European-style employment contracts are very, very uncommon in the US. Most salaried workers can either quit or be fired at any time, for any reason, with no notice or severance penalty in either case.
I have some experience with the hiring process in Belgium. The Social Democrat in me stands in awe. The manager in me cringes in horror.
Do you have any vacation time accrued? If you decide to work the full 12 days, make sure you get paid for giving up those vacation days.
You are not a jerk in any way for giving 2 weeks notice.
Loyalty towards employees seems to have evaporated around the time that cassette tapes went out of vogue.
The picture you have painted indicates zero forward movement and slowly increasing dissatisfaction. Make the jump, it sure sounds as though you will be doing the right thing.
In 35 years as a Freelancer, I stopped that lifestyle and took a staff job with a small corporation for 5 years. When it was time to depart, I took myself to the CEO/ Owner and spoke to him one on one. He was not only gracious but supportive of my reasons for departing.
I gave 2 weeks notice. I felt some guilt about it, but knew it was the right move. If I hemmed and hawwed, I would still be there.
Good luck with the new gig !!! Congrats !
Here’s the situation in a nutshell (even though I did notice that you already gave notice):
2 weeks is standard and customary. Nobody’s going to look at you funny or penalize you for giving that amount of lead time. Of course, you can give more if you know ahead of time, and feel pretty confident that your boss/company won’t throw you out on your ear. Back in about 1999, my company basically froze wages and bonuses, and I decided to move to a different city where IT/computing job prospects were better. Since I was on extremely good terms with my boss, I gave him like 2 months notice.
Your old company has been taking you very much for granted if they had no plan or backup in case you ever decided to leave. And that’s not your problem, when we get down to the nitty-gritty. As long as you don’t leave them in the lurch with stuff like terrible documentation, or record keeping (i.e. if you’re an IT manager, and you don’t leave your vendor contacts, etc…) then you should be fine.
As black rabbit says, very few US workers are under contract. Generally, US jobs are considered “at-will employment”, meaning you can quit or be fired at any time and for any reason, with or without notice. Contracts are more common in some professions (my wife, a physician, has a contract with her employer which outlines the notice period, among other things), but probably the great majority of US employees are “at will”.
While the “at-will” doctrine says you can be fired for any reason, there are exceptions. One is that you can’t be fired for being a member of a “protected class”. So, you can’t be fired for your racial or ethnic heritage, religion, disability, gender, etc. You can be fired because the boss didn’t like the red tie you wore today.
I’m on 3 months notice these days. I once had to give 3 months notice and was also made to work it. By the time I actually left I’d almost forgotten I was leaving.
This is in the UK, where, like you say, 4 weeks is standard, more for senior personnel and employment contracts are legal documents for both sides to follow.
If your employer terminated you, would they be on the hook to pay you the 3 months salary?
In the US, as others have noted, 2 weeks is a pretty standard notice period. Certainly if someone’s planning to retire, quit to go to college, or whatever, they may give longer notice. For the OP, 2 weeks is plenty, especially if he (she?) doesn’t mind taking the occasional phone call.
I don’t believe the employer has any legal right to pay the 2 weeks salary if the employee says “2 weeks notice” and the employer says “clean out desk now”. In practice, I don’t know how that would work, as I’ve never had that happen to me. Hell, the last time I quit to change jobs (as opposed to because I was moving to another city) was over 30 years ago; the employer did NOT opt to tell me to scram right away, and in fact the manager chewed me out a week later for daring to take a holiday (Labor Day)… after working 10+ hours both Saturday and Sunday of that weekend. Yeah, there was a reason I was leaving that job.
Pay for accrued vacation time IS legally due the employee. If the OP has accumulated, say, 2 weeks worth and the employer says “Bye. Now!” they cannot withhold that.
Either your current boss steps up and makes you a better offer, or he loses you. That makes it his fault.
I think you’re a selfish jerk and an ingrate. You’re stabbing your boss, who’s provided you with a good career and helped fund your education, in the back, not to mention your co-workers who will have to deal with the disruption your abrupt exit will cause. In short, you’re everything that’s wrong with corporate America. Feel ashamed? Good, you should.
