CEO: "Don't worry we are not planning any layoffs!"

me: "Phew, OK realtor let's close on this new house purchase! It's a big investment but my future looks great!"

<two weeks later>

CEO: "I'm sorry but I was wrong and you are terminated effective immediately."

Bank: "Congrats on your house purchase closing, your new monthly payment of $XXXX is due in two weeks!"

How is THAT a better situation than warning people there could be instability ahead? People are being thrown completely under the bus with no warning.

It is well-known that if you're in the USA you can lose your job at any time, for no reason at all. At-will and all.

People need to plan for that happening, and not just assume it can't happen to them. This example employee should have thought "Hmmm, I should wait some years and save a good amount extra just in case".

I wish it weren't this way, but this is the reality of the world. Yes, it means moving slower and buying a house later (and for more money) - or never at all, but it isn't going to change and our hands are tied.

In the USA you can't out save the housing market unless your making 10x+ the median salary. A lesson I've repeatedly learned. I worked for a number of bootstrapped startups, and purchased houses far under what I could have borrowed based on my salary because I always wanted to have a good solid year+ of runway should I face an unexpected layoff during a downturn.

That has turned out to be some of the worst financial decisions I ever made. While my contemporaries were buying house for 4-5x+ their salary and over time those houses doubled, tripped in value, my house also doubled and tripped in value, but now the difference between the houses I could have purchased and the ones I did, are now in the millions of dollars (aka I have to find 2+ million to upgrade to a house only slightly better than the one I own). Meaning if I want to move up in the housing market to a house I could have purchased a couple years back for just a slightly higher percentage of my income is basically out of reach.

So a lot of people complain about what it takes to get their foot in the door, but the spread between houses has massively widened as well. Just 10 years ago 1.5 million would have gotten a house in the top couple percent, now that number is probably closer to 7-9 million. So even if your salary doubled or tripped, unless you purchased at the max of your previous salary its like starting all over in the housing market.

(and just to make this post longer, this is largely the result of interest free money, a few years back I realized that steady state interest one pays should always be just slightly higher than inflation. Anytime the inflation != interest rates happens it throws things out of wack. AKA while people are complaining about the current rates, if inflation is 8-9% the fed should have immediately reacted with 7-8% rates, which would have massively hammered the system, but apparently no one at us fed/etc has really studied control systems enough to understand that adjusting rates every couple months will never result in a stable system, especially if they fail to react to changes strongly. Their current strategy entirely assumes that inflation/etc slowly rises or falls.).

On the other hand, the people who bought in the aughts were caught underwater with the 2008 crash in home prices. When using leverage to make investments, the lever always works both ways.

I could easily have been a billionaire today if I'd made different moves (like buying all the MSFT or AMZN I could when they went public). I know a billionaire who did just that - he borrowed every penny he could and put it into MSFT at the IPO.

Of course, I was also urged to buy bitcoin when it was $500. I didn't. Shrug.

Where i live (Austin TX), I would have upgraded to a bigger house from my first if they had actually gone down in value. That was actually my plan and part of the reason I bought a cheap house in ~2005. But, the federal government stepped in too soon and made it clear to the banks that they were going to support the market. So outside of a few obviously overspeculated markets a lot of places just stopped going up in value, they never went down or if they did it was single digits.

I placed multiple offers on foreclosed houses (as did a few other people I know) none of us got them because the banks refused to sell them for less than the previous mortgage amount. They let houses sit vacant for 2-3 years until the market was basically recovered in ~2011. One of the ones I bid on, was listed for X, I bid that, was the only bidder and 6 months later the bank counter offered for X + 25%.

So, individuals got screwed on both sides, the people who lost their house, and the "savers" who were denied the deals they were waiting for.

(edit: Just to add to this, basically in auction terms the banks all set a hidden reserve price equal to the previous max while simultaneously listing them for far less than the reserve. It create an optical illusion of the housing market being cheap and full of unsold houses, while people who were actually underwater felt trapped because they would have to take a hit selling the house, and people trying to buy houses couldn't actually buy any without buying the "overpriced" ones being sold by actual individuals. A few people got lucky and bought at below market rates from individuals who had owned them long enough to be able to afford to sell at these lower prices, but those were pretty competitive even during the slowest part of the market. I was regularly outbid (I think it was something like 12 times), despite bidding over listing on them.)

