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Telltale Employees Left Stunned by Company Closure, No Severance

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Re: Telltale Employees Left Stunned by Company Closure, No Severance

#161

Post by jimcsharp »

thrower123 wrote: post #26

Adventure games seems to be a segment that is especially prone to boom and bust cycles. This has to be at least the third major collapse, following Infocom and LucasArts. Even when well executed, the formula is hard to keep fresh, and the emphasis on story and writing leads to generally poor replayability. Particularly now, in the youtube/twitch age - most of the enjoyment of these kinds of games is watching the stor…

I've found myself thinking "I'm the kind of person who should enjoy adventure games" only to buy them and just not. At all. There needs to be more systems to keep me occupied, otherwise I'll just read a book or watch a movie. I think this latest cycle was buoyed by at least a few people like me.

Re: Telltale Employees Left Stunned by Company Closure, No Severance

#162

Post by delinka »

dragonwriter wrote: post #48
delinka wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does the cause matter? Company's dead, the employee "involuntarily departed."

The cause matters because the right to individually buy into the existing employer-sponsored group health plan. So, if the employer no longer exists, and the employer-sponsored health plan no longer exists, the right to buy in is meaningless.

If your company is buying from an insurance company, that insurance company is required to offer the same plan to the former employee.

Re: Telltale Employees Left Stunned by Company Closure, No Severance

#163

Post by delinka »

pandaman wrote: post #132
delinka wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does the cause matter? Company's dead, the employee "involuntarily departed."

It matters if it was a self-insured plan i.e. the company itself paid insurance claims.

In my case, my company "self-insures" but they hire processors (Bluecross, CIGNA, etc) to handle the claims. I doubt that any employer is processing all claims themselves directly. I would have to do the research, but it seems sensible to me that the processor would require some amount of money in escrow (or some other insurance policy) to cover such an event.

Re: Telltale Employees Left Stunned by Company Closure, No Severance

#165

Post by zemo »

gaius wrote: post #152
zemo wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you view your work through a lens of pure abstraction and intellectual curiosity, what's to stop you from working on something that hurts people, just because the problems are interesting?

There are dark sides to every industry, for example when does a game cross the line into being a Skinner box? I don’t think it’s as simple as industry A unalloyed good, industry B unmitigated evil.

A company is not either "good" or "evil"; it's not binary, there's no evil bit in corporate ethos. Some companies are more evil than others, and to pretend everything slots into either "good" or "evil" and all "evil" companies are equivalent is an act of cowardice. Working for IBM during the Holocaust is not comparable to working at Zynga during the peak of Farmville. It is dishonest to look at your own life from a standpoint of pure rationalism and reject your own humanity, your own human experience, and how your actions affect other people's lives.

Re: Telltale Employees Left Stunned by Company Closure, No Severance

#166

Post by phonebanshee »

Domenic_S wrote: post #37
bradford wrote: post #18

Anyone know what the unemployment benefits are like in CA? In WA state, "Unemployment benefits are made available through taxes paid by your former employer(s) to partially replace your regular earnings and help you meet expenses while you look for another job." Not sure what the situation is in CA but I'd hope that, in the absence of a severance package, there's something else that can help them land cleanly here...

$450/week maximum. There's a waiting period (2 weeks?) as well.

Wow, that's low. It's $749 here in Washington.

Re: Telltale Employees Left Stunned by Company Closure, No Severance

#167

Post by phonebanshee »

sonnyblarney wrote: post #146
toomuchtodo wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If severance is in your contract, and the company is insolvent, you are SOL. It is not like any other obligation, as an example, unemployment: your company pays into unemployment funds every month (mandated by government), which is what allows you to collect if you're let go, regardless of their solvency situation. A severance agreement with a bankrupt company is worthless.

Yes, severance is like every other obligation, different only probably in seniority. Obviously if the company is bankrupt they cannot pay. Don't work for companies that are going, or could be going bankrupt. In the vast majority of the cases the writing is on the wall long before that happens. Payroll taxes are just another form of income tax, the company doesn't really pay it, the employee does, economically speakin…

And for most software companies, seniority is irrelevant. There aren't any assets to split up, so you'll be the first in line to get your slice of nothing.

Re: Telltale Employees Left Stunned by Company Closure, No Severance

#168

Post by AllegedAlec »

badpun wrote: post #153
slg wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have a few options. Here they are in descending order of preference * Hope your employer is compassionate and keeps you on their plan. I have no data on this, but anecdotally it is surprisingly common. Companies can be heartless when dealing with large groups of employees, but it is much harder to rip away Karen from accounting's health insurance as she is going through chemo. * Hope your spouse (or parents if yo…

> 500,000 - 1 million bankruptcies in the US a year Really? So, assuming there's 125 million households in the US, a person has ~25-50% (derived with simple probabibility math) of becoming bankrupt over medical bills at some point of their life? That sounds like BS.

https://www.thebalance.com/medical-bankruptcy-statistics-415...

Re: Telltale Employees Left Stunned by Company Closure, No Severance

#169

Post by pandaman »

delinka wrote: post #163
pandaman wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It matters if it was a self-insured plan i.e. the company itself paid insurance claims.

In my case, my company "self-insures" but they hire processors (Bluecross, CIGNA, etc) to handle the claims. I doubt that any employer is processing all claims themselves directly. I would have to do the research, but it seems sensible to me that the processor would require some amount of money in escrow (or some other insurance policy) to cover such an event.

Most companies do and thus, most people believe they have a policy from the processor, not their company. Also many companies hire processors for payroll too (ADP and the likes). Does it seem sensible to you that in this case the payroll processor would require some amount of money in escrow to cover severance, PTO, California's WARN etc in case of bankruptcy?

Re: Telltale Employees Left Stunned by Company Closure, No Severance

#170

Post by phonebanshee »

badpun wrote: post #153
slg wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have a few options. Here they are in descending order of preference * Hope your employer is compassionate and keeps you on their plan. I have no data on this, but anecdotally it is surprisingly common. Companies can be heartless when dealing with large groups of employees, but it is much harder to rip away Karen from accounting's health insurance as she is going through chemo. * Hope your spouse (or parents if yo…

> 500,000 - 1 million bankruptcies in the US a year Really? So, assuming there's 125 million households in the US, a person has ~25-50% (derived with simple probabibility math) of becoming bankrupt over medical bills at some point of their life? That sounds like BS.

A bit more than half of bankruptcies are medical. And you're forgetting that someone can declare bankruptcy multiple times in their life. But yes, it's a savage system.
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