Twitter Layoff Started Today
linkedin.com
linkedin.com
I'm not that old, but even I remember a time when companies, at least in principle, would invest in their employees (via stable employment, regular raises, mutual trust) in return for employees investing in the companies (innovation, extra effort, dedication, championing the company brand). Today, we have this:
- Companies using the barest of excuses, or none at all, to lay off employees. Because it makes good business sense.
- Companies lying, deliberately and freely, to employees about upcoming layoffs, in order to "stave off panic". Because it makes good business sense.
- Companies laying employees off in the most impersonal fashions possible (large Zoom meetings, automated email, SMS). Because business sense, etc.
- Companies literally escorting laid-off employees out of the building like criminals, on the premise that a suddenly-former employee is an incipient criminal.
- Companies stiffing people on severance, based on a cost-benefit analysis which concludes that the potential legal bills will cost less than a fair and reasonable severance. Because, again, it makes good business sense.
In spite of the downsides of unions, this turn of affairs is really an argument in favor of universal unionization.
Has there ever been really any difference? I know rose colored glasses make people think times past were better in many cases, but I find no evidence that things in this regard are really any different for the majority of people.
For example, this [1] FRED historical data series shows layoff rate to be extremely flat for 20 years. BLS used to track some series also that were flat for as far as I can find data. Here's [2] a slightly different dataset that is flat back to 1967.
Any solid evidence that things have ever been any different?
> In spite of the downsides of unions, this turn of affairs is really an argument in favor of universal unionization.
Unions often drive out workers at the benefit of those getting union jobs, lowering employment. For example, see [5] and similar papers.
EDIT: 2 more datasets [3,4], back to 1919, still pretty flat.
[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/JTSLDR
[2] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS13023654
[3] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M08291USM175NNBR
[4] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M0852AUSM497NNBR
[5] https://www.nber.org/digest/dec02/whose-employment-affected-...
This seems a bit misleading from the article you referenced:
“The researchers find that, for both men and women, more union involvement in wage setting significantly decreases the employment rate of young and older individuals relative to the prime-aged group (with no significant effects on the relative unemployment of these groups). In contrast, a larger role for unions has little impact on male-female employment rate differentials but raises female unemployment relative to male unemployment.”
Lower employment for the very young and very old is generally a good thing in places with a robust welfare state —- and certainly is overshadowed by the positives of unions, such as the lower rates of poverty, lower mortality and accident rates, and higher job satisfaction and overall wages as a percentage of productivity across many industries.
Exactly, I can’t think of any country who has had problems with the majority of the 18-24 year olds not being able to find meaningful employment.
Well…except for every single country where this has been the case.
It’s not like they will be sitting around with no job prospects looking at the immigrant groups getting jobs (because they have no other choice but to work) and become susceptible to some right/left wing extremist groups or anything like that.
So whatever effect union has in employment, it’s not the kind that is shown to lead to extremism.
Again, you cited a paper claiming that it supported that “unions == unemployment” when all it said was that unions are correlated with small increases in unemployment among the very young and very old.
What we know is that union membership is shown definitively to result in better working conditions and safety, higher job satisfaction, and higher wages across entire industries.
I cited no such thing but merely pulled an opinion out of my backside.
I’m really just saying that maybe it isn’t such a good idea to intentionally restrict young people from the job market because they have the exact same right to meaningful employment as anyone else.
No, this is never a good thing. No welfare state replaces the lost income - it may reduce the pain but does not remove it. Otherwise those people would not be unemployed - they'd be retired.
And especially for the young - each year lost is a year behind for wages their entire life as they lag in raises, promotions, skills, and opportunities.
I'm not sure why you think this is a good thing. I've never heard anyone ever claim it, and I've read and worked with econ stuff a long, long time.
Can you cite a peer-reviewed paper about the claim you made? Did you read it in econ literature?
> overshadowed by the positives of unions, such as the lower rates of poverty, lower mortality and accident rates, and higher job satisfaction and overall wages as a percentage of productivity across many industries
These only accrue to those in the union at the detriment of others not in the union and consumers at large. Unions reduce employment, have slower employment growth, and raise costs, which is borne by society. A union is a monopoly on labor, which has all the downsides of monopolies on goods or production.
Some examples:
[1] " We find that unions adversely affect unemployment rates and the growth rates of gross state product (GSP), productivity, and population, while increasing the rate of wage inflation. The impact on the employment growth rate is negative but not significant."
[2]: "We find evidence that links union influence to slower job growth during an economic recovery, a finding consistent with previous studies reporting that unions negatively affect average employment and employment growth."
[3]: Lists data for many countries and many time periods about how union shops have lower employment growth.
I could go on and on. So while there are benefits to union members, it comes at a cost to those not in the union, to economic growth overall, to employment rates and employment rate growth, and wage inflation (thereby eating up the gains of union wages to begin with). The literature is pretty clear on these effects.
