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 or severance 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.

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

> 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

I obviously don't know anything about the company, but it sounds like you dodged a bullet by leaving.

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.

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.)

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.

Once here too.

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've never had notice of a firing or severance so I don't know how common it is.

>>Also jobs often/usually fire people with 0 day notice and no severance.

That is not typical nor the norm.

Most companies have established PiP policies, and severance even in the cases of "for cause" terminations (though that is rarer)

"Fire with 0 day notice and no severance" is more likely to be found at startups, and/or small owner led companies with no real policies, or HR Depts.

Don't know what the law is like in most states in the US but in the EU if the employee has been with the company for longer than 6 months it wouldn't even be legal to fire with 0 notice & no severance - generally companies wants you out asap but continue paying your salary for the minimums require by law. In my experience at least 2 weeks and more commonly 1+ months (I've seen people get 3 months, that have worked at the company for several years).

This of course doesn't apply if the employee did something like outright breaking the law or the terms of their contract (rare).

I think it goes without saying that the EU is different.

Here in Germany, in fact things are problematic in the other direction. For the last 2 hires I made, their previous company forced them to work through their 3 month notice period.

That's becoming more and more widespread. It's idiotic and counterproductive but apparently companies love some fake sense of security.

I think this is more for "traditional" companies, I've never seen a startup here (Berlin) do that in the 10 years I've been living here.

I have 3 months notice. It is unreasonable.

It's unreasonable for the company to want you to stick around for 3 months before you switch jobs, but it's not unreasonable to ask a company to let an employee who has been with them for years 3 months' (notice or severance) before they fire them (as the power balance is not equal - the employee is supposedly dependent on that salary for their livelihood and not everyone can instantly land a new job after being laid off).

Overall even as a business owner myself I prefer the pro-employee German system over the free-for-all American one.

In my experience it's becoming more and more widespread specifically in startups. I hope you're right and I'm just seeing the bad outliers.

> Also jobs often/usually fire people with 0 day notice and no severance.

This is only true in the US.