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Comment by version_five | Hacker News Reader

Putting aside the other aspects of this story, I think a buyout offer, possibly even a "standing offer" is an interesting practice to consider at companies. I worked somewhere where there was a large, low morale group of employees that I think were just there because of money concerns + fomo if the company ever went anywhere. At the time I thought a buyout offer would have been a great way to separate the people who wanted to be there from those that were just putting in time.

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And on the flip side, compensation plans that encourage people to stay to arbitrary dates are probably a mistake.

That's where I'm at today. There's a lot of money resting on my staying at a company for a year. I don't feel like I've been working effectively with the culture or team, and I'm pretty sure both me and the employer would be better served by my leaving, except the financial incentive, sunk cost, and avoiding having a "I worked here for only 6 months" on my resume is enough to justify me staying an extra 6 month.

Potentially not coincidentally "percent of engineers who stay a year" is one of the key metrics of the team that sets up the compensation structure...

Same thing happens with relocation expenses. Many employers make you pay them back if you leave within a year. That's normally quite a sum, and can be even bigger if the employer paid closing costs or otherwise made a new hire whole for selling a home in order to move.

I think if 1/3 of your company leaves there is short-term morale loss for the ones that remain. But the loss of internal IP will be devastating. Especially if you are not big on docs and have that “just be smart and ship” approach that Basecamp has. Basecamp has a real problem hand here... they probably never expected this.

From what I’m seeing basically the entire iOS team is gone, and that app is nontrivial. It’s going to be a nightmare to get new developers up to speed without any of the existing expertise around.

Just because an employee leaves doesn’t mean you can’t hire them back as a consultant. Although that may not happen in this case.

Paying employees 3-6 month severance to hire them back as a consultant is perhaps the worst possible business decision I can imagine a leader making.

Perhaps in the short term it is, but in the long term I think you care about company culture more than spending the $$$.

Why hire employees at all then? Just outsource everything.

I'm not sure what you mean. I'm assuming that if they hire people as contractors they only do so until they've hired new people to fill the vacant positions.

There's only 58 employees there too

I looked through the information and it looks a lot like what we used to call "Voluntary Reduction in Force (VRIF)" AKA a "voluntary" layoff. It includes 6 months pay which seems sweet. Am I missing something?

We used to have these when I worked at Xerox. The only question I have is did everyone get the VRIF or just some people?

It's an interesting concept. One problem with it would be that the employees who can most easily get a job just consider it as a bonus for job hopping while the people who can't get a job anywhere else stay forever.

Seems overly expensive. Anytime an employee quits/changes jobs/whatever, you're now out a huge additional amount of money.

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