[1] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12122-001-1012-0
[2] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12122-007-9004-3
[3] https://library.fes.de/libalt/journals/swetsfulltext/7250184...
I appreciate your citation of those papers, but I feel that this is an unjust comparison -- unions raise wages for workers even outside of their industry, whereas industrial monopolies frequently depress wages and raise prices for the benefit of a privileged few (generally executives and large shareholders). Unions are, historically, a reaction to that power imbalance of industrial monopolies, and attempt to counter diminished bargaining power. Unions increase economic equality, while industrial monopolies decrease it.
This reminds me of the debate over universal healthcare -- critics asserted that it decreased labor force participation, and was therefore a failure, when others argued was that it was evidence of its success--as people who wanted or needed to quit their job, such as those also acting as a caretaker, but previously didn't yet qualify for medicare, could finally retire.
Abolishing slavery also increased unemployment, as do raising interest rates -- the youth unemployment rate is a single data point to be balanced with other economic indicators that at the end are simply tools to tell a story about the prosperity of a society. Unions density, low poverty rates, and high wages are correlated across not just states but the entire world.
It is not a comparison, unjust or otherwise. A union is precisely a monopoly on labor. That is the point of a union. If you google, this is a common definition in economics on what a union is.
Are you claiming a union is not a monopoly on labor? Are you claiming that this labor monopoly does not have features of a monopoly? Upsides and downsides?
In fact, in order for unions to exist in the US, they had to be specifically exempted from anti-trust laws. The original anti-trust law, the Sherman Act, was used against unions, so future laws had to specifically allow the monopoly of a union.
So yes, a union is exactly and legally and economically a monopoly.
> Unions increase economic equality
You keep parroting this claim, despite my just having shown you multiple papers clearly demonstrating that this is simply untrue. Those people now unemployed in those papers, those not getting jobs in the future because unions stagnate growth - are they now better off and more equal?
Unions change who gets what, at major cost to many people, making some of them incredibly poorer.
There is simply no free lunch here. Forming a monopoly on labor will have effects - getting more money for those in the monopoly is not going to raise all boats - and that monopoly and those in it will try to hold their income, at the expense of immigrants, of those outside the group, of society at large.
So they pass costs on to consumers as well as pushing those out of work that would compete with them. This is pretty straightforward - and demonstrated in the literature as I posted.
So yes, unions can raise pay for those in it, may have some ripple effects to others, but you cannot ignore basic economics and what losses are caused elsewhere.
If you're going to ignore well sourced, peer reviewed evidence, and not provide solid counter evidence other than your continued opinion, there is really little left to discuss.
The literature you posted demonstrated no such thing. Again, you're now making expansive claims that are interpretations well beyond the scope of these papers, using "first principals" and "common sense" -- they show that unions increase wages at the cost of slightly raised unemployment among certain groups. There is no free lunch, but unions eating lunch at the expense of shareholder profits is absolutely a good thing and the point. Their affect on consumer prices was not demonstrated by your literature, but I assume you're going to make the same false libertarian argument against "minimum wage" -- that it raises some consumer prices and unemployment, and therefore, should be abolished (in spite of the massive evidence that's shown that it's been radically effective at lifting people out of poverty while having little effect on both)?
Your blanket condemnation of unions is ideological.
> Unions Reduce Inequality. You keep parroting this claim, despite my just having shown you multiple papers clearly demonstrating that this is simply untrue. Those people now unemployed in those papers, those not getting jobs in the future because unions stagnate growth - are they now better off and more equal?
Ok, here's a source that supports that unions actually increase productivity, that's about 20 years more recent than the source you posted.
"In total, results suggest that right to work laws work as intended, increasing economic inequality indirectly by lowering labor power resources. Theoretical and policy implications are discussed." https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/708067
Union Density Effects on Productivity and Wages "Accounting for selection effects and the potential endogeneity of unionisation, the results show that increasing union density at the firm level leads to a substantial increase in both productivity and wages. The wage effect is larger in more productive firms, consistent with rent-sharing models." https://academic.oup.com/ej/article/130/631/1898/5824627
"Decompositions based on public-sector earnings indicate that increases in union density have produced inequality that is 29 percent below what it otherwise would have been"
Do you now agree that a union is a monopoly of labor?
And switching to RTW laws instead of unionization hits upon one of the key areas: RTW lets more people work, so those regions also get lower quality people into jobs. Lower quality people earn less generally.
From your first paper, regarding RTW laws: "previous research finds these laws to be largely inconsequential" - so: did this paper overturn all previous papers? Or did later papers still support the "largely inconsequential" part? Papers are a discussion, so it's best to look at followups, such as the more recent, more widely cited [1]: it states that RTW is not what drives inequality - that is caused in the paper by preexisting variables, that both drive inequality and the passage of RTW laws. So I guess that covers that, right?