"I was also urged to buy bitcoin when it was $500. I didn't."

I was doing a data science project for a class in 2013. Instructor wanted it implemented and internet visible, with encouragement for users to "vote with bitcoin". It was around $14-$15 at the time. I passed on doing the project...

But remember that for everyone whom you remember for doing the correct thing, there are probably dozens more who did the opposite, such as borrowing every penny they could to put into pets.com or some 'stable'coin. Success is generally hard unless luck intervenes.

Of course. I wasn't willing to take anywhere near the risk they were, and so I don't begrudge them their profits.

The federal reserve is screwed no matter what they do. Reduce interest rates? Lending increases so much the value of money is inflated away to nothing. Increase interest rates? The music stops playing, the borrowing stops, the economy grinds to a halt and enters a recession.

>Yes, it means moving slower and buying a house later (and for more money)

The latter is not necessarily true relative to other countries and showcases people don't understand the long term influence, or lack there off, of various contract structures.

The US has at-will employment dangling a sword of Damocles over your head 24/7. Well, here we have temporary contracts not getting extended to permanent, and the status of a 'permanent' contract being the only way to open doors, which employers will royally abuse to lower other benefits.

US or not, the premise remains the same. Don't be reliant on a party not looking out for your best interests.

The entire US is not at-will employment. And companies with strong employee unions do not have this issue of suddenly and without notice firing their staff...

Minus Montana, every state is at-will employment of some sort or another. And, I think Montana may even have it in some form now.

> And companies with strong employee unions do not have this issue of suddenly and without notice firing their staff...

Lots of people don't work at a place with a union, and don't have access to unionized employment due to industry, current geography, etc. Also we're seeing a huge anti-union push by a lot of interests right now, recently notable being Starbucks.

At will employment works both ways. You can quit at any moment to get a better job.

And yet, the norm is that employees give notice while companies give nothing.

As the WSJ reported a few weeks ago, companies often find out an employee had quit when the company noticed that they'd stopped showing up for work. Sometimes they disappear with accrued pay being owed them, and don't leave a way to contact them to give them their pay.

Companies doing layoffs often give 2 weeks notice in the form of a 2 week severance check and escorting them out. This is for good reason - very few people are productive as a short timer, and some are even destructive.

I'm not saying companies good employees bad. I'm saying these things cut both ways all the time.

I tendered my resignation once and was met at my desk in an hour. They brought two boxes, watched me pack. They interrupted me while writing detailed status for customers on each of about 5 projects I was working on. I hit the print button, and was escorted to the conference room. They offered a severance package if I agreed not to discuss why I was leaving. I handed the status package I'd printed to my (former) manager. He glanced at it, and recommended they double the severence. Best summer ever. I looked for work, and was paid to deliver sailboats offshore.

The reason people are met at their desk, watched, and escorted out is now and then an employee will be tempted to steal company equipment, and worse, commit some form of sabotage in their anger.

As usual, a stinker here and there ruins it for everyone.

Things only work both ways when they are symmetrical relationships. In almost all cases your employer is in a stronger position.

I've been an employer and an employee. It is symmetric. Employees can and do negotiate, and if you do something they don't like, they walk away. You cannot make them do anything.

If anything, it's the employee with more power.

Employees have special rights. For example, meeting payroll is the first priority of any employer. Any disruption on that and the state will hammer the employer into a pulp. Employees have all sorts of legal advantages in pressing frivolous lawsuits against employers. I've had lawyers from BigCorp tell me they just settle the frivolous ones, because it's far cheaper than going to court, especially with the court heavily biased against them. The suing employees know this, which is why they do it.

Employees can walk away at their whim. They can walk away if they don't like the cut of your jib, or because they don't want to work for a woman, or for any racist reason they feel like. An employer cannot.

Employee candidates can ask any question they like of the potential employer. Not so the other way.

Well if you are lucky enough to live in Montana instead of the other 49 states….

