Twelve months notice

This is exactly what I did when I emigrated to Canada from the States. I let the company I was working for know that I was applying for landed immigrant status and that they could count on me until the immigration process was done and I had a job in hand for the move.<p>It took about ten months from start to finish, but they appreciated the openness, honesty, and (most importantly) hard work that I put into the company prior to emigrating.<p>Were we a startup? Um. No, more a small player. But I would have done this whether it was a small company or a large company because I respected the people I worked with. If I didn't respect them, then they'd exactly get the two weeks (and that happened more than once, too).

Generally good advice, but a year is a long time in the startup world and what do you do if you get a really good job offer that won't wait? Seems like this is a pretty common occurrence as it has already happened to me and I am only 6 months out of school. Without going into a lot of detail, I started at a company shortly after graduating and two months later got a job offer at another startup that was better in almost every aspect and decided to bail.

Is 2 weeks a legal requirement in some states? I have yet to see that here in California, except once in an employment contract for a company headquartered in NJ.<p>The advice I generally give is also Golden Rule based, which is to give the amount of notice one reasonably believes would be given in a layoff. This is, of course, easiest with a company that has already gone through such a thing, having already set an expectation.

There are pockets of the latter approach in larger industry. I was fortunate enough that my frustration at truly ignorant policies caught the attention of our CTO, who happened to value openness and honesty over legalistic relationships.<p>I've found the freedom to be unabashedly open about my search for fulfillment in my work to be an incredible source of inner peace and job satisfaction. It's humanizing.