As I showed above - union companies have slower employment growth. This is done at the cost to less employable workers - especially youth and old - as also demonstrated which you then said was a good thing, for who knows what reason.
Your second paper is the same short-sighted claim you keep making - of course wages go up for those in a union. No one disputes that. It does not address that the cost is passed on to society and to displaced workers, which is the part you seem unable to admit also happens. If a monopoly on labor drives up wages, where do you think that money comes from? Owners simply hand it over? Or does it put pressure on employment, on investment, on business expansion, on prices?
We can keep going around. I agree there are benefits to unions, but you seem unable to admit there are also costs. Do you still think there are no downsides and that unemployed youth is a good thing? Do you admit a union is a monopoly on labor?
[1] https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/bejeap-2019-0...
In the present there are also both kinds of companies. Are you sure you aren't comparing the worst of today's companies to the best of the past's?
It doesn't take many incipient criminals to ruin things for everyone. You'd do it to if you've ever had an employee steal or embezzle from you, and it's a lot more common than you might think.
At some point you'd figure out Americans would look around the world and start asking: "are we sure we're doing this right?".
In every place in Europe I know of, you're not escorted outside of the building by anyone. You just go at a leisurely pace and drop off your badge and stuff, put your stuff in a bag, etc.
So I'm in my mid 40s, and my earliest memories of company-labor relationship, has always been one of union crushing, layoffs, and pitting towns against each other to see which factory or mine was going to close first, before offshoring. But then again, I grew up in the deindustrializing midwest.
I'm not saying this rosey world never existed (I believe lifetime quality employment still existed in the 1960s), but it's been like this for more than half a century.
Well I am old, and I don't remember the time you claim to recall.
I've never championed a company brand and I just threw up in my mouth a little even typing that.
According to my grandparents, back in the late 1940s through early 60s, I guess it wasn't rare for people to work at a _single_ company _for the entirety of their career_, fostering bi-directional loyalty.
Nonetheless, when I left my first job, he was supportive. He said "They're not loyal to you, so why should you be loyal to them?"
This always comes up in such discussions, but who exactly is They here. Company isn't a conscious entity, its the people. And those people are likely saying the same things about They as you/we are.
The real deal here is we have 100% ownership of any situation in life, and we are not loyal to ourselves, given this obvious fact.
If you have an opportunity significantly better than your current job, you must make the jump. But people often change jobs for petty reasons, which don't give anything much in the longer run. On the other hand, your perfectly good growth at your current place gets interrupted. Heck stability in itself is worth a lot. It helps one focus on relationships, fitness/health, consistent savings and investments, and debt raising for some investments(like buying homes etc).
People keep talking about compounding growth, and yet keep changing their process. In fact its sticking to one thing and doing it right is what causes compounding growth.
"This always comes up" -- really? You always hear quotes from 60+ year old people? Somehow I doubt that.
This came from someone with a lifetime's worth of experience from one company. Naturally he might have had different experiences with a different company, but on the other hand, he at least knew people from all over.
I remember that time too, back before we had armies of employees with nebulous job titles like "Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion Advocate". Maybe someone realized some of these positions don't actually create any value, product, or service. Or as you put it, "Because business sense, etc." My impression is Twitter has extremely high overhead costs, and the gravy train has run out of steam.
> Companies using the barest of excuses, or none at all, to lay off employees The intention is to streamline everything and cut costs and improve efficiency for the business. However, doing the opposite here helps preserve tribal knowledge (possibly leading to better business outcomes). It helps improve retention because it creates an environment where employee isn't constantly optimizing for the best compensation and looking to jump ship at the first better opportunity.
> Companies lying, deliberately and freely, to employees about upcoming layoffs, in order to "stave off panic". Because it makes good business sense.
Doing the opposite leads to employees being more focused at work. Instead of prepping for the next interview, they can focus their energies on company initiatives.
One doesn’t recognize a well packaged lie overnight. Or at least I didn’t. Took burnout to realize the company I was willing to give it all for never really meant all of those sweet things it told all of us. And that was true long before I worked there. The wrapping was nicer. Have you heard of a “pension?” Some of the older employees, by tenure, would talk about them. They sounded just magical. Wonder where those went. Not the only perk that has vanished with time, but perhaps one of the most notable.
But it took too long to see it. I didn’t really want to. It hurts getting your heart broken.
The money they need pay bills and keep them afloat if and until they get new employment.
When severance ends, that’s it.”
It’s Twitter’s responsibility to not only offer severance, but make sure employees keep an emergency fund?
That said I agree, complaints about "what will happen when my severance runs out!" did elicit a bit of an eye roll.
The writing has been on the wall since Mollusk started chasing the purchase.