CEO: "Don't worry we are not planning any layoffs!"

me: "Why are we talking about layoffs at all? Probably should start planning for contingencies"

Don't get me wrong: There's almost certainly a more transparent way of doing this that doesn't involve straight up lying, and it's crummy as hell, but there's some amount of personal responsibility here in terms of knowing how to read between the lines.

It's a matter of perspective. We have a culture that largely puts business interests above independent peoples interests. If you agree with this then it makes complete sense that it's better for the company because that employee might have been kept and we want to keep them stable. If we warn them, they might become a flight risk and we might not need to cut them. Information asymmetry is our friend so let's give them only the information that's beneficial to us.

If on the other hand you take the perspective of supporting a bottom up independent worker interests above a business's (I fall in this category), then your point is quite valid. Information asymmetry here put me in a terrible situation, if you would have told me earlier, I might have made different decisions. That might not include leaving, but it might have included tidying up my resume and prepping for interviews, just-in-case. Maybe I follow through or maybe I just keep some backups lined up in case things go south. Some may just pass the risk back to the business and jump ship since they assume they have better odds doing this and may even get a promotion.

Personally I don't believe any business leadership's words, I skim financials, I watch movements in the laborforce especially around management, I look at markets and make my own interpretation. I assume they're providing intentional incomplete information to their advantage and try to infer reality from that combined with the other data sources. Businesses are not your friends and will lie to you to their advantage above all else. I'm not a subscriber to Hanlon's razor when it comes to self-interest. What can typically be attributed to self-interest should be considered above incompetence, especially when looking at something as strategic and methodical as a modern business structure that have countless meetings to sit around and discuss and analyze these sorts of things or contract specialized skilled services in these domains.

Why aren't you always keeping your resume tidy and staying ready to interview? In April 2020, when Covid hit, my company did an across the board paycut. The next week a recruiter reached out to me about a job that I really was T interested in. But we kept talking and she referred me to a job I was. I gave her my resume without any changes to it from before the pay cut announcement.

I spoke to the (internal) recruiter about my accomplishments based on a “career document” that was updated.

I did no special technical preparation for my interview loop (BigTech cloud consulting - app dev). I only practiced behavioral questions based on my career document.

>Why aren't you always keeping your resume tidy and staying ready to interview?

Keeping your resume tidy is more of an expression (making sure you have marketable skills), it doesn't take much effort to update experience and new or shifts in skilling.

As to interviews, I could go on about the current broken interview process, but suffice it to say that interview prepping takes several weeks of sitting through competitive programming problems for most people.

For those who presumably need no sort of prep time, good for you, I however need prep time. I also value my personal time and have no desire sitting around for an hour or more every day playing with competitive programming problems so you'll have fresh memory for interviews that use this silly approach. As such, like many people, I need a little bit of lead time before I can get through all the hurdles. I've yet to see a single employer who doesn't use this process in the past 4 years although maybe I have a bad sample. This includes big tech, mid and small tech and some big/mid that aren't even tech focused I spoke with at different points. I'm glad you managed to find a sane employer that considered prior experience, a resume, and traditional interview process. That is not the norm in my area to say the least.

So to add on, I’m older (48), when I looked at the landscape in 2017, my (step)son was graduating in 2020 and it was time for me to take a stab at BigTech.

I really had no interest in the shit show of the modern software engineering interviewing process since I had never had to do a coding interview in my life on the enterprise dev side.

I did know “cloud” by 2020 and had customer facing experience so I was able to pivot to app dev cloud consulting and my BigTech interview was mostly behavioral.

> Why aren't you always keeping your resume tidy and staying ready to interview?

because we have the rest of our lives to live

It’s really a once a quarter exercise.

- update career document

- update resume

- reach out to my network on LinkedIn and schedule a lunch with former coworkers

- sleep well at night.

I’ve been through a layoff, I’ve had to jump ship quickly (a company was acquired by private equity), and I had a sudden 10% paycut (2020). Guess how little I stressed?

Interview ready doesn’t mean “practice grinding leetCode”. It means always be in a position when opportunity knocks (or you need to find a door to knock on), you’re ready.

> It's a matter of perspective. We have a culture that largely puts business interests above independent peoples interests.

