To fire someone, or to quit?

at your level, yes. (If I remember correctly, you are a few years out of school.)

Depends on your level of responsibility. If you're at the bottom of the totem pole then it's fine. If you're closer to the top, deeply embedded in a project, or have a lot of face time with clients then you should think more along the lines of about a month if possible.

yep, what pv said.

hmmm...i was just thinking about giving 2 weeks notice if i get/take the job i am negotiating but now you got me thinking.

i am a PA (JC w/o license) pretty much embedded but there is so much man power available in the office right now and i have left such a trail to follow and have standardized things beautifully and it's only a couple of corporate typical copy/paste kind of jobs getting cranked out...should i give more than 2 weeks notice?

i dont think i should

i havent been here that long.

Most of the firms I've worked in have requested in their employee handbooks that "key staff" or "management-level staff" give a minimum of one month's notice. Of course there's no way to make that mandatory - and any notice at all is completely voluntary (unless you've signed a contract at some point that states otherwise). If you feel that you can smoothly transition the project to others in the firm within two weeks then the projects will probably be fine. But you still may leave your employer with the memory that you left on pretty short notice. It's up to you how much that matters to you.

A project manager left our firm recently when another local firm made an attractive offer. He gave only 8 weekdays' notice. He left a project on which he was the manager and sole contact person. Even though the project is nearing completion there are still the usual myriad issues popping up. While the rest of us do have time to address these, we don't have the background on the project to do it well as well as the project manager could. It would have been very helpful to us, the clients and contractors - and thus to everyone's sentiment about this employee - if he would have stuck out the project for another 6 weeks to substantial completion. It's nearly certain that he'll work with the contractor again at some point if he stays in this region - so that's one bridge that especially wasn't smart to burn.

I just gave my boss 6 weeks notice, and he had wished I had given him more. I work for a small firm though (7 people) and although it was my first job out of school, I still had a significant role at the firm...

Therefore, I think it depends on your relationship with your boss, and whether you feel he deserves to know a bit ahead of time so he can make appropriate arrangements to fill in your position.

yeah if it's a small firm they are gonna have to devote a lot of resources to finding a replacement for you so 2 weeks might not be enough. then again, it also depends on what the terms of your leaving is - if you are on great terms with them but just have to leave (i.e. for school) and it won't be awkward to stay around after you give them notice, give them as much notice as possible, at least a month. if you don't want anything to do with the firm anymore and don't like them, etc then 2 weeks is probably enough.

I try to negotiate a contract for services for AFTER I quit. I basically try to continue projects that I am embedded on as an independent contractor. I have too much pride in the work I am involved in to just leave it to anyone in an office I am leaving. But sometimes they just want you to go.
j

depends on the firm. some places don't give you the opportunity to give notice. if you tell them you're quitting, you get fired. firms like that don't deserve receiving notice at all.

That's true - some firms will ask an employee to leave immediately once they give notice - especially if they feel that the employee is at all "disgruntled". This is usually to prevent the employee from affecting other employees' morale, to prevent him from taking drawings or files (or deleting or otherwise damaging them), etc. But even if your firm has been known to do this in the past you should still give them - in writing - a reasonable amount of notice. One reason: if you do give written notice and they ask you to leave immediately then either they have to give you severance pay for the amount of notice that you gave, or you're now eligible to file an unemployment claim - because in the eyes of the Dept. of Labor you have in fact been fired.
I've only ever seen firms do that with fairly entry-level people who were seen as unproductive to begin with, or with people who were leaving under troubled circumstances (more or less being pressured to resign.) Most firms aren't going to ask a project manager to leave immediately - especially if he has a key role in one or more ongoing projects.

dude, just leave without saying anything. architecture sucks.

If you're going to try to negotiate to provide services to the firm after you quit, PLEASE be absolutely sure that you will actually have the time and interest to follow through! We just got burned by that arrangement - a departing employee was the only one working on a nearly-done CD set for a small institutional renovation project and she offered to complete the set on an hourly basis and return the complete set (with the bill) within a month. It sounded like a great deal, since the rest of us didn't have much familiarity with the project, or much time available. We checked with her after a few weeks and she said she was almost done. The month went by and no drawing files arrived. Meanwhile the client started calling in somewhat of a hurry to build. The former employee ignored our messages for another week. When we finally got in touch she said her new job was more time consuming than she'd anticipated and she was sorry but she couldn't finish the set, and she'd stop by to bring things back and discuss the state of the project. She dropped off the files very early one morning while no one was in the office, along with a bill for 10 hours of services. The set did in fact only have about 10 hours of work done on it since she'd left the firm about 2 months earlier. Now we're stuck scrambling to finish this, the client is unhappy with us (justifiably), we're unhappy with the former employee (I think also justifiably), and we'll probably never get into that type of agreement again.
I think it would be much better in the long run for your reputation to make a clean break - even on short notice - than to create a drawn out problem like this.

I would love to quit on a dime to screw my boss because he is a unprofessional dick. But I don't want to screw over my coworkers. I think 2 weeks is a nice happy medium. It gives my boss time to hire someone else or at least get the process started so my coworkers aren't left with all of my work. But I'm not going to go out of my way and stay longer for this asshole. I think professionalism works both ways.

Give your two weeks notice and see what happens. Largely I think the two weeks is a joke. Lower level employees goof off and do nothing those last weeks. Higher level employees use those two weeks to scam clients more often than truly transition management. That's why I'm a big fan of not letting anyone have 100% autonimity with a client/project. Employers need to protect themselves

2 weeks is standard. If your bosses want you to stay around longer to finish what you were working on, they should pay you the salary of the job that you are going to (if it pays more)

There are a few clients I would like to give a two week notice to....but with the times we are in better hang onto them as long as I can.

I gave my 2 weeks 1 week ago! Do you know what that means? YAY!

no days notice is required

at least in my state it is a right to work state

so just like you could be fired with no days notice you can quit with no days notice

anyone had the joy of having an 'exit interview' before your last day? an in depth interrogation of why you're leaving, what you like/dislike about firm, etc

Sure, you can give 0 days notice if you want (unless you're working under contract and it prohibits this.) There's no law against it, and there are even a few situations in which it might be the best thing to do - or at least justifiable.

But I'd just keep in mind that your employment history follows you forever. It's not just the word-of-mouth opinions of you that follow you, or the issue of getting your IDP units signed off on down the road, or whether or not you even list this job on your resume. Once you work somewhere it just has a way of resurfacing forever. A few years ago I had to document 7 years worth of former employers and have them all sign employment verifications when I applied for a mortgage. The last thing I would have needed in that situation was some pissed off former boss "losing" that time-sensitive form on his desk for a month. (And if I'd just "left out" any of my previous jobs then I would have had a long enough gap in my employment history to potentially disqualify me.) My point: you just can't always foresee now every situation in which you may need these people to be at least minimally cooperative later. Unless they're actively, deliberately abusing or tormenting you it's usually in your best interest to give them the 2 weeks (or more if they request it.)