No guarantee about next week, but for now it's strong demand.
The employees can't sell these until the blackout is lifted. Currently there is no end date set.
Edit: Per below comment, don't do this :)
If you could find someone to lend you cash (based on the totality of your financial situation and personal credit), that's fine. It's not fine to borrow someone else's shares and short them during a blackout.
If you have MNPI you can't buy or sell anything, including stocks or options, even if you don't work for the company.
Do they contain penalty provisions beyond getting fired? They're meant to protect both the company and the people from the slightest risk of insider trading allegations, so in most cases violating the policies isn't actually illegal insider trading.
edit: over the past 6 months. so the duration of this process
I think sympathy and compassion are fine ideals to hold for any of our working class cohort.
Put another way, people will behave as you treat them. Treat them like they are fools who can't do finances and they will behave that way. Expect them to do basic financial behavior and they will.
We literally make financial literacy courses free, online, without any need to even sign up. They will teach you what a bank is all the way up to 401k basics.
The PersonalFinance Wiki for the /r/PersonalFinance subreddit is actually very nice and covers a lot of common situations: https://www.reddit.com/r/personalfinance/wiki/commontopics
Investopedia maintains an excellent and well written dictionary on financial terms, with a mix of articles. I use this website heavily: https://www.investopedia.com/financial-term-dictionary-47697... They have a personal wealth section here: https://www.investopedia.com/personal-finance-4427760 and a good place to start is: https://www.investopedia.com/articles/pf/09/financial-respon...
If you want a software aid, YNAB is pretty good and is based on a solid set of principles. https://www.youneedabudget.com/the-four-rules/ Obviously lots of other options exist to manage your money and YNAB is not the only option, but it's a good one.
If a resource suggests any kind of particular stock picks, crypto or other "investments", it's bad. It exists to sell you a product.
Save money from each paycheck. If you're just starting, put this into an emergency fund (savings account) until you have 6 month's take-home pay saved.
Then start savings in equities. You should diversify this, i.e. in low-fee index funds. Do this in an IRA or other tax-advantaged plan your employer might offer. Don't watch this too closely or try to time the market. Just invest with every paycheck.
Understand the time value of money. Don't go into long term debt for short term needs or consumables. Live below your means so you can save more and maximize compounding gains in savings/investments.
Do these things and you are well ahead of most people. If you want to get more sophisticated at that point, look for courses or professional advice, but remember pros rarely beat the market.
If someone is making $200,000 a year and is financial trouble when they get laid off (with severance), well, I reserve my tears for people who never see that kind of income their entire life.
It’s also not clear that Twitter would be able to block sales once you are no longer an employee; my guess is that they can’t.
“Working class” lol. Class-wise, engineers are like the junior executives in the Mad Men era, or junior lawyers and bankers today. They are not only well compensated, but have tons of impact (and therefore leverage) as individual contributors.
The “working class” are the folks cleaning the building who are fungible commodities. You can be a 10x janitor and it won’t give you any leverage in the organization, and you have no pathway to upward mobility in the executive ranks.
Anyone who relies on wage labor for their income (as opposed to earnings from capital) is working class. That is the defining feature of the working class.
Unless you could retire tomorrow and support yourself from your capital holdings alone, you're a member of the working class. (Many engineers at Twitter likely could retire tomorrow and live off their equity, but I'm guessing the majority could not.)
People love to erode class solidarity by claiming that only people whose incomes are below a certain level are working class, or that you have to "work with your hands" to be working class. Don't fall for it.
Since when is that the definition? Doctors and lawyers have never been considered part of the "working class." Software engineers, and other categories of jobs that didn't really exist in the 1930s, are more similar to those professionals than to working class people.
> People love to erode class solidarity by claiming that only people whose incomes are below a certain level are working class
You've got it exactly backward. The top 10% has been pulling away from the median American for decades now. They're beneficiaries of the same forces that have produced outsized growth for the top 0.1%. They write the software, paper the deals, put together the PowerPoint presentations, etc., that enable those trends.
The delusion among skilled professionals that they are part of the "working class," and their influx into the putatively labor-aligned political party, has had a tremendously negative effect on working class interests. They champion policies like globalization and mass immigration that benefit them at the expense of factory and farm workers. They spent divert vast amounts of political capital to social issues important to highly educated people, at the expense of economic issues important to the working class. And they make it impossible to pay for expansive social services the way other developed countries pay for them: by heavily taxing the upper middle class.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_class#Marxist_definiti...
In Marx's dichotomy, ownership of the means of production is critical because workers are utterly dependent on that capital to be able to produce anything. That's not true of knowledge workers. A programmer, like a doctor or a lawyer, isn't dependent on a capital owner to produce the thing they sell.