No. It's about the fact that it's literally the CEO's job to put the business's interests above those of any individual employee. Anything else wouldn't make sense.

Good luck with that attitude when your company depends on highly skilled labor that comes from a very small pool of talent (relative to all labor in the country). The game industry, and game engine programmers in general, are a small group and if a company isn't good to their employees they are going to have a very, very difficult time hiring and staying competitive. It's not like they can just grab bodies and throw them at projects. Even hiring the very best and brightest cloud engineers from a FAANG is going to see them flounder and waste time ramping up to game engine development.

Unless, as the game industry tends to be, every employer is awful, and you can get away with it because there is a lack of better offers for people to consider.

If one didn't have the attitude I mentioned the company will go under from employees leaving. You missed the point.

At no point in my life as an adult have I ever depended on my current job for my financial stability. I depended on having a marketable set of skills, a network and a savings account.

I definitely never went into buying a house without having 3 to six months worth of bills in the bank.

On the other hand, as a software developer for 25 years, it’s never taken me more than a month to go from “I’m looking for a job” to “having an offer”. I’ve changed jobs 8 times abs six between 2008.

Well to be honest, this last time took two months just because the hiring process takes longer at BigTech. But I wasn’t really looking. It just fell into my lap.

Speaking of which, even in todays world. Any software developer who worked at Unity shouldn’t have any trouble finding another job quickly. That’s intended to be a compliment.

> At no point in my life as an adult have I ever depended on my current job for my financial stability. I depended on having a marketable set of skills, a network and a savings account.

Congratulations on being one of the most privileged people in the country. You realize ~50% of the country doesn't even have enough money in their checking/savings to cover a $400 emergency expense right? https://www.fool.com/the-ascent/personal-finance/articles/49...

This isn't a "well just stop buying avocado toast, and start pulling yourself up by bootstraps!" problem. This is a systemic problem with wage stagnation and complete decimation of the middle class over the last decades. The fact is the average American can only dream of having privilege you mention like not depending on their current employment to pay next month's rent/mortgage.

We aren’t talking about “most people in the country”. We are talking about software engineers at a well known company that pays far above the median income.

Software engineers at Unity are not “suffering” making between $196K to $330K+

https://www.levels.fyi/company/Unity-Technologies/salaries/S...

My attitude was the same when I was making $33K as an operator/programmer in 1996 and when I bought my first house when I was making $70k in 2002.

Also, if you are living paycheck to paycheck with $400 in your account, you shouldn’t be buying a house. A house comes with maintenance and responsibilities that you’re not going to be able to pay for. The parent poster used the scenario of someone buying a house and then getting laid off.

"You realize ~50% of the country doesn't even have enough money in their checking/savings to cover a $400 emergency expense right?"

Great quote. Yet I see a lot of really nice cars humping down the highway. Teslas, Bimmers, Rivians, Ionics, etc. Er'ybody on their iPhone 13ProMax AND their AppleWatch. Spending like there's no tomorrow.

Like the man said about living within your means...

Saying that 50% of people live paycheck to paycheck is meaningless unless you are also implying that those same 50% are all excellent at managing their finances. Otherwise you are just saying that it is possible for people to spend every dollar they earn which is obviously true, but not interesting.

Is there a subset of that 50% who is living paycheck to paycheck despite having excellent financial discipline and trying to live within their means? Probably, but without knowing what percentage it is, the 50% (and I've recently heard 64%) doesn't tell you much of anything.

If an individual has chosen to be blissfully oblivious to

- basic economic news though mainstream news sources, which has been plentiful

- the overall financial health of their employer and the sector in which they operate, which usually make up a significant chunk of all-hands meetings, so there's no excuse for not having been exposed to it

- the health of their product/service and its value to their employer as a whole, which they should know simply by virtue of, y'know, doing their jobs

then frankly they're going to be blindsided by pretty much everything in their professional career, not just a mere layoff.

> It comes just weeks after Riccitiello told explicitly employees in an all-hands meeting that layoffs weren’t coming.

I wonder about the legality of doing all this...

