Just curious, have you ever lived or spent a significant amount of time in Nordics (or anywhere in Europe)? Generally speaking, I find that people who haven't lived outside the their birth-country often romanticize life in other countries.
I immigrated from the US to another country a while back, and it's not unusual for me to meet newcomers with unrealistic expectations about life in their new home. Often, they go back to their birth-country after a few years, disappointed with the mundane reality of living in a foreign country.
I'm not trying to say that your wrong, necessarily. For some people, life can be better in other countries, but I caution against unrealistic expectations.
When I worked at Amazon, I personally knew someone who put in their two-weeks notice, and the next day they found out they were fired when their badge didn't work. From anecdotes I've heard, this happens if Amazon suspects a person is leaving to join a competitor. Amazon is very serious about protecting their data.
In France the standard notice for engineers is three months, and goes both way. It's not unheard of for a corporation to pay the three months notice when firing someone, without the employee actually coming in anymore, precisely to avoid theft, or the moral hazard towards other employees.
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.
Many companies do the same thing. The employee isn’t fired they are just asked not to return for the 2 weeks. I’ve never heard of the employer not paying out the 2 weeks.
Apart from whether Amazon are paying the two weeks notice that they morally owe, one obvious difference would be if your next employer asks have you ever been terminated from a previous position.
Who would want to be placed in the position of saying yes I was fired because I was suspected of being a security risk?
Does anyone ever answer this question truthfully? I generally assume not. The only way to verify this is through a back channel (AIUI corps generally won't disclose the reason due to libel liability), unless the employee really screwed up and didn't sign a separation agreement, which (again AIUI) you'd only decline if you plan on pursuing legal action against your employer.
And if you're already on a back channel, then you don't care about playing fair.
Well you can of course but interviewers often discount candidates that slag off their old employers on the grounds that they’ll be difficult to manage.
I personally know someone who gave a two week notice at Amazon and had his manager ask him to stay out the quarter. It's all about relationships and reputation. People with a proven track record of quality work and strong ethics are valued there.
Nothing. Relationships are by definition bidirectional. Being able to have a good relationship with a manager implies that that manager is at least not awful, and most likely also good. The person I refer to would never have delayed starting his new job as long as he did if he didn't have professional respect for his manager.
Must depend on the org and how you do it. My personal experience is that if you are open and up-front with going to a competitor, they'll cut your access and pay you for the remaining time left on your resignation letter/month.
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.
If someone was going to steal company info for a competitor, they’d do it before they gave notice that they were leaving. And they wouldn’t tell their current employer where they were going.
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.
Fired as in not paid for the two weeks? That’s very unusual but being shown the door when you give notice and having your desk effects delivered to you is not at all uncommon.
Sorry. I didn't mean to imply a moral judgement on the issue. I was just trying to provide an example that furthers the parent's point on Amazon being very protective of their data.
I don't understand how a union would function in the video game industry. I don't work at a video game company myself, but I have some friends that do. The typical life-cycle of a video game is:
- A small group of developers work on the core physics engine, graphics engine, and high-level game design.
- When the core game engine is sufficiently developed, the number of artists and game designs greatly increases to generate the art, sound, and level designs for the game.
- As the game reaches an alpha stage, the number of QA testers is dramatically increased.
- After the game is released, almost all of the QA and art people are let go, with a small number retained to work on DLC. A core group of software developers will be kept to be begin work on the next game, and the cycle repeats.
How does a union function when much of the workforce is only going to work for the company for less than 2 years? Many QA testers work for less than year.
Some of comments here are suggesting that facial recognition wouldn't be necessary if San Francisco would just fix the root cause of its crime problem.
There is a common pattern I've noticed in discussions about San Francisco.
Person A: San Francisco should implement <solution that provides relief in the near-future>.
Person B: That's just a bandaid over the problem. It's better to just fix <problem that has plagued humanity for all of history>.
Usually, the solution to <problem that has always plagued humanity> requires large changes to our economic system or society that would take decades, if not lifetimes. I'm not opposed to such changes, but it seems naive to me to not do quality-of-life improvements because they would be unnecessary if our society was massively different.
If this is how the city is managed, it's no surprise that it's a mess.
SF is broken because they refuse to punish bad behavior. Pising and pooping on streets and sidewalks. Breaking into cars. Using heroin and meth in public. Disposing of needles wherever you feel like. Setting up a tent in the park. Most other cities would stop this from happening but SF won't.
Some people believe mentally ill homeless drug addicts are the tragic, powerless victims of a society which has made housing and medical care unaffordable and deprived them of political representation; that putting a homeless person in jail guaranteeing them food and a bed for a week is unlikely to be much of a deterrent; and that the things that would be an effective deterrent are inhumane.
Personally I don't agree, but I can see why a person would think that way.
I immigrated from the US to another country a while back, and it's not unusual for me to meet newcomers with unrealistic expectations about life in their new home. Often, they go back to their birth-country after a few years, disappointed with the mundane reality of living in a foreign country.
I'm not trying to say that your wrong, necessarily. For some people, life can be better in other countries, but I caution against unrealistic expectations.