Financial literacy is something that desperately needs to be part of the curriculum in high school and I can empathize with people that will struggle as a result of their layoffs even if it's due to their own money mismanagement, but software engineers being laid off from a tech giant are definitely not working class in any sense.
That's not how adulthood works. The world doesn't care if you learned it nor will it teach you. Besides, it doesn't take a course in finance to understand basic financial responsibility.
Adults can teach themselves most things given the right tools and incentive. Your viewpoint essentially means nothing is ever problematic ever. Invasive rhinos released onto SF streets causing property damage? Why didn't SF residents learn to defend themselves and their property damage. The world doesn't care if you learn or not. Climate change leading to drought and the entire world is starving? Should have done a little thinking ahead and stockpiled food.
Half my coworkers lack these basic skills and they drive around in $100k Teslas.
The guy can't even make coffee at home or a sandwich. Never had to do it. They are true man-childs.
Despite the creativity of your rhinos scenarios, the point still stands. Somebody that did proper financial planning would be better equipped to cover the property damage.
And yes, you very much should stockpile food. I have 6 months worth, and adding. I hope you're right and I turn out to the paranoid one, that would be best for the world. But just to give a hint: where I live protesting farmers led to some empty shelves. Nothing existential, but just to share how very quickly such a thing happens and how close it was to a more serious issue. Or, perhaps consider the entirety of Eastern Africa about to face a possible famine. Or, consider Sri Lanka being totally fucked.
I don't say this to hate or judge, I say it to help. Take care of your shit, this world is volatile.
Financial literacy is quite literally adding and subtracting numbers. For somebody who gets in to FAANG sort of companies with mad algorithm skills. This sort of things are a cake walk. Financial Literacy applies to people who just didn't get any education. We are talking of people who can't even read and write.
A volatile but oversized emergency fund is not horrible. Especially if the estimated chance of needing it is low.
Worried about medical emergencies? Emergency fund in equities isn't terrible. But if your emergency fund is supposed to support you after getting laid off due to an economic downturn, your emergency fund is going to be a lot smaller than it was right before the emergency. And if your emergency fund is in the stock of the same company that you work at, you're opening yourself up to just not having an emergency fund in the worst-case scenario that your company outright goes under.
Your company stock is an investment that is part of your compensation.
Your retirement account has (mostly) investments, at least in the US.
Your brokerage account has investments investments.
Any investment advisor will tell you that all investments have risk. There's an upside, and there's a downside to every stock. Anyone who remembers the Dot-com bust will remember that.
Nobody is forcing them to live in SF, especially not Twitter.
"I have a mortgage on a house" tells you essentially nothing about a person's finances, how they financed the house, their assets, their monthly expenses or their debt-to-income ratio.
Some people might have put 20% down, avoided PMI, have no other debt and only put down 20% because they wanted to hold onto cash. They had a good credit score, and got a reasonable interest rate.
Others may have utilized any one of a number of loan programs to put down > 5%, which they financed through loans from family, or emptying their 401K, got a not great rate, have PMI, have student loans on top of that, a healthcare debt, etc.
You have zero information beyond "well, they have a house."
That's like 3-4 months of post-tax pay for a twitter engineer (and not a senior one at all). Yeah, i would expect them to be able to have that much in savings.
If someone cant accumulate roughly 15% of their annual compensation in savings, while earning $200-400k/yr, then I have no idea what else could be done here to help.
The thing with those crazy Valley salaries that you hear about here is that a lot of the time a good amount is in the form of stock that vests on a rolling basis. So maybe you get $150K in cash and $75K in stock. After 401k, California and federal taxes, California housing costs, and California <everything costs>, I can understand how someone making “$225K” in the Valley might not be able to save a whole lot.
Should people be more disciplined? Isn't it possible to do better? Sure, totally. But let's start with reality and not boomer bootstrap fan fiction.
This doesn't make any sense. Yes, your stock "vests on a rolling basis" the same way your salary "vests" every two weeks.
If you are making 150k in cash and 75k in stock, then you get access to 225k (minus tax) of liquid cash every year. The vesting schedule is irrelevant.
I'm from the Netherlands, known for its comparatively poor pay for engineers as well as high costs of living.
Despite that, from day 1, when my salary was at its lowest and I was still single, I saved 25% of my salary. A lot of years later and no longer single, I've build up multiple years in savings. Even more than that if I add my spouse. And the funny thing is that the need to do this applies less here, as unemployment benefits are relatively generous.
It just shows the dramatic difference in culture. I'm shocked how even the best paid engineers can't even manage to save 30K. 30K...are you kidding me? A single event or large expense (construction at house, car breaks down) would bankrupt you. And if your cost of living is so enormous, what the hell does 30k even do during unemployment?
If I'd earned 200K+, I'd save so hard and retire 20 years early. The US has such a spending culture.
Many who get a high-paying job at the beginning spend to the limit of their income and then some. Very sad.