Even if it did run afoul of labor regulations, it's damn near trivial for a business to find a justification ("new information", "changing market conditions", etc.) for a change of plans.

> Bank: "Congrats on your house purchase closing, your new monthly payment of $XXXX is due in two weeks!"

Actually 30-60 days depending on when you close. And candidly, that should be enough time to find a new job for a company with a reasonable hiring process.

This literally happened to me a few years ago. It was stressful but I was fine.

Is there any insurance that will cover a X amount of months if you get fired?

It’s called “living below your means and saving money”. No matter where you are in the US, as software engineers you are probably making well above the median income for your location. You should be able to save an emergency fund.

> It’s called "living below your means and saving money".

… or living well above your means in the time of asset bubbles left and right?

Let's say you and your buddy both make $125K.

If you bought a small $100K serious-fixer-upper house in order to live below your means in 2019 and your buddy bought a large $600K house at the same time which he could barely afford, then who would have "saved" more by mid-2021 when you both sold at 2X valuation?

At some point "living below your means and saving money" needs to turn into "you need to spend money to make money".

"Saving" does not protect you from inflation and it is of nearly zero value in the case of hyperinflation.

We don’t have to be hypothetical. We know an entry level developer at Unity makes almost $200K

I’ve done investment real estate before - I had three houses (including the one I lived in) with mortgages of over $500K when I was making $75K a year. Guess what happened when 2008 came?

How is that person who didn’t save, got laid off and having a $600K mortgage going to fair?

Fast forward to 2022. I have a house in the burbs of a major metropolitan area that at the time I had it built was less than 2x our household income (2016) and I had savings. Since we were living below our means, when I had a 10% (Covid related) pay cut, it stung, but I shrugged and kept it moving.

Saving money is not a defense against inflation. It’s meant as a safety net so when the stock market crashes and you lose your job it’s just a minor inconvenience instead of a major life event.

Nope, although if you got disabled (perhaps from an accident at work) and were laid off as a result a short term disability insurance would help.

In Europe it is common for multiple months of high pitch negotiations between "wanting to lay off" and layoffs. Usually without any riots or panic.

I don't think a sudden layoff at any time is an assurance for workers in the sense that it is better to pretend everything is Ok until it isn't.

> In Europe it is common for multiple months of high pitch negotiations between "wanting to lay off" and layoffs. Usually without any riots or panic.

I'm kind of tired of seeing this "well actually, in Europe..." -- there's a reason there's zero major tech innovation happening in Europe. There's a reason Google/FB/Netflix/etc. and 99% of other major software unicorns (save Spotify and handful of others) are from the US. To be successful as a company, you need to be nimble, not burn your runway with bureaucracy.

Working for a startup is a risk and money, for the time being, is very tight.

Unity was started in Europe. It moved to the US when it stopped being a startup. I think there is plenty of innovation in Europe. But you are right, there is something that makes it easier to go from small/medium to big/huge that is easier in the US, and laxer labour laws is probably part of the story.

"Zero major tech innovation happening in Europe so long as you exclude every tech innovator in Europe."

https://www.failory.com/startups/european-unicorns

#1 is Klarna, the company that will let you finance a pizza over the next 4 months. Not sure I'd be trumpeting that as innovative.

Easy to discount companies when you overly simplify them -

ie “#2 in the US is Stripe, the company that lets you pay on a credit card. Not sure if I’d be trumpeting that as innovative!”

I didn’t.

I looked at the list, it might be my US-centric bias but I'd only heard of 2 in that list before and they weren't big

I don't know what you mean by "weren't big" - $1B is the absolute smallest you can be to be a unicorn.

Ever heard of fucking Spotify?

You mean the low margin unprofitable company that is at the mercy of the record labels and their “product” is the equivalent of a minor division for Google, Amazon and Apple?

Their product is still better designed than the ones came out of Google, Amazon and Apple.

Maybe so. But isn’t it a Pyrrhic victory for a for profit company to have a better designed product that is still losing money? That’s not exactly a definition of a “successful company”

"might be"

> there's a reason there's zero major tech innovation happening in Europe.

Thanks for telling us you know nothing about Europe.

