Pretty decent. When I was laid off last year from a company that supposedly has a reputation for taking care of their employees, I got 1 week per year of service, which was 8 weeks.
Shopify is my guess; I was part of that layoff and the timing lines up. They had those exact terms and paid them out in addition to WARN act minimums contingent on signing of a severance agreement. I had the same offer but declined due to issues I had with the severance agreement.
> I had the same offer but declined due to issues I had with the severance agreement.
Is it too prying to ask what that means in terms of your outcome? Idk what the WARN act is, and I understand that my question may be neive or too personal to post an answer to publicly, but I'm curious what the alternative to signing is/was and if the answer is generally applicable or specific to the company/agreement.
Not at all—I would not have mentioned this if I was unwilling to talk about it.
The WARN Act[1] is a bit of federal legislation that applies during mass layoffs. There are some variations from state to state, but it generally ensures anyone caught in a mass layoff (50 to 100+ people) is required to receive either 2-months advance notice or 2-months salary+medical benefits.
When Shopify performed their layoffs, there were subject to WARN payouts as they did not furnish 2-months notice.
The severance agreement they gave me and others paid out an additional 8 weeks + 1 week per year of seniority, contingent on signing.
I declined to sign, which was painful, but my main concerns were over two clauses:
* a non-mutual NDA Shopify was unwilling to change to a mutual NDA.
* a provision to appear in court on Shopify’s behalf, uncompensated, for an indeterminate about of time, whenever requested.
There was a lot of other oddness about that whole layoff I’ll leave out here for the sake of brevity, but the whole process was quite the shitshow.
Curious, what would be a severance package HN would be satisfied with? I suspect the average US employee would be stunned to hear an offer of 6 months.
So much negativity around these statistical outliers. The majority of companies in the US don't offer severance and it's very rare in some industries. Not saying that it's fair, but name and shame? Maybe we're living in different worlds.
Given the gauntlet that is modern tech interviews, 3 months. 1 month severance isn't an issue in a market where you can grab a new gig in 2-3 weeks. But all these places want 5 rounds of interviews.
Is so standard in the USA, it's not the standard in any other place on Earth I worked at (Brazil, USA, Sweden). Even in Brazil you'd get at least a few months of severance.
"half a week’s pay for each full year you were under 22
one week’s pay for each full year you were 22 or older, but under 41
one and half week’s pay for each full year you were 41 or older
Length of service is capped at 20 years."
And also it's pretty shit because it's capped, so for most software devs it won't be anywhere near what their actual salary was:
"If you were made redundant on or after 6 April 2023, your weekly pay is capped at £643 and the maximum statutory redundancy pay you can get is £19,290. "
This is the money the government will pay you rather than severance from an employer.
Redundancy also comes with a required notice period that the employer must pay you through as well. And there’s a bunch of other rules around how people can be selected for redundancy.
I got laid off when Realtime Worlds went into administration and only got the statutory pay until years later the company was wound up and I got a follow on measly cheque from them for part the money they still owed me for the notice period.
"Your redundancy pay is called a statutory redundancy payment. It is calculated based on your age, weekly pay and number of years you’ve worked for your employer. You are also entitled to a paid minimum statutory Notice Period. It’s your employer’s duty to pay these, but your payments are capped"
If the employer can't pay (as in my case) this is also the money the government will pay in their lieu. Which is why it's so shit/capped. Normal payments from employers are generally more in my experience.
The UK has an awful standard living for how wealthy it is.
For example, if you happen to be classed as a "worker", rather than an employee, you do not have a legal right to leave work or take time off to care for a sick family member or pick a child up from school.
Yep. And there are many many many other examples like this - for instance UK employee protections are quite good.....unless it's your first 2 years of employment. In which case you get almost nothing - within the first 2 years you can be let go without any reason, and it's not redundancy either so it doesn't trigger all kinds of protections - it's just "it's not working out, bye" - same as US, or worse actually in some ways.
Yeah to be honest, a half-year sabbatical with time to job hunt non-frantically is a luxury I've never had. I love my current job, but I would probably look at a half year severance like a vacation.
Sorry for the intrusive question but if you make software engineer level salary how is it that you don't have multiple months/years saved to mitigate for those possible layoffs?
Or did we all fall for the lifestyle inflation trap that comes with high salaries?
I'm probably a pessimist/realist but I have always lived way below my income and saved as much as possible because it really feels like the cash cow that software engineering is is eventually going to end. Layoffs are always looming. When that day comes, I want to relax as much as possible and not have a deadline to find a job,
It is primarily psychological difference. I have 10 years of expense as savings. But that is tied in my retirement/emergency/child education plans. If I stop earning for 1 year, I'll be dipping in them which will create a pressure.
