It is factually true that a company can come to you and claim you are fired and have to leave, however it is illegal. One does not need to be quick with a lawyer. If you are a developer in Sweden, and you have joined the Swedish software engineering union, they will provide you legal support to ensure that you get what the law guarantees you. During the big layoffs this year, they actually waved any prereqs for how long you had to pay dues in the Union to get legal support. The layoffs in Sweden required the company to negotiate with employees for how much money they would accept to leave, in many cases this severance was full salary for a year. I live in Netherlands now and it's the same thing. Yes, a company will make it hard on you but they have no legal status here and will 100% lose going to court.

Yes, not everyone has the courage to stand up to their employer, and it may take some time for the legal process to work itself out, and it can be stressful. But the guarantees are there.

For myself, as an American who moved to Europe and has stayed, I found my quality of life much better. The reduction in pay has not bothered me one bit.

At least in the Netherlands it's extremely difficult to fire someone (which is a good thing). Unless they do something straight up illegal or are proven to be extremely incompetent, the only way to get rid of someone is to wait out their contract, assuming they don't have an unlimited contract. And if they're on the works council (mandatory in any company with at least 50 employees, with more seats the higher the number of employees), it's even more difficult to fire them without a very long, well-kept chain of proof for their incompetency.

The employer can always negotiate with the employee if they want them gone sooner, but that's still going to be expensive for the employer, and the worker in this case has much more robust rights than the employer. If my company wanted me gone I could easily get a year's salary out of it with any decent lawyer, as I have a permanent contract.

> If the HR and management want one out, one is out.

Definitely not in the Netherlands, and I expect most EU countries are similar.

> Is is worth the massive paycut the Europeans are accepting?

I don't earn anywhere near the 600k number that I see flying around in this thread and elsewhere on HN (which is lunacy to me but more power to you guys), but I'm still better off than 99% of people I meet, have my own home, have actual usable public transport and don't have to worry about a hospital visit bankrupting me. Oh, and my employer can't arbitrarily decide to just fire me, and if they do (for example in a wave of layoffs) I get compensated generously for it, plus the gov't itself will compensate me as well if I can't find a job for whatever reason while having 35 paid vacation days (I think the legal minimum is 25 vacation days for a fulltime employee, not 100% sure on that number though) + 10 or so public holidays. So, yes, definitely worth the pay cut.

There's more to life than gross monetary amounts, and from the horror stories my USA-ian friends relay to me about living there, I consider myself quite privileged to be where I'm at.

> At least in the Netherlands it's extremely difficult to fire someone (which is a good thing).

In your experience, has this led to more careful hiring?

One big downside I've seen at some companies in the US is that its so easy to fire someone that companies can tend to hire whoever walks in the door. Especially at larger and publicly traded companies, it can often be more important to fill seats and show company growth when times are good and fire by the thousands at the first sign of any economic issues coming ahead.

I don't personally mind it being easy for a company to fire someone as long as that situation is clear before accepting a job, but it would be interesting if we have clear examples of better hiring practices when the employee can't be fired easily.

> In your experience, has this led to more careful hiring?

Not in my (albeit limited) experience in the Netherlands. What I’ve seen it lead to is people hired initially into temporary one-year contracts, which are then converted to permanent contracts if things work out. I’ve definitely seen people be fired or otherwise pushed out even on permanent contracts. It’s not impossible, but as the above poster mentioned, it’s not easy either.

The quality of employees hired was certainly no better than at other companies I’ve worked for where firing was much easier. That’s with a sample size of 1 Dutch company though, and that company sucked, so it’s not a great dataset from which to draw conclusions.

> In your experience, has this led to more careful hiring?

I've never been at the helm for hiring decisions so couldn't tell you too much about the process itself, but we have a concept of a trial period here. The first month (or two, it varies by company but I think the maximum allowed is 3 months and most companies only go for the 1 month) of your employment, either party can part ways for any reason whatsoever at the end of the trial period. So if you're just not a good fit for whatever reason, the company can let you go when your trial period ends, no questions asked (assuming you weren't being treated unfairly of course).

At least anecdotally, everyone I've worked with that has passed the trial period at the 4 companies I've worked for in NL has been great to work alongside. People like to imagine a scenario where someone will bust their ass off for the trial period and then coast once they get through the trial period, but I've never experienced anyone doing it, I have however seen plenty of people dropped once the trial period ends.

Keep in mind that you can only get a permanent contract after 3 consecutive temporary (usually 1 year) contracts, so it's not like there's endless room for abuse by a bad employee either. If they're shit at the job within the first or second contract, the company just has to wait them out and not extend another one, and if someone's been fine for 3 years then it stands to reason that they should get a permanent contract that protects them extremely well.

Of course, if the company likes you they can offer you a permanent contract even sooner or even straight off the start, but I just mean that legally the company has 3 years worth of contracts to decide to keep you permanently or not.

It's probably a bit harder to get hired here (I don't really have that struggle but friends do complain about it), but once you do land somewhere then you can at least have the confidence that you won't arbitrarily be fucked over with no recompense due to things wholly outside your power.

Could explain what do you mean by better hiring practices. I think it is widely known that 4 rounds of interviews are not enough to judge someone, but it is not known if there exists a better practice apart from only hiring connections and time taking proctored take home project, which both have their fair share of problems.

That's actually what I'd be interested to learn. Presumably if a company can't fire someone easily they would have been motivated to find better predictors of future job success than a few short interviews.

Anecdotally I've seen companies skip even that process and hire anyone who seems even slightly qualified. The bar for "better hiring practices" is pretty low for me when the examples I've seen over 20 years in tech are either hire anyone to fill seats or throw obscure logic problems at candidates assuming that maps well to the role being hired for.

Trial periods. In Luxembourg they're 6 months. You can be sent packing with 1-2 weeks notice, no questions asked.

Yep, sounds like that's way more common in Europe than the US. I'm actually at a small US company now that hires this way as well, I just hadn't seen any larger companies over here doing it this way.

Once you reach a certain size it's quite complicated to let people go, if you need to fire a large amount of people you need to e.g. work out a social plan, you can't fire performance-based unless people grossly neglect their job responsibilities. For smaller companies with less than a few hundred employees it's easier of course, but once you're in unionized territory firing becomes a process that the management needs to work out with the employee board.