Google powerwashes your corp Chromebook when they let you go. A friend was composing an email on the train when their screen went black and the device reset itself to factory settings.
They even send the “you’re being fired” email to their personal email they have on file. Didn’t even schedule a meeting.
Most of the employer behaviour described in such gleeful terms here would be outright illegal in most of Europe and open up the employer to risk of being sued for wrongful dismissal, etc.
Eh, there are ways around that. I've worked for multiple Finnish companies that do layoffs via "lomautus" whereby they put the laid-off employees on a forced, unpaid, indefinite leave. After multiple months of not receiving a paycheck, the employees inevitably "resign".
In Germany that's forbidden, you'd have to pay them.
But you can be placed in a room/office with no windows (not the OS), a computer without internet access and nothing to do. How long can you go on like that?
Royal Bank of Scotland did that to me and a few colleagues when they didn’t want to pay redundancy whilst closing the only building for us to work in.
Was a battle of wills and eventually after 5 weeks of coming into a random branch office and sitting in an empty room, we came in one Friday to be told that the manager in charge of the building closure had been removed from the project and they would be paying full redundancy pay and we didn’t have to come back in but they’d pay for the next 3 months as well.
We’re talking about a Google employee that makes 5x or more of what a European counterpart would. Lack of termination notice and other at will employment is easy to plan for when you make so much money.
Until someone starts providing examples of software companies where the employees are unioned and clear $400k+ annum, the bar is still “no unions”.
They even send the “you’re being fired” email to their personal email they have on file. Didn’t even schedule a meeting.