It's relative, but having to dig into your 401k isn't an attractive alternative, one I'd only consider in truly dire straits. You are capped in how much you can put in a year so it's not like a savings account you can aggressively make up for after getting hired.
I'd much rather resort to temp work than dig deeply into my future if I had a choice.
1. I'm not a software engineer, and don't live in or near the valley.
2. I'm married and I have two kids. It's amazing how fast multiple years of saving disappear when you have daycare.
Just to give you an idea of what childcare looks like: It's a very reasonable question whether we should pay for childcare, or hire a full-time staff member for the household to watch the kids: The price is about the same.
Yeah I get it. It's not easy. As a rule of thumb we are still aiming to live with 70% of our household income even with a kid so to mitigate for one of us being laid-off unexpectedly.
I guess it is a trade-off. We could live slightly better in a bigger house but I don't want to stress and be in a tough spot if one of us lose their job. That mental sanity is worth 30% of our income to me.
How are the people making 65k as a household (median income per household in my state) managing this?
I don't even understand how 2.5k$ grocery per month is possible.
We are 3 in our households (young kid) and probably spending closer to 1k$ per month groceries and eating super healthy/organic.
Same, my rule is my gross yearly salary or 24 months all recurring expenses whatever is larger. I try to set my lifestyle to where the 2 years expenses are 70% of gross salary which is honestly not terribly difficult as a dink.
Peace of mind for the cost of "only" making 4.65% interest is well worth it to me.
Can you explain? Unemployment is still very, very low and there are hundreds of thousand of open positions out there. Not sure about game companies, hence my asking.
Not just gaming. Tech companies have been shedding jobs like crazy and slashing hiring. Pretty much every day there is news of some company slashing hundreds or thousand of jobs. Anecdotally, its not unusual to take 6 months to find a new job at only 2/3rd the previous salary.
Tech companies are definitely still hiring too though. My company is and I have no shortage of recruiter LinkedIn mail with leads should I need or want to find another job.
I read an article about this recently, but can’t find it to officially cite it. However, the thrust was something like this:
Despite unemployment being low, the reality is that many of those “thousands of positions” are either geographically-distributed duplicates of the same position, eternally-open cattle calls, or open-but-basically-a-formality for either getting a visa or an internal move. This makes the number of actual openings quite opaque, yet much smaller than it appears.
Yeah, that's my feeling. I see plenty of positions and still get maybe 5 calls a week for work. But it really does feel like most aren't even looking at my resume, nor do recruiters get much farther through a hiring manager.
Of course I could simply be unlucky and swamped by other more attractive candidates. Apparently seniors are swamping Junior roles, so maybe I'm just competing with a bunch of staff/principals now in mid/senior roles.
I don't think these numbers are for tech only anyways. Further, it seems like the high demand is around service jobs and not white-collar office jobs either. So it's probably easy to find a job, but you are gonna be selling donuts, not produce art for video games or earn 400k+ building apps.
I got laid off and my "severance" was the minimum mandated WARN act period and "don't mail your stuff back to us." Of course, the layoff happened the month before equity vesting and annual bonus happened.
Did you look into unemployment benefits? I've never done this but I had acquaintances who looked forward to getting laid off because they'd get unemployment payments from the government for up to 6 months so they saw it as vacation. All they had to do was lie about looking for a job. This was quite a while ago so things might have changed.
PS: not saying you shouldn't have gotten a better severance package.
Unemployment never pays your full salary, and how much it even scales with your salary caps at a number much lower than is relevant for about the top 75% of software engineers in most states. Assuming you're not straight up lying, then the people you talked to likely derived considerable security from their savings and future job prospects, or possibly even other exogenous factors such as supportive families or income-earning partners rather than unemployment benefits alone
I agree that it's wrong and was shocked when a friend brought up that's what they did and several friends chimed in "me too".
Unfortunately, tons of people in the world really don't care about wrong, they only care about what they can get away with? Their argument was "I paid the unemployment tax, I should be able to take advantage of the benefit". But I agree, the point is not to use as much as possible. It's to use as little as possible. We can't have nice things because lots of people will abuse the system.
The layoff announcement mentioned that the 11% staff laid off is global. It's possible a lot of people laid off are actually in China, since Tencent owns 100% of Riot Games. There is a trend for Chinese companies to not hire workers that are over 35 years old, so some of these employees might be unemployed for a long time. Also, Chinese economy is in the crapper right now.
Most are fairly high cost living locations outside the US (ex: Sydney, Tokyo, Seoul, Paris, Dubai). Mumbai and Sao Paulo are not cheap for India and Brazil.
Yeah they kinda just invest and stand back (with west investments at least?), maybe they are conflating tencent with netease. Are they the same parent organization…? Am i a tencent subsidiary?
