What is it with the holidays? A friend called today to let me know they'd been 'let go' with only one day's notice. The crazy thing is that this seems to be the norm - my last employer had a bad habit of making big staffing cuts on short notice just before the holidays. Now, it does mean more time with the family over the holiday, but it still seems to me there is a more appropriate time to do it. And as for this whole 'one day's notice' business, don't even get me started. If you can't trust your employee not to trash the place before leaving, I'm not clear why you hired them in the first place.

Besides - it should be clear that the only workers you have to worry about are the ones wearing wooden shoes (since they are the only ones capable of sabotage

Erik commented:
Ideally, unless something is really wrong at the company, a termination should not be a surprise. If it's for a restructuring or downsizing, an announcement should have gone through weeks or months before it actually takes place. If it's for performance, an employee's supervisor should discuss that well in advance, and give the employee an opportunity to show improvement. Of course, the operative word here is "ideally..."
on Fri Dec 16 14:48:24 2005

David commented:
Yup. And as we both know, 'ideally' very rarely describes the real world. Certainly businesses often seem incapable of making measured decisions.
on Fri Dec 16 16:12:51 2005

Jason in Egypt commented:
From personal experience, I agree with David's original comments. When I was "downsized" or whatever happened, I found out at the end of a day, was given a bit of time to pack, then quietly exit after everyone else had left. So the next day, my friends/co-workers showed up and I had just vanished. *sigh*
on Sat Dec 17 09:58:26 2005

Anonymous commented:
Speaking as the person involved, I must say, although it really sucks in many ways, its a relief in others. I'd been half expecting it for a while, and haven't been having a lot of fun at work for several months anyway. They gave me a good severance package, paid my insurance through Febraury, and my ex-boss is helping me find another job. They didn't give me notice, but they gave me a check for 2 weeks pay in lieu of it. I wandered in the next day, packed up my stuff, talked to some people about consulting contracts, had a free lunch, and left. I understand that some people in the company were encouraging that I be "walked to the door" (admittedly, standard procedure in the IT world), but my boss essentially said "*you* may do business that way, but *I* don't." They did shut off my email and change most of the passwords immediately (which I expected, and actually instructed them to do.) I'm looking it at as a postive. I get to take a couple weeks, play with my kids, and figure out what I want to do when i grow up. In short, they did the layoff thing *right* (if you can apply that word to the situation). It could have been much, much worse. My US$0.02. If you need (or know somone who needs) a senior level IT/network guy, and you haven't already figured out who's writing this, ask Dave.
on Sun Dec 18 01:25:33 2005

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