Requesting Severance?
![[Post New]](/jforum/templates/default/images/icon_minipost_new.gif){kind=icon}
Anonymous
Why did you start with tldr? |
Anonymous
I'm not OP, but what do you think of OP quitting and asking for severance? |
Anonymous
|
Years ago, my DH was uncomfortable with the ethics / numbers where he worked. For example, the company ran some data twice that didn’t produce the results they wanted. They ran the data a third time, for the desired results - but hadn’t made any changes and didn’t know why the results were different. My husband was unwilling to support the publication of only the 3rd data run (without figuring out if it was correct or, otherwise, disclosing the first two data runs). Although it wasn’t illegal (I don’t know but I assume because it wasn’t a public company), he felt it was extremely unethical. They started giving him work that wasn’t possible - he felt either they were not competent in their field or they were purposefully giving him impossible work. He didn’t know which. (Like imagine being told to develop a drug that would make people immortal or to develop a passenger airplane that didn’t feel the effects of gravity. Like actually not possible.)
It was a super stressful stretch of things like this of them applying more and more pressure for him to quit and him not quitting for various reasons. We think they were trying to get him to quit. Finally, he couldn’t take it and planned to quit over the latest demand or ethical concern, but when he got to work that day they fired him and offered him severance with the condition that they couldn’t say anything negative about him - just confirm that he’d worked there - and he couldn’t say anything negative about them. He spent awhile deciding whether to sign - he wasn’t sure he didn’t want to be able to talk, but also didn’t want them to talk badly about him. Ultimately he did. At the time I saw it as the same outcome he planned with more money but also with more moral dilemma. In retrospect I wonder if weeks earlier he could have quit, but offered to stay silent for x amount. His severance equated to about half the salary he’d earned because he wasn’t there for long (like he was there 6 months and was paid 3 month severance). About a year later, he connected with an employee who was in an administrative role and was not offered severance when she was fired. He learned that the two projects that brought him the biggest concern had failed, in part because they couldn’t replicate results. That definitely made him feel good to know - both in terms of vindication and because they never got to the point where there were any clients involved who could have been negatively affected. |
Anonymous
|
Pp here - he met with an employment lawyer a few times during this process. Once to confirm his understanding that nothing was illegal in terms of what the company was doing, while he figured out how to proceed, and then again to review / counter / work on his severance.
It’s long enough ago that I don’t remember, but I think part of him staying was thinking he could still convince them to change when he was on the project. Though there was probably at least a month of impossible / made up projects when it was clear he’d have no influence. |
Anonymous
Hah. Good luck trying to prove retaliation based on someone being "nit-picky, passive aggressive or even condescending"... |