[0]https://treasurydirect.gov/indiv/products/prod_ibonds_glance...
However, if one wants to hold a portion of bonds and a sub-portion of said bonds happen to be I-Bonds, then I see no issues with that.
Nonetheless, the point is more that: you need risk-free cash to live sometimes, keeping 6 months of your current costs in a low-risk account is pretty base levels of financial literacy
Assuming that $200k in total comp includes about 25% in stock (based off publicly reported comp packages for twitter employees), and a combined state/federal 35% tax rate... They have no spare money to save without a second income with $97,500 in take home pay.
It’s <someone else’s> fault I couldn’t save anything with 3.5x the median household income.
'Low income' is defined as a household income of 80% of the median ($166K), depending on household size. $150K only meets that for a family size >= 4. There's also 'very low' (50% median) and extremely low (~35% median.)
I got the hell out of the Bay as soon as I could and would definitely never choose to live there with a family.
I never made that much in my entire career. HCOL is pretty crazy, out there.
I wish them well.
I wouldn't bet on them being able to get new jobs as quickly as people think. It seems that every tech company is hemorrhaging jobs.
So you live like a poor person does until you've saved up enough money to deal with emergencies. Then you can live the lifestyle you desire.
It's what people have done for generations and generations. This isn't rocket science.
Even the slowest companies take 2-3 months to get an offer. Maybe it takes you a month without a job to be interview ready.
Honestly, the vast majority of people would be better off taking a month of work to prepare for interview full time to get a better job...
But you do you, bitcoinmoney.
Even ignoring this, there are thousands of situations where layoff + stock blackout can be financially devastating even for people with "well off" jobs. The entire reason it's recommended to keep a 3-6 month emergency fund is for emergencies - surprise medical costs + reduced pay on disability if you get cancer/car accident/etc. or struggling with a dip in household income from a spouse losing their job during a second-in-two-years recession. If one of those happens to you and _then_ you're laid off, you'd probably be more sympathetic.
Over half the U.S. lives paycheck to paycheck. It doesn't require a ton of imagination to envision why even people living in the bay area working at Twitter might be in dire economic circumstances after a layoff and stock blackout.
[1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/twitter-lays-off-third-of-talen...
I have a lot of sympathy for someone who’s plan for savings was “if I get fired I can”: (1) use my severance money (2) sell my stock (3) get a loan against my home
Only blackout periods blocked (2) and falling home prices blocked (3).
I dont know of any over 2%
Other people in this thread are talking about what I understand to be hypothetical engineers with 400k compensation, and it sounds like that doesn't describe this situation.
https://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Twitter-Recruiter-Salaries-... https://sfmohcd.org/sites/default/files/Documents/MOH/BMR%20...
- I think in general _recruiters_ are not on H1Bs. And even for jobs held by people who _are_ on H1Bs, that can be a biased data source for salaries.
- And sure enough of the info for twitter H1Bs, I see no recruiters. Plenty of engineers, a bunch of data scientists, some managers and directors, but no recruiters. https://h1bdata.info/index.php?em=Twitter+Inc&job=&city=&yea...
How will these people that were making well into six figures possibly survive?
Both people in this example have a lot more in common than I'm reading into from your comments.
It's all the whining. These folks are privileged to have options, choose to live in certain areas, and enjoy the benefits (higher pay, more jobs if they get laid off, amenities, etc.) of those choices. But they still complain.
I honestly don't get the psychology. Is it some sort of defense mechanism for folks who don't want to admit they're the elites that they decry? Rent costs an insane amount in SF—and its driving out long time residents and minorities—because Facebook engineers make $500k/year. It's not "billionaires"--how many houses can Zuck buy? It’s the tens of thousands of rank-and-file employees making 5x the US median household income.
OK, but it's very easy to live comfortably on $100k in a LCOL area. The idea that these people have no fat in their budgets is risible. Put me in charge of the books and I promise they'll be in tip-top shape in 6 months. But they'll hate me, because a lot of stuff they've been keeping in the "needs" bucket is gonna find its way into the "wants" pile in a hurry.
If you don't have an emergency fund, then you cannot afford to eat out. You cannot afford two cars. The one car you have better be a used Hyundai. You can't afford to take a vacation. You can't afford those violin lessons. Hell, you can't even afford Hulu or Netflix. Go for a quiet walk and gather your thoughts toward accumulating an emergency fund, because if you don't have one, then you cannot afford any of that stuff.
$100k in a LCOL or $300k in a HCOL is sufficient to have an emergency fund. And in the same way that layoffs in a LCOL will hurt, it hurts in HCOL as well.
I just think that the lifestyle perception that some have of people in HCOL making $300k is very inaccurate. It's not nearly as extravagant as you might think.
It's not hate, it's trying to get people to understand that they are elite and privileged.
