751–760 of 1001 posts
I work for Stripe and got laid off this morning. Sucks because my manager was only told this morning, and didn't have a chance to talk about how well I was doing or take any part in the decision making. We'll at least I'll get a break. I worked nights and weekends all of October.
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I was laid off at the beginning of October and still can’t find anything. It’s definitely a buyer’s market for senior level engineering talent.
Amazon and Google are always calling, even now I gets emails from both. Amazon recruiters just spam me. Shoot your shot there if interested
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I feel most decent engineers can get rehired elsewhere with 14 weeks of runway. I do agree this is generous af. Most companies just give out minimum severance. No acceleration of vesting. Healthcare continues for maybe 1-2 months. I know at my current company, I will lose all PTO.
> I feel most decent engineers can get rehired elsewhere with 14 weeks of runway. Oh, sweet summer children and children of recession free economies for IT. If job openings fall to 10-20-30% of current ones and tens, hundreds of thousands of IT workers are fired, good luck getting hired quickly, when any of the few good remaining job opening has hundreds of good applicants. We'll be back to the days of: Sure, you can…
There's always non FAANG boring crud apps to code.
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No offence, but they're not putting anybody in the electric chair. They're letting people go with pay until almost March - if you can't find a new job in 4 months, it's on you, and maybe they weren't wrong to give you up. A dynamic job market includes hiring and firings. At most they have to apologize for some disruption, and they more than made up for that with the severance packages. And about the language - "fire"…
4 months is relatively generous but... > if you can't find a new job in 4 months, it's on you, This statement feels _wrong_. We are all subject to macro trends that we don't have control over. They impact our lives. Even the well off tech people but especially people in other industries.
Wild animals don't have this problem. If you're a deer you literally run around all day eating plants and fucking. Sure, the animal kingdom has a whole host of other concerns, but my point is that we've replaced all those with a system and we don't have any choice but to live within the boundaries of that system.
It's not legal to live a deer's lifestyle as a human.
In our system's status quo, companies are allowed and encouraged to speculatively over-hire. There is no consequence for doing so. They figure that having a few too many employees is an easily correctable problem, so it's safer to just hire aggressively and hope it pans out. If not, oh well, the business isn't the one paying the price.
I think it would be a good idea for businesses to be required to pay average pay out severances to laid off employees, and that requirement should extend beyond this "generous" 4 months. I also think about hourly employees where severance is a foreign concept.
Maybe then they'd run their businesses more conservatively instead of making moonshot gambles with human lives. Maybe it's not the best policy for "the economy" or "innovation" or "competitive business" but we have more than enough resources to provide for the humans of this world, we just choose not to allocate them fairly.
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The problem with that is that in some cases there's really nothing else someone can do. If they are a recruiter, and the company is no longer hiring, keeping that person around doesn't help anyone, including that person. Honestly the way Stripe is handling this seems pretty good. They are telling you now that you have until March to find a new job. They are essentially doing what you suggest, without making them come…
It's important to understand that growing companies are not laying off because they have 'nothing for staff to do'. This isn't likely a situation of 'Ford Motorcars had a bad 3 quarters, and sales forecasts are way down, we have to close two plants'. They are laying off to improve efficiencies on paper, capture some excess value created by those staffers (hey - you built that thing, great, bye, don't need you! For no…
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I feel most decent engineers can get rehired elsewhere with 14 weeks of runway. I do agree this is generous af. Most companies just give out minimum severance. No acceleration of vesting. Healthcare continues for maybe 1-2 months. I know at my current company, I will lose all PTO.
> I feel most decent engineers can get rehired elsewhere with 14 weeks of runway. Oh, sweet summer children and children of recession free economies for IT. If job openings fall to 10-20-30% of current ones and tens, hundreds of thousands of IT workers are fired, good luck getting hired quickly, when any of the few good remaining job opening has hundreds of good applicants. We'll be back to the days of: Sure, you can…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I feel most decent engineers can get rehired elsewhere with 14 weeks of runway. I do agree this is generous af. Most companies just give out minimum severance. No acceleration of vesting. Healthcare continues for maybe 1-2 months. I know at my current company, I will lose all PTO.
> I feel most decent engineers can get rehired elsewhere with 14 weeks of runway. Oh, sweet summer children and children of recession free economies for IT. If job openings fall to 10-20-30% of current ones and tens, hundreds of thousands of IT workers are fired, good luck getting hired quickly, when any of the few good remaining job opening has hundreds of good applicants. We'll be back to the days of: Sure, you can…
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what is "unused PTO" - I thought every company was now on the unlimited/zero PTO model
Unlimited PTO sucks for employees. It isn't the case in every state but some states, including mine, require employers to pay out PTO upon separation. So having unlimited automatically means you get paid out nothing on separation, a bad deal for employees. If you're allowed to take time off, then you have earned it but because of the policy, you don't get to realize the benefit of having earned it upon separation. Un…
This fallacy needs to die. When I was at GE everyone in my blast radius took at least 1 month per year. Many took much more than that. There was no stigma.
How come CEOs never get fired during layoffs? Laying off this much of the workforce is an indicator they have done their job poorly (I.e. failed to adequately forecast industry trends and demand). Any normal plebeian would be out the door in two minutes if they did something similar.
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The problem with that is that in some cases there's really nothing else someone can do. If they are a recruiter, and the company is no longer hiring, keeping that person around doesn't help anyone, including that person. Honestly the way Stripe is handling this seems pretty good. They are telling you now that you have until March to find a new job. They are essentially doing what you suggest, without making them come…
This might sound wild, but maybe the decent thing to do is if the company warns the team months in advance that a purge is coming. Let those who need to leave, leave. Quietly tell those who you really want to remain that they should not fear.
You basically have a bunch of employees who know their job is going to end...waiting for it to end. Mentally, you're checked out. You're not going to produce your best work for your company and it becomes a struggle to stay engaged. That's my experience, anyway.
The better approach for everyone is to _maybe_ give 1-2 weeks warning so everyone can wrap up what they're working on, then give fair severance packages when the day comes.