Comment by _heimdall
4 hours ago
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).
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.
> Universal healthcare, guaranteed indefinite severance, universal childcare, etc are completely antithetical to our system.
I don't see how that follows. How is your system that different from e.g. the UK, which manages to have all of those things (severance is not indefinite and is unemployment).
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.