Comment by lagniappe
2 months ago
I want to agree, however, it will take every bit of that time for some to find new placement. These AI cuts aren't just making it harder to keep a job, but harder to get a job as well.
2 months ago
I want to agree, however, it will take every bit of that time for some to find new placement. These AI cuts aren't just making it harder to keep a job, but harder to get a job as well.
For better or worse, it isn't a company's job to pay laid off employees until they find a new role.
The industry standard for severance is 1-2 weeks pay per year at the company, paying out roughly 7 months is a big deal (and yes, an acknowledgment of how rough they know the job hunt will be).
Disagree. If a company puts someone in a precarious situation then they have the obligation to take responsibility. After all, its management who failed to keep the company successful. Unless we are saying that the C-suite doesn't actually deserve their massive compensation packages.
Not in tech. Larger severance packages are common.
Going forward, I wonder if severance packages should be a point of competitive recruiting advantage
Are smaller tech companies also commonly doing larger severances? I've only been laid off once and its when the company was basically out of money, but my understanding was always that it was only FAANG and similar that considered larger severance packages.
They are for CEOs and have been for decades. We call them "golden parachutes", and a lot of people hate them.
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Maybe it should be the companies job, being jobless in the US is a potential death sentence and since we don't have universal healthcare, universal childcare, or universal higher education/vocational training the onus should be forced on the companies to provide welfare for workers since they are so adamant about not paying taxes to create a welfare system that doesn't mean homelessness or death.
There is also no industry standard for severance, it's not federally mandated and not a guaranteed benefit.
I'd be very hesitant to throw out so many of the fundamentals that made America into what it has been for the last couple centuries.
The goal, at least here, is to expect individuals to mostly take care of themselves rather than depending in the state or some other authority to do it for them.
Universal healthcare, guaranteed indefinite severance, universal childcare, etc are completely antithetical to our system. Maybe the majority is ready and willing to throw that old system out, but if so we need to do it by focusing on the fundamentals rather than getting distracted with higher level implementation details.
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I don't think it should be the companies job, but I would be ok with it being paid for by taxes companies pay.
Requiring companies to do all of these extra things just gives larger companies more and more advantages, since they have an economy of scale to provide go government-type services.
I don't want my company to be in charge of my whole life. Let them pay taxes to a government that can provide those things equally for everyone.
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> but harder to get a job as well.
I just tried hiring someone and received over 200 resumes that looked mostly fake. Thinking about adding a final in person interview in an attempt cut down the garbage when I repost.
I dealt with this exact problem in my last hiring phase too and used this technique to screen them out earlier: https://thomshutt.com/2026/03/24/interviewing-in-the-age-of-...
What do you think can be a solution to this? I guess the problem is only going to grow as more people use AI, I'm sure someone out there is also using agentic workflows (basically spamming every job opening). Is the solution to use AI to filter the results or do you think that will not work out if the target is to find the best candidate
Use a good recruiter to do the dirty work for you, it’s not cheap but it’s worth the lack of hassle.
With that said, at my firm we switched to using an in-house non-technical HR recruiter using nothing but a LinkedIn Job listing and the results are exactly as you’re experiencing. Perhaps 1 in 100 is a real human with a real resume, the rest are AI being fed our job description to generate a resume.
Onsite final interviews and technical assessments are our stop-gap.
How can humans stand out to companies like yours?
I’ve considered writing informally and putting subtle typos in my cover letters, for example, to signal humanity. Is this a good idea or do recruiters look down on it?
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You should spend a few days thinking about how to improve your process, with more than just a final interview.
This isn’t my experience, but I think it depends highly on the segment. We have mainly senior C++ devs (database company), and it’s still a challenge to find great engineers.
I think the current job market isn’t “one size fits all”. Having said that, obviously if they’re getting laid off, they may very well be in the segment that’s less desirable.
Very regional as well, Eastern europe is supposedly doing well, western europe (UK/NL) is doing alright, north america seems significantly worse
I've got a couple of friends that left London to go back to Poland during covid. They first continued to work remotely, but ended up switching to Polish companies because the pay was better.
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Yes Poland in particular is booming. It’s an outsource destination that’s higher skill and less risk than India.
> however, it will take every bit of that time for some to find new placement.
Isn't this another way of saying the severance package is generous enough to cover the time needed to find another job even in a down market?
If a severance package that covers the time needed to find a job isn't enough then it's starting to feel like we're being angry just to be angry. I don't like layoffs either (I've been laid off before) but if a company is giving 7 months of severance on what was already a very high paying job, that's very good.
I don't think that seven months is near enough to reliably cover the time it takes to find a job in this market.
Depends on what you specialise in. Sysadmins seem to be in demand (which isn't a programming job but is in tech still) and embedded hasn't been killed by AI yet (and I doubt it will)