Not really. This thread just really needed some conflict.
I worked for a company that also had 4 weeks notice in the agreement letter.
I’m curious as to how they “made” you work the 4 weeks (given that slavery has been illegal in the USA since 1863).
My husband has left several jobs for better opportunities, and he’s never been given 2 weeks of pay and shown the door. He was expected to work the full 2 weeks. He’s an engineer - I don’t know if that has anything to do with it.
Nitpick: every employee is “under contract”. A contract is not necessarily one of fixed duration or embodied in a single writing (or any writing, for that matter.) Generally, the employment contract consists of any verbal agreements and the bucket of employer policy acknowledgments the employer makes you sign.
A contract is formed when the employer asks you if you’ll work for them for $500 a week and you say yes. It’s that simple.
I’m interested in the update of what the CEO/boss response is to the departure. I hope we are let in.
Yep, it’s typical in IT jobs to be shown the door when you turn in notice. Especially if you have credentials/privileges to either copy important files or cause massive data destruction.
Two weeks is all that is owed, even if your boss wasn’t an ass. Good luck.
2 wks. is more than enough. Just ask how much notice they’d give you if it were in their economic interest to give you the boot.
Two weeks is definitely fine, I will say that while I often point out employers don’t have to give you any notice it isn’t true that they don’t. Many employers do give notice, albeit not as specific as an employees notice typically is. Sometimes it is just as specific.
I’ve seen situations in which a company was insourcing what had previously been an outsourced IT department. Maybe about 30% of the people who had been working on the contract were offered jobs in the insourcing, the rest would be cut and put on their consulting firms “bench” (unpaid position.) Of the 70% who were losing their jobs, they knew about it for three months, and the final month of those their job overlapped with that of their replacement and they were required to train their replacements. If they didn’t, there was a severance program and they’d lose their severance pay (which was based on years of service with the company and for some of the longer tenured employees was around six weeks of pay in a lump sum.)
I’ve also seen situations in which people at large companies are put on an “improvement plan” due to poor work performance. This is a warning that you’re going to be fired, some people do not recognize it as such, but I’ve never heard of anyone going on such a plan who wasn’t eventually fired. It’s simply a way of being rigorous and dotting every i and crossing every t.
I’ve also seen situations in which upper management announces that a “reduction in force is imminent”, in that case there is no way to know for sure if it will affect you, but you can’t say you had no warning a few weeks later if you’re one of the ones let go.
See, this makes no sense to me. If I was going to burn the servers to the ground in revenge, wouldn’t I do it before I tell them I’m quitting?
It makes sense when you fire someone to first remove their access to everything, then tell them to come into the office to talk. But when they tell you they’re quitting? Makes no sense except as revenge.
I’ve been through both kinds of layoffs, “This list of people please report to the downstairs conference room, we’ll mail you your personal belongings” and “We’re cutting staff, so your last day will be in 19 days”. Ah well.
At my company, we aren’t concerned as much with sabotage as with the negative impact on other employees. Someone who is leaving is more likely to bitch about the company, discuss all their reasons for leaving, and talk about how much better it will be at their next job. If you don’t need the person for transition, it’s easier on everyone to just let them go now and avoid another two weeks of them bringing down morale.
The best (worst?) I heard of was a friend who called his voicemail over the weekend to check for messages, and got a response “that extension is invalid.” He was officially notified when he went to work on Monday, but it wasn’t much of a surprise at that point.
I assume you mean obligation rather than “right”, but I’d think if you gave two weeks notice and they replied you’re out now with no pay, then you’ve been fired rather than resigned, and they might be liable for unemployment.
The worst I’d heard happened to a friend. He was engaged, just bought a new house in the burbs, and was off on his honeymoon, which he’d cleared with his workplace about 6 months earlier.
Comes back the first day after the vacation to his boss telling him to clear out his things and leave immediately - he had been downsized during his honeymoon, but his direct boss fought like a trooper to keep him on salary until he returned so he wouldn’t get the bad news while he was ON HIS HONEYMOON.
That was a freaked-out dude for about two months while he frantically job-searched. Wedding payments, new house, new mortgage, new bride, and no warning for being out of a job? Holy shit.