I look on it the same way I’d look on someone who would cheat on their spouse with me (though of course not to that degree): If you’ll do it to them, you’ll probably do it to me, too. I’d want a new employee to observe all the niceties of breaking off with their previous employer so I could be reasonably certain to expect the same niceties if/when they move on from their employment with me, rather than quitting and leaving me in the lurch.
It’s not a “Go” or “No Go” test. Just a check in the negative column along with stupid things like … Chewing gum during the interview, being 10 minutes late or not having references.
Generally not OK, but, y’know, sometimes you’ve just gotta tell your boss to take this job and shove it, and after that the only thing to do is walk.
I think you get to do this about once in your lifetime, though.
What comes around goes around. If you don’t treat the employees with courtesy and caring and insist that you have the right to fire them without any severance, aka, at-will employment, you get no sympathy from me when they exercise that right. As for the other employees, if they don’t like it, they can leave immediately, or give notice if they don’t like it.
I agree with everyone about (some) employers not valuing employees so why should the employee value the employer. My boss is coming in tomorrow to see how things are. I’ll voice my concerns about how to prevent this from happening again.
I asked my other co-workers if they knew what happened/what they thought and the general consensus was that she created a lot more work for us which was pretty annoying, but as someone said above, c’est la vie .
I appreciate everyone’s input- this is also my first time being a boss (I’ve been in this position for a bit over a year, she was hired about a month after I got this position) so it’s good to see where I may have erred. But I did try really hard to help her, I guess some people don’t want to be helped.
“Do unto others…” or Do unto your employees as you would have them do unto you.
If you are preparing to give notice, find out what your company does when a employee gives notice.
At the lower end, many companies treat workers as disposable as used Kleenex, maybe worse.
So OP- what does you company do when a employees gives notice? What does it do when it wants to lay off an employee?
It really depends on how well the individual gets along with management. While I’ve been there several people have quit and several have been fired.
The Fired:
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Had a wage dispute with upper management. Sent email to entire company about it (my tiny store is part of a tiny chain). Was fired about a week later.
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& 3) Incompetent and were eventually discovered to be stealing.
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Spent about a week in jail missing all of his shifts and we had no idea where he was. Management let him come in and plead his case, I’m not 100% sure of the details, but he’d had some attendance problems before, so maybe that’s why they didn’t rehire him.
Those who gave notice:
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A girl who’d worked for with us for a bit less than a year was unhappy, gave notice and worked the full two weeks.
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Long term employee, I think he’d been with us for nearly two years. Gave two weeks, but near the end of the two weeks decided he wanted to take a break before starting his new job. My boss was pretty upset.
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Long term employee who’s still with us. Didn’t explicitly say he was quitting, but expressed extreme dissatisfaction. The people above me gave him a raise and said they’d be happy if he stayed and he has since taken on additional responsibilities. Something similar happened with another employee and my boss called me and said he was very worried that the guy was going to quit and asked what we could do. He ended up getting a raise.
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Me, except it was a misunderstanding. I told my co-workers about a freelance thing I was doing on the side and the person who was the store manager at the time (one of numbers 2 & 3 who eventually got fired) told the boss that I was looking for another job. The boss called me and told me how great I was, what could be done so I could stay, etc. I am dumb and did not take that opportunity to ask for a raise, but I did ask for subsequent ones after taking on additional responsibilities and was granted them.
I don’t mean to post a laundry list, but my point is that there are plenty of examples to illustrate the fact that even though this is sort of like a “McJob” nobody is getting fired for literally no reason and it seems to take a long time to fire people. And there are plenty of examples of people who have been given raises, asked to stay, and nobody who gives two weeks has been harassed about it. And what’s also important is the ones who were eventually fired would pick fights with and be rude to not only their bosses, but the owner and CEO of the company. Being rude to the CEO is not instant grounds for dismissal though, the co-worker who put in two weeks then decided he wanted a break had told the CEO off at some point prior to that and survived.
ETA: The company is really informal- that’s why people are just asking for raises at periodic intervals rather than having formal reviews. Management notified us a few months ago though that a more formal reviewing policy will be implemented in August. The company’s been around since 2007 and started pretty haphazardly so it’s kind of a strange work environment. A lot of the levels of upper management are new too. When I began the boss above the store manager was the owner, but as the owner opened more stores he hired more people.
Too late to go back and re-edit, but what I meant was, he hired more people between him and us.
What you may notice is that a lot of people have a shitty attitude about work in general. Some people think that the company or the boss is “unfair” because they make you show up to a particular place at a specific time and expect you to perform some task. That it’s somehow your fault because they are working an entry level minimum wage job.
Yes- I’ve pretty much only worked in retail/hourly jobs so I’ve definitely come across that attitude many times.
Yes, once.
It was the job from hell. A family company where there seemed to be no boundaries. My boss and his wife (who was also above me) would bring their fights from home. Their kids worked there in the afternoons and I once had to put up with their 11 year old reminding me that he was my boss’ son when I refused to do something I had been specifically ordered not to.
People would be either fired before the legal 3-month trial period so they could get away with no paying severance, or quit. Nobody there had been in the company for more than a year, and everybody was looking for their next job. The environment was extremely stressful and the owners nasty.