Its not about bureaucracy, its about there being a different social contract in Europe compared to the US

And as for unicorns, we may have few of them but we have many, many profitable and innovative companies that stick around for the long term.

So we’re going to gloss over the near total lack of innovation? You guys innovate in design, cars and nuclear physics (colliders to power plants), and that’s about it.

You don’t think any of that has to do with the employment contract?

Way to undersell Europe. Yes, we're a bit lower on global tech innovation. Much of our tech innovation is region specific, which should make it obvious why one, the US won't see much of it, and two, the markets aren't there for VCs to just throw money at it. There are legal and social reasons why they don't target the global market more, too.

>You don’t think any of that has to do with the employment contract?

The Netherlands has a legal notice period of 1 month baseline. Despite that, many companies opt for a longer employee notice period, which then requires them to double that amount from their side. Doesn't sound like the employment contract is at fault here as much as the risk-averse culture, when nothing is keeping these companies from keeping the notice period shorter. Surely, a talented developer does not have to worry about finding a new job so much it requires more than a month.

God forbid I mention Japan, which despite still using fax machines and having similar structures, still produces plenty of global products. Unless your idea of tech is "just software".

It's not as simple as you try to imply. Spend a bit more time doing research between what is legally required, what employers offer and what developers realistically need.

I'm mostly playing devil's advocate. dvt asked a question, and andyjohnson0 deflected by arguing about a sentence fragment.

What's the layoff policy in Japan? I would say it used to be 'never' and that hasn't been the case for some time, but a lot of the innovation ramp for them occurred before the 90's recession that started breaking the social contracts, so that isn't really a point in dvt's favor.

Culture definitely plays a role here, as does need (see also the Netherlands who send consultants worldwide to talk about water management). People like to talk about how different Scandinavian culture is from American culture, but from what I know of Japanese culture, it's at least as far away from say Norway as Norway is away from America. So if dvt thinks that Europe is missing some secret sauce and not just American Exceptionalism, I would say that Japan has substituted a different sauce to good effect.

Japanese companies are more likely to try and get you to resign peacefully or keep you around in a place where you won't cause any damage than to create layoff / firing scenarios. Japanese employees are lifetime employees, far stickier than Europeans.

Layoffs can still occur for economic reasons, but that's the same as in Europe.

>not just American Exceptionalism

There is very little "exceptional" about America in and of itself. What America has, is a lot of cash to throw at getting exceptional people and mess around forever. When your markets are huge, you can throw huge money and gain it back. When your markets are small, you can't.

Which then comes back to the question "so why don't European countries target the English market like the US does? Why care for your local market if you can make much bigger money targeting the global one?". And unfortunately, I don't know why beyond risk-aversity, culture and "that's just how it went". At least in Japan, the Japanese-only market is still far bigger than most [insert non-English European language]-only markets.

Point being, if dvt is arguing "it is the bureaucracy!", that doesn't explain why Japan works, China works, and why Europe tech scene continues to import bureaucracy-heavy approaches from the US tech scene, like you know, big Agile.

The web, neural networks..? Many innovations are made in Europe. Americans are better at finding the product market fit. Not always at innovating.

Nobody used the web until a couple college kids in corn country added images to it. You can call that market fit if you like and I won't argue with you about it, I just don't agree.

I had to listen to too many rants about the quality of Tim Berners Lee's code to allow that he invented the web. I place too high a premium on execution, which is a big part of my problem with IP and patents. You made a box. Congratufuckinglations. Can you make a million of them? And not chop anyone's fingers off?

If the web were the automobile, he's no living embodiment of Rudolf Diesel. Maybe closer to a valued employee of James Watt. He was channeling Engelbart, channeling Bush, and stuffing it into SGML.

Rudolf Diesel, there's a European inventor. We went a little crazy with that car thing. Sorry about that.

Edit: That was also 30 years ago for the one, 40 for the other. That's quite a long time. Whole countries have cycled though low-end tech to innovator to resting on their laurels in that time.

The entire purpose of a business is to make a profit.

So being successful as a company requires having the right/ability to screw over your employees at the drop of a hat?

I wasn't aware that Unity was a startup. Mighty long runway, those 17 years. When is Unity going to take off?

