laid off 6 engineers across 4 EU countries

Last year we had to make cuts to the engineering team, and because we’d hired pretty aggressively across the EU in the 2 years before that, 6 of the 8 people we needed to let go were based in Spain, France, Germany, and the Netherlands.

I’d done layoffs in the US before and figured there’d be more process involved over here, with longer notice periods and more documentation to file, and budgeted about a month to work through it.

That estimate did not survive first contact with the Netherlands…

The reason is that the Netherlands alone took 11 weeks, because economic dismissals there require either UWV permission, a government agency with its own processing timeline that doesn’t particularly care about your quarter-end targets, or a mutual termination that goes through the courts.

The German hire on the other hand, was 7 months into his contract when this started, which put him past the employment protection threshold and meant we needed a documented operational justification plus a negotiated settlement to avoid a labor court filing.

And then France required a mandatory pre-dismissal interview before a formal letter could even be issued, with the individual dismissal process there running a minimum of 5 weeks by law regardless of whether anyone was contesting anything.

The one thing that probably saved us from making it significantly worse is that we’d moved everyone onto EOR contracts the year before, Workmotion and Deel are the main ones if you want providers with their own entities in each country rather than routing through local partners, and we were on Workmotion.

So at least the severance calculations, the notice periods, the government notifications and the jurisdiction-specific paperwork were handled by people who’d done this in each country before, and it saved us from trying to figure out 4 different labor law systems on the fly.

5 months total, lawyers in 3 of the 4 countries, and a European expansion plan that’s a lot more conservative than the one we had going in.

Now maybe this post reads like a complaint about EU labor law, and it partly is, but we’d still make the same hires, we just had a completely wrong model of what the exit process looks like over here.