But then everything seems geared towards parting you from that remaining 20% wherever you live :)
I do feel for those laid off, not everyone being laid off will have managed to maneuver themselves into the ideal position over their time at Twitter.
Discipline in both will go a long way in not having a big house full of unused rooms and money that's not wasted.
Cost. Paying early termination on your rental contract. Paying to move. First, last, and a cleaning deposit at your new place. Stocking a new place with perishables. An easy 3+ grand to move to an inexpensive town.
Loss of salary/job opportunities. You won't have the same job opportunities, nor salary ranges, if you live in a less expensive part of the country, since your new pay will be based off your peers in your physical location, not your last salary in SF.
So they will have to downgrade from an extremely privileged position to just highly privileged position. Should we open some fundraiser so they can keep their expensive lifestyle even after layoffs?
I think 3 grand is probably an underestimate for any significant move. It cost me $1k to move ~2.5 miles across town the last time I moved.
And I've spent what, $5,000 to send a couple pieces of furniture across the country for a move because they weren't replaceable, and I had the money.
That’s probably close to the average (4k/mo).
https://thehill.com/changing-america/resilience/smart-cities...
The same forces that encourage rampant consumerism in people who can't afford it, do it to people who can afford it - and then suddenly discover that they can't.
What does that even mean? Is there some expectation that they receive paychecks after severance when they are no longer employed?
Where's Twitter's emergency fund?
What's the mortgage on a USD$2m 1300sqft house? Looks to be $11k/mo? So, total comp should be at least US$400k to be considered affordable.
Using South Bay, I don't know where a Twitter engineer would live in San Francisco...
https://www.redfin.com/CA/Sunnyvale/1063-W-McKinley-Ave-9408...
https://www.redfin.com/CA/Mountain-View/237-Houghton-St-9404...
We went through a variety of simplistic formulas for "what you can afford" and entered half of our incomes to get an idea of what we actually wanted to spend.
I live downtown San Jose, 90min commute/day, and paid $500-$600k less, but the school isn't anywhere near as good.
Parents have different perceptions of value and choose differently.
East Bay was never an option for me - can't commute by bike from there to Mountain View/Sunnyvale.
At really high incomes, especially with stock vesting only a few times a year rather than every month, you can operate more like a business than a month-to-month budgeter. Keep enough cash on hand to smooth out the spikes in income. If your income is high enough to do this, you won't have a problem building the initial cushion.
What's irresponsible is living off your stock when you don't have that emergency fund.
The other side of the coin is that you pay significantly less taxes if you hold on to the vested shares. They increase in value after vesting, and you structure your sales such that you take a long term capital gain. A lot of my coworkers did that, and have a lot more money than me. But it's a gamble, and you should always weigh your gambles by how badly you can afford to do.
(I hate getting paid in stock, but it's advantageous to the employer, so it will always be a thing. With auto-sale, it's a very similar risk to being paid in cash, except that you have a lot of annoying paperwork to do every year. But you just pay someone to do that.
Oh, and if you're a new FAANG hire, please just find a professional to do your taxes. I did it myself and fucked it up a number of times. The IRS does not like fuckups, and extremely competent professionals will do everything for you for a small amount of money.)
This depends on how the stock plan is structured.
For example, with RSUs, you pay income tax on the value of the RSUs whether you sell them or not and some companies do that tax withholding for you. The value of the RSUs on the vesting date becomes your basis. When you sell the shares is when capital gains taxes come in -- on gains above the amount they vested at.
So, there is not a tax penalty to selling RSUs the day they vest and reinvesting them -- you have to pay the income tax whether you sell them or not. If you decide not to sell them, then you do benefit from holding them long enough to make the capital gains long term gains -- but with the risk of having a lot of your eggs in one basket.
With options it can be very different based on the type of options.
Depending on how Twitter does things, if the employees got RSU's, taxes due (federal, state, etc.) got correctly deducted on vesting.
Unless people deliberately reduced their tax deducted from their RSU's (which may not be doable), or have lots of other income on which tax is due, they won't be screwed over on taxes. And if they have lots of other income on which tax is due, they're less likely to be living paycheck to paycheck.
Wait till they get new jobs and find out that in the real world companies don't have RSUs, rooms full of toys, flexible hours, gold-plated healthcare plans, company time to work on your own projects, and free cafeterias staffed by gourmet chefs.
Welcome to the 99%!
How screwed would most people be if the stock exchanges all closed down and they were fired?
That's false, someone commented to that effect in the response thread on LinkedIn. Blackout periods for insider trading reasons can't apply to you if you're no longer with the company and you own the shares. It's possible their broker fucked up and has some snafus, but it is not legally possible for them to prevent you from selling shares after you've been fired.
