customer data and/or confidential company data. Amazon has to protect itself from data exfiltration/data theft.
This might catch extraordinarily stupid people from conducting industrial espionage, but really I see it as the company encouraging people to not give any notice at all (which, remember, is just a courtesy) when they quit. It’s shortsighted on the company’s part.