>not burn your runway with bureaucracy

You going to tell us the US tech market is not boggled down by bureaucracy? Surely you jest. Do you need a reminder who sets the trend for the remainder of the market?

The US really only dominates in a specific flavor of consumer technology, I doubt that will last much longer anyway

if you can't afford the bureaucracy of employees, then maybe you shouldn't be hiring.

> In Europe it is common for multiple months of high pitch negotiations between "wanting to lay off" and layoffs. Usually without any riots or panic. I don't think a sudden layoff at any time is an assurance for workers in the sense that it is better to pretend everything is Ok until it isn't.

It's important to note that this is typically a legal requirement (e.g. the requirement to consult prior to redundancy in the UK) rather than something typically done out of any good-will by the companies/employers.

In many European countries, employees have to give notice periods before quitting. They can't just not show up and say I quit. I have seen one month per year of employment topping out at 6 months

Outside of explicit contract law you may be tangled up in, the US doesn't have explicit law and most employees are classified as "at-will" (basically, dependent upon where the business views this freedom as beneficial or non-beneficial to itself).

Since businesses haven't managed to lobby such legislation requirements in for workers to give notice (largely because at-will is typically beneficial to them) and just use contract law where it matters (public personalities, etc.) you can just show up and quit legally, without legal repercussions.

With that said, cultural protections have been put into place under job history in the application process. If I were to show up and without a very good reason tell me employer I quit effective immediately, I can do so unlike the European cases described.

But is this really freedom or an illusion of freedom? Many in the US are living paycheck-to-paycheck to survive. They're financially leveraged and can't really just quit, they need to line up an opportunity and have minimal savings to protect them. For them they can make the choice but it's a bad choice for them and most of the time they won't. Businesses know this and leverage it. The pandemic labor market offered a shift in this giving some bargaining power back to labor but it seems to be clawing right back to businesses again, probably for quite some time.

In what are classified as more professional positions, you're expected to give 2-weeks notice. Many employers request references and if you're honest during your interview, leaving without notice in most cases will require a good explanation and a competent interviewer, otherwise you're a red flag no hire almost immediately and there's a pool of others behind you without said red flag. So, I could quit tomorrow, but I'd have to be very careful with my next employer as to how I go about referencing my previous work, why I left, etc. In most cases I can't really just show up and quit, I need to give notice and wait. Perhaps that's not as long as some European countries closer to the order of 4 weeks IIRC but it's not as free as it might appear to be for the majority of laborers.

This is usually negotiable if you're leaving as well, it's not in the companies interest for the most part to keep you hanging around past wrapping current things up.

Well that would have certainly given me motivation to leave my current job sooner. If I wait N months to quit, I have to stay here another month? Fuck it I’m out.

And this is the other side of the coin. I personally wouldn’t want the tradeoff of lacking flexibility to leave.

> How would this be better? I saw first hand the damage caused by 4 hours between pre-announcing lay-offs and completing them. Weeks would mean the entire company comes to a stand-still.

I've worked at multiple companies where we had layoffs announced months in advance. That is the normal sane way of doing things. If it is does really competently, the company starts by offering a voluntary severance package (though that does tend to get rid of the best employees first...).

Yes it sucks, but a transparently and competently run company will let everyone know that the finances aren't looking great and that layoffs will be coming, but they'll try to have everything worked out soon so worry isn't hanging over people's head for long.

It's not one extreme or the other. I don't know what was said exactly, but certainly there's some middle-ground - something along the lines of "right now we don't have any layoffs planned and we'll do everything we can to prevent any, but we can't predict the future, especially with the current state of the economy, so certainly can't make any promises".

The fact that you think it's a difficult question means that we need more robust incentives like jail time.

Edit: Actually, here's a thought. Unity has RSU's. That means it misled... its investors. Which (like everything) is securities fraud.

Plus you have the people resigning around the lay-offs. Nobody wants to be on a sinking ship and having your workmates sacked and morale at the company dropping can make people think about other opportunities.

> How would this be better?

Don't lie to your employees.

> There is no "right" answer in this situation

There are better and worse answers though. Lying and/or being incompetent are terrible answers.