Going from X "total comp" to X salary is an improvement in itself. Not even to mention how that total comp is often bumped by once-yearly vests/bonuses - spreading it as salary means you get it asap and can walk more easily.
I did it earlier this year..and the public company I left tanked next quarterly earnings report. Luckily I converted that to guaranteed salary (which is now gonna hopefully anchor me for the next gig lol)
i don't see any problem here. Just do a short sell. Not being an employee anymore makes you not a subject to the short-selling prohibition for employees, doesn't it? When you get access to your long shares you can close your short simultaneously with selling the same amount of the long.
Edit: 30% of its recruiting team: https://www.wsj.com/articles/twitter-lays-off-third-of-talen...
Edit: This was a different person than the author of the submitted post. Uff da.
And for all we know, this person isn't giving the correct information regarding blackout windows.
If I were a shareholder I'd say that it isn't compatible with capitalism and I feel that would be a sufficient answer.
I understand, but I really have no idea what you're talking about. I'm not tapped into the Twitter meta.
IME the blackout remains until the opening of the trading window following the end of your employment.
Blackout periods are more of a CYA thing.
Once you leave the company, you only have to follow the actual law, not the stricter rules that the company sets for its employees.
Kinda legally yes, but some mid-sized companies enforce a trading blackout by contract and with a broker-level feature on everyone just so that they don't have to do the work of telling everyone that has that kind of information that they do. Twitter probably does this because of how the LinkedIn thing is worded.
The former employees could transfer their shares to another broker and sell them with no issue if they think they are on the good side of the law, which they probably will be after severance.
I was under the impression that once I'm "vested" the stock is now mine and I own it like any normal stock.
Are "vested" shares something different? Could I say for example sell my shares on Robinhood if the blackout wasn't in effect or are they held by some third party?
However, when someone leaves the company, they can transfer those shares out to their e-trade account or whatnot. I've done that before and it only takes a few days. After that you aren't beholden to stock blackout periods, unless you have Material Non-Public Information, which means you will probably have to figure out if you can sell without being considered insider trading.
It is only insider trading if you are basing your trades on insider information. If your only reason for selling is “I just got laid off and need the cash” then you should be fine
Nope, that applies to anyone for whom the employment offer says it applies to.
At the previous company I worked at, we had no such rule. At the current one I work for, it applies to all software engineers. At plenty other companies, including FAANG companies like Google, it applies to all software engineers as well. Apple, for example, also doesn't allow you to trade AAPL derivative options in any way whatsoever (so you aren't allowed on your own free time and even using your own money to trade puts and calls).
In those cases, you cannot trade the company shares during certain weeks of each quarter, despite you fully owning those (even if you bought them on your own, before joining the company). Obviously, this only applies if you are still an employee of the company, once you leave you can do whatever you want.
The blackouts apply to employees because they often have insider information, even if that information may be of minimal real value. The SEC has really clamped down on tech stock trading in the last couple of decades. Those of us who had stock/options in the late 90's dot-com boom likely participated in several stock trades that would be outright illegal today.
There exists a standard stock transfer mechanism, ACATS, for basically "wiring" your stocks to a different brokerage. I think these transfers are also legally mandated to some extent.
My previous company partnered with ETrade, giving us a special account for stock awards. The main special thing about it were insane commission, order(s?) of magnitude higher than interactive brokers. I moved the stocks to IB using ACATS; it felt like ETrade tried to use stalling tactics like asking me to mail a paper form I think (I called bs), then iirc there was an error because the account was special so the transfer logic couldn't find it, etc. But after persisting I saved 100s of $$ and also the company had no control of the stock anymore (we had some earnings lock outs, not that it affected me).
The downside is that it might mess with automatic tax stuff, iirc dates-CBs got transferred but I had to redo something about these tx-es, maybe ISO stuff? Not sure if anything was missing for RSUs, I assume things like espp cost basis might get lost, we didn't have it.
Now I wonder if I should do the same for my current company stock... just in case.
I'm not sure if I'm joking either.
You need to take a remedial course on treating Entities of Other Existence with respect.
We'll have to get back to you on when you can register, we're a little under-entitied in the Carbon-Based Respirating Encouragement and Retention Department.
FWIW, that boss turned out to be one of the best and most empathetic people I've ever worked with.
HR: the ones who fire you
"Emerging talent"?
The legend was, they had a fake fire drill. Then when everyone was out in the parking lot, they told certain people not to bother coming back in again.
Edit: Snopes has a "debunking" of this at [1]. I'm not persuaded that this debunks it, since the laws protecting employees were not in effect yet way back then.
Minimum, you should be updating your resume/LinkedIn, and you should also look at ways to cut back on costs where possible.
I'm sorry, Twitter assured the company that there would be no layoffs? Isn't that _exactly_ what Elon Musk has been telegraphing with what he's said to the press and at the town hall? Also at this point