His Employer Fired People Without Warning — So When He Found a New Job He Quit Without Giving Any Either
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Being a contractor isn’t always the easiest way to make a living.
Things can change quickly and there’s no guarantee that you’ll be employed in the near future.
And that’s scary stuff!
But, on the flip side, the people who employ contractors should have the courtesy and the decency to give workers at least a little bit of a heads up if they’re going to let them go.
But some people don’t always operate with integrity…
In today’s story, a contractor talked about a co-worker who decided to fight fire with fire when he found out how his employer was treating other contractors.
Check out what went down.
My contractor coworker quit with 10 seconds notice after what our manager said about contractors.
“I worked an engineering contract for a while. They were pretty open ended, like a lot were, with a vague (but not binding) length specified.
That’s just the way these jobs work…
Kind of like: “This contract is expected to be for 12 months, but it is at will of the employer, and could end earlier or be extended further.”
But for those that do that kind of work, usually they stick to the vague timelines, and a lot of well performing contractors get extended.
Anyway… one day our team of 10 (all contractors, managed by one full time employee) let 3 of the contractors go. (And they had ME do it!!! Technically I was running that team, but… I was a contractor too, and not in charge of any firing like that.)
That’s harsh…
So they were told “this is your last day” at 4 pm.
Me and another contractor asked our sponsor “hey – how come we didn’t give those guys any notice?”
He said brightly “that’s why we hire contractors! So we can cut them loose at a moment’s notice whenever we want to!”
And it was shady…
We didn’t love that answer. Also – it was a weird thing to say to two other contractors… He basically told us we’d get no notice and be let go instantly someday.
Anyway, long story short, that other contractor was a VERY sharp guy. He started interviewing, and got another job. He told me about it (and I didn’t tell anyone else).
It started in a few weeks. He just kept right on working the contract job, and was right in the middle of a bunch of work that only he understood.
At 5 pm on his last day he just stood up, grabbed his laptop/mouse/docking-station, walked to our sponsors desk and set them down.
Smell ya later!
He just said brightly “hey, thanks for everything, this is my last day!” The guy said “wait, you’re leaving?” and he just said “yes, thanks!” and walked out.
That was it.
(He did also hit ‘send’ on a more official ‘last day’ email at the same time too.)
It was really funny, his work was half done, he didn’t answer any calls or questions about it, and it took us like a month to figure it all out and get that project back on track.
If the sponsor hadn’t been SO delighted about being able to fire contractors at any second, that guy would definitely have given a nice two week notice and worked to have a smooth handoff of his work.”
Reddit users shared their thoughts.
This person had a lot to say.
Another reader weighed in.
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This individual shared their thoughts.
Another person spoke up.
If you enjoyed this story, check out this post about a teenager who wants to work, but his mom thinks working past 8pm is too late for high school.
And this Reddit user weighed in.
He showed them!
And maybe this experience taught these folks a lesson about how to treat their workers.
We can only hope…
This guy wasn’t playing around when he quit this job!
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