While I have remained friends with my previous two bosses and a lot of my workmates, this time I just couldn’t have it. I got a job two months after starting there (when I was already getting physically sick with stress and hate for the job), I showed up at 10:00 wearing t-shirts and shorts to pick up my stuff and hand over the keys. I told them their company sucked and they could keep the rest of my salary and walked out. They were flabbergasted.
While that was completely out of character for me, I’ve never met any employer that deserved it more (I have a lot of horror stories, luckily none involving me).
And for the record, this wasn’t a job flipping burgers, everybody in the company (except the children) where professionals. And it wasn’t a small company either. I have had 4 jobs in more than 20 years since I got my first degree, I left in incredibly good terms with everybody in all my jobs but that one.
That’s SOP for anyone at my company regardless of the reason for resigning. As soon as notice is given a manager has to escort you to your desk, stand there watching while you empty it out, make sure you do not attempt to log into your computer, then either walk you out of the building themself, or have security do it.
Another thing to take into consideration about whether or not to give notice is how many companies that you can work for are in your area. If you live in the middle of nowhere, you should be more careful of burning your bridges than if you, say, work in a city where there are more opportunities for work and/or your ‘work history’ following you around.
I found this board via Google Search.
A little over a year ago, I had a 6-figure income and a job that was literally killing me, and I knew that if I worked there one more day, I would be a patient IN the hospital where I was working. So, yes, I did quit without notice, which was a horrible thing to do to my co-workers, whom I liked, but there was simply no other alternative.
I decided to move back to the city I consider my REAL home and start a home-based business, and am living on the savings from my 6-figure income days in the meantime. I am much happier and have no regrets except for leaving my colleagues in the lurch, and torpedoing my career at the same time, but it was one that over the past few years is mutating into something I don’t recognize, and the support I’ve had from other people who do the same thing I was doing is 100%.
So, that’s my story.
Other websites have given the following reasons as those where it is acceptable to quit a job without notice.
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The one that happened to me: your physical and/or mental health is in immediate and dire jeopardy.
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You are being forced to engage in illegal or unethical activity, which would include not getting paid.
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Your employer is not following standard safety guidelines, which would include sexual or other forms or harassment.
Comparing quitting without notice to being fired and escorted out isn’t really comparing apples and apples. Usually when someone is fired without notice there is cause for termination and the employer isn’t going to want you hanging around trashing files on the computer or cleaning out the office supply locker.
If it’s a simple layoff or workforce reduction, then yeah, no notice is a dick move unless they’re still paying a two week severence.
I can’t honestly say that there’s a moral issue with short or no notice on a minimum wage McJob. At that level, everyone is replaceable on short notice. The employer probably has a stack of applications in the drawer from people who would love to start on 24 hours notice.
ETA. Whoops. Didn’t notice the thread date. C’est la vie.
I quit my last job w/o notice. Granted it was a p/t job at a pizza shop. It was my favorite pizza place and I thought I would like working there. I worked hard, never tardy never called in sick and would take extra hours any time but after a few months time the boss’s attitude was starting to wear on my last nerve. Uncalled for passive aggressive pot shots and the silent treatment, WTF. he would say some totally off the wall shit to people. anyway he’s the boss whatever…
until one day he refused to tell me what my hours were going to be for the next week. Only three people worked there and he said he didn’t know if I was on the schedule that came out the next day. LIAR, just wanted me to chase his tail and beg for hours. So i made other plans. And when he called on Friday (the busiest night) asking where was I? Oh the pleasure it gave me to give him a piece of my mind. He apologized and started to make noises of contrition, and I cut him off and said I won’t be coming back either. And hung up. And now I have a new favorite pizza shop. It is so much tastier too, why I thought that crazy guy had good pizza? Dunno.
I think quitting without notice is a terrible thing to do, even slightly worse than unexpectedly dying without notice.
I once quit a minimum-wage job after just 4 weeks. It was for Blockbuster. I was fucking sick and tired of being FORCED to push crap on our customers even after they were getting upset. It was obvious they didn’t like it. But, thems the breaks.
I learned to hate Blockbuster with the fire of a thousand suns. I am still happy to watch it slowly tumble towards bankruptcy.
I did feel shitty about it, to my coworkers and my boss. But I could not take it anymore.
In general, if you are not in a union, not on contract, whatever… oh and you work in one of those republican “right to work” states or whatever it’s called, then nobody owes anyone a goddamn notice to quit. An employer can hire anyone they want, and an employee can work for anyone they want (who will hire them).
If you, as an employer, want employee stability, offer contracts or hire union workers who can’t just quit.
Only time I’ve quit without notice was with a sketchy place. They weren’t hiring me, they were contracting with me as an independent contractor to deliver food for them. It was clearly a sham: we had regular shifts and specific work duties, and if I’d taken them to the IRS there’s a decent chance they’d have been broken by all the back taxes they’d have to pay on their de facto employees. The wages were low enough that, after I subtracted for wear and tear on my car, I only once (in my five or so weeks of work for them) made minimum wage.
Like I said, it was sketchy. But I figured that if they wanted to pretend I was an independent contractor, two could play that game; so after they paid me cash for my last shift–er, not shift, my last accepted contract with them–I told them that I was done, that I’d not be accepting any more contracts with them. They acted shocked and hurt, but they could sit and spin for all I care.