Terminated - Fortunately Not Arnold Schwarzenegger Style

As many people may or may not know, I'm making a job change. This is a really exciting time for me. After working at at my first employer out of college for over 3 years, I was offered and accepted an exciting job at a competitor.

It's a very interesting situation to respond to as an employer: If your employee is leaving for a competitor and gives notice (2 weeks, for instance, as I did), how do you respond? Some people might not understand my question.

As an employer, you have a few options:

• Let the employee leave in 2 weeks.
• Terminate the employee within a few days of the notice.
• Terminate the employee immediately.

I personally believe that the second option is best, assuming you have an ethical and productive employee committed working hard after they announce their intent to move on. A few days forces urgency of a brain dump from the leaving employee to coworkers without giving time for the employee to mentally 'check out' before quitting. It also allows time to methodically transfer files to coworkers, prepare projects for hand off and answer any outstanding questions directly.

However, my employer, (as do almost all employers when an employee announces they're leaving for a competitor) terminated me by the end of the day.

The concern, of course, is that your employee is no longer loyal, especially if they are disgruntled. They could potentially steal trade secrets, inventions, patents, customer lists and other sensitive information with hopes of having an advantage at their new employer.

This concern, however, I personally believe is somewhat misleading. First and foremost, company secrets are protected by law. Often when working for technology companies, you give away all rights to inventions, patents and copyrights relating to your job function (sometimes unrelated to your job function!) to your employer. I specifically have an invention (and frankly a really cool one at that) which my previous employer is probably not going to act on. However, I can't mention anything about it to my new employer because I signed away the rights to it upon taking my previous employer's offer. In addition, my new employer asked for and I agreed that I wouldn't give confidential information from my previous employer as a part of my new contract.

Bottom Line

Simply: Professional companies that deal with technology make you sign away anything valuable to them, want to make sure inventions and secrets from previous work stay with the original companies. Good companies don't want lawsuits from stolen ideas - they want original innovation.

Less Than Simply: There are gray areas. Customer lists, for example, could be considered trade secrets. However, its very difficult to legally prove a customer list is stolen.

Regardless of Simplicity: Employees who are leaving know before the employer does. They'll secure whatever information that they want before they give their notice. What they secure isn't a function of time employed after their notice, it's function of the employee's ethics and savvy.