you have no idea how lucky you US founders are about firing

the difference between US founders and EU founders on firing is bigger than anything else this industry pretends is comparable, and I lose another year of my life every time someone on here posts they had to let her go on friday like it's a normal sentence.

want to fire someone in germany after their probation? you can't, not without verhaltensbedingte kündigung which means multiple written warnings spread across months and a paper trail thick enough to survive an arbeitsgericht hearing.

France? same, but add €30k or more in severance and a labor judge that's statistically going to side with the employee.

Netherlands? you file with the UWV or the court, expect months of process and a transitievergoeding payout based on tenure.

Meanwhile in the US, you call HR in the morning, schedule a quick meeting, send the offboarding doc, change the slack permissions, hand over the final check, and by lunchtime you have one less person on the roster.

you do this for performance or for fit or because the runway needs to stretch another quarter, and you don't need a reason because at-will employment is the most generous gift an entire labor system has ever given to founders.

And the most painful version of this is when you run a cross-border team. I have a small team in Austin we employ through workmotion on US contracts, and when one of them was underperforming for months, my workmotion contact walked me through the at-will exit process via email, the offboarding took a week or so, severance was technically zero because the contract didnt require it.

Meanwhile, I had a Berlin employee with the same performance pattern from the same period that we still hadnt been able to exit nearly a year later, with multiple Abmahnungen on file, a works council that requested mediation, and a settlement number that started at €60k.

and the wildest part is (you) US founders don't realize what at-will means for the underlying physics of a company, because you can take a swing on a hire and reverse it within weeks, you can ship a new strategy and reorg the team around it before quarter end, you can replace an exec without a year-long succession plan.

But we can't move that fast because every EU hire is a multi-year commitment minimum to that human being's career and our P&L, and we make every hire knowing that.

And the one thing that benefits us is retention, because Germans don't jump jobs every couple years like Americans do, and I've had engineers on my team for 5+ years since the social contract works both ways, and the “legal” cost of firing them is matched by the cultural cost of leaving you, so when an EU hire lands and works out they tend to stay.

you all complain about hiring being hard, about EOR pricing, about how someone underperformed and now you have to manage them out…

man, what I wouldn't give for those problems, so the next time you draft a "unfortunately we had to part ways" post, think about whether the operator on the other side of the world is even allowed to want to.