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Comment by julesqs | Hacker News Reader

for everyone praising the severance package, laid off employees at kickstarter are getting even more severance and full healthcare (not COBRA) because they unionized: https://twitter.com/ksr_united/status/1256382357311012871

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Doesn't look like more to me. Roughly same salary duration (would bet a pretty penny that Kickstarter doesn't pay nearly as much as Airbnb to begin with), significantly less health insurance, nothing about equity. That's what a union came up with for such a microscopic layoff compared to Airbnb? Sounds like the free market is better off deciding these things.

oh I might be confused about the COBRA situation actually. I can't tell if Airbnb is actually paying for COBRA.

aside from that, assuming that non-engineers get paid better at Airbnb than elsewhere is a big assumption.

Will agree on the point regarding non-engineers. I would bet all else being equal they do, but will not fight over it as it's just an educated guess.

With regards to COBRA, the premiums are certainly covered by AirBnb as COBRA is available to employees for 18 months by default and 36 months in California where AirBnb is headquartered.

right right, it was confusing to me that they mentioned COBRA but it does sound like Airbnb is paying, which is good.

Not sure how relevant Airbnb equity really is at this point going forward.

RSUs will always be worth something unless the company goes completely bankrupt. Judging by the stock prices of major hotel chains like Marriott and Hilton which serve as a rough guide, the equity is likely worth ~50% less now -- certainly not irrelevant considering the offers were always considered generous to begin with.

That too is a generous severance. But the AirBnB severance is considerably more generous: Longer Severance (14 weeks + n vs 16 weeks) 1 year of Cobra vs 4 months Equity vs None

that is a pretty good severance. I was laid off from an ad-tech company based in SF in April and received 4 weeks of pay (I had worked there for almost 2 years)

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