>Labor regulation is much more strict. It's legally hard and expensive to lay off workers in Germany, for example.
Is a few months notice [0] too much to ask? You can fire anyone you want, you're just going to wait a little bit or pay their remaining salary if you want them gone immediately. There is nothing legally hard about it. The hardest part is probably that you have to physically mail the
layoff notice, but nothing prevents you from just directly giving it to them straight into their hands to be perfectly compliant with the law. Also, most of these laws only apply to companies with employee counts in the double digits. Not to small startups hiring their third employee.
There's much more to this than you cite. There's Betriebsrat and Sozialplan etc. I'm not at all saying any of this is bad, but it does play an important role when companies make decisions about where to put their engineering centers.
Is a few months notice [0] too much to ask? You can fire anyone you want, you're just going to wait a little bit or pay their remaining salary if you want them gone immediately. There is nothing legally hard about it. The hardest part is probably that you have to physically mail the layoff notice, but nothing prevents you from just directly giving it to them straight into their hands to be perfectly compliant with the law. Also, most of these laws only apply to companies with employee counts in the double digits. Not to small startups hiring their third employee.
[0] https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/bgb/__622.html