[gcr]

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.

[ninalanyon]

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.

[nalthis]

Skeptical that this would actually be illegal in Europe if all the details were provided.

I went through a similar thing at Amazon. Locked out of my laptop at 3 a.m. and emailed I was laid off. The key thing though is that my official end date was 90 days in the future. Legally, the 3 a.m. lock out was actually just a warning of impending layoffs. I got paid to “work from home” for 3 months after I returned my badge and laptop.

My understanding is that Europe may have longer wait periods, but most tech companies still essentially do the same thing there. Amazon’s laid off Berlin employees still get locked out at 3am and told to do nothing for months while legal does whatever it needs to do to get rid of them.

[lazyasciiart]

Funnily enough it is actually illegal in Europe and so our laid off German employees were reinstated by court order, several other countries as well. Amazon presumably ran into the same problem, or was smart enough to know they would: they give plenty of notice to European employees and follow local laws. https://www.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestionsEU/comments/1qpni5...

[Der_Einzige]

This is why the EU continues to get much more poor compared to the USA. Turns out "live to work" really does beat "work to live".

[UltraSane]

Seems like only a few thousand people in the US are really getting rich from this.

[weberer]

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".

[kuerbel]

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?

The law, sadly, can't forbid asshole employers.

[blokey]

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.

Fun as a 21 year old.

[mschuster91]

And then US tech has the arrogance of claiming "we don't need unions".

yeah, shit like what we're reading here is precisely why y'all need unions.

[kortilla]

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”.

[AlexeyBelov]

Why not fire people humanely, even if you pay a lot?

[rixed]

A full email? We need a "you've been fired" emoji.

[tosti]

U+1FAF5 U+1F525

[laughing_man]

Man, that's cold.

[gear54rus]

I think at least on windows you can powercycle it quickly a few times until it gives up this behavior. Not sure about Chromebooks.