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Comment by stormbrew | Hacker News Reader

Fwiw there is a more normalized practice that resembles this and is, afaik, not a massive hr risk: openly offering a voluntary severance with defined benefits.

Obviously it's not a great signal to those who don't take it about the health of the company, and you might lose a bunch of people you'd rather not, but I think allowing some level of self-selection is good when it's possible.

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I find it rather rare that a relatively compentent dev couldn't get approximately equal compensation working for some other company. So if offered $X for volutary severance, where $X at least N months total compensation, most devs who can get a similar job in less than N months will leave. This leaves you with least capable people, which is (usually) not what's wanted when doing layoffs. (This is of course assuming that interview performance is correlated with work performance, which is not necessarily a great assumption to do)

I think there are two problems with this in practice:

1) In the end those people will leave anyways once it's obvious the ship is sinking, so I think you wind up with a double whammy of attrition.

2) Mass layoffs don't usually allow for a particularly good perspective on who is a high preformer because it's hard to vet decisions on that scale. Also this assumes that performance is the primary axis, and not cost or tenure. You will likely lose high performers along with low and medium in a top down layoff.

What are reasonable ranges for N in a typical severance package?

I think you need to consider that we're in the context of a job market that has been hoovering up devs for the last 10 years. There are 30 year olds who graduated into a fairly good market who are now expeirenced developers who have never seen a really difficult job market. It's all fun and games if you're a fungible 20 something who can go off to be another cog in another machine. But if the market dries up - as is starting to happen with all the big names slowing, it's a very difficult situation to be in, and long term unemployment isn't just a financial burden, it can be a massive emotional burden as well. One thing that has always troubled me in my career is that I look around and I don't see many 50+ or 60+ year old engineers, and partly it's that our industry is still emerging and 60 year old engineers pre-dated the industry. But some of it could well be that at some point attrition pushes people permanently out of the industry.

The issue with voluntary severance, is that the strongest employees tend to be the most likely to take it.

This way you probably lose the best people, the ones who is in high demand on the market (probably having several informal offers right now), and left with mediocre ones, who are too afraid to look for new jobs.

If you had offers and your company announced layoffs but you weren't one of the people being laid off, would you stay?

My primary interest in any work is the product, the team and the compensation. The later is negotiated beforehand, so if the team is not severely impacted (brilliant people who I happy to work with are staying) and there is no big changes in product (I still feel that I am doing something meaningful and useful for people) - there's no reason to leave.

If your team is unaffected by layoffs then you're very very lucky. This sounds like you're imagining basically the spherical cow of layoffs.

Layoffs don't happen when everything is hunky dory and just needs some tweaks.

Nobody in their right mind fires brilliant people. And brilliant people are the ones who are fun and delight to work with. It may sound harsh, but leaving some ballast weight behind may be even healthy for a team.

Brilliant people are expensive. Bleeding companies need to cut costs. Layoffs are usually a mix of poor performers, high cost talent, and tenure ordering. Sometimes entire departments full of brilliant people go because the department isn't profitable.

Again, you have in your mind a spherical cow of a layoff.

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