I just read the rest. On top of 3.5 months pay, they get accelerated vesting, cash payment for healthcare benefits, all unused PTO paid, and more. That’s incredible.
In my experience, if you’re job hunting and don’t have an offer in hand by November 1st, you’re probably not going to get one until mid-January.
The “normal” interview process takes 4-6 weeks in my experience from application to offer/rejection. That is doubled between Thanksgiving and New Year’s Day.
Not poking at you directly. I've got 25 years of experience. I was on a team a few years ago with people with... 2-4 years experience. We were both labelled to the end client (contracting company) as 'senior developers'. It's just weird all around. When everyone is 'senior', it loses any useful meaning.
The levels are fresh out of school, have learned enough to not need hand holding, and able to make good decisions about code. You cover them very fast. There is a staff level about that, but most people don't reach that level. There just isn't need for too many of them.
If you are handed $73,000 and still need to frantically look for a new job, something strange is going on.
also all the income and benefits are taxable
Keep in mind that this is interviewing without a job taking 40 hours (or maybe more) of their time every week.
Interviewing is much, much easier when it replaces your job and you're still collecting paychecks for several months.
You can get health insurance from healthcare.gov
Granted not California, but the federal bit is the same - https://oci.wi.gov/Documents/Consumers/HealthInsuranceLostCo...
> I thought the open enrollment period was already over for HealthCare.gov. Can I still enroll?
> Yes, if you have just lost your health insurance, you are eligible for a 60-day special enrollment period. You can work with an enrollment assister, an insurance agent, or use HealthCare.gov to enroll in a new insurance plan. You may also qualify for a special enrollment period if you have experienced a life event such as moving, getting married, having a baby, or adopting a child.
Your taxes would only be 40% (actually 47%) if you make beyond $500k a year. Cobra rates are quite affordable. I was on Cobra when I was laid off due to covid, and it was $550 a month for top tier healthcare.
$550 for gold level insurance is expected for someone young, which I guess you are.
You can ballpark almost anyone’s premiums based on the figures in link below. I would use Omnia Gold or Omnia Silver HSA numbers, and plus or minus 20% for your state.
https://www.state.nj.us/dobi/division_insurance/ihcseh/ihcra...
Those two statements are in odds with one another. $550 is quite a large sum of money to put out each month, particularly when you don't have an income.
https://www.healthcare.gov/glossary/premium-tax-credit
Generally, decent insurance costs anywhere from $400 to $1,200 per month, depending on age of insured, plus up to $9k out of pocket maximum for individual and $18k for families, per calendar year.
So to adequate insure one’s self for healthcare expenses, you would need $18k or $36k for out of pocket expenses (since things can happen at end of calendar year), plus $400 to $1,200 per person per month minus any premium tax credits. For a young family, I would guesstimate $24k to $30k per year in premiums minus any tax credits.
Basically, be poor enough to qualify for free healthcare, or earn enough to be able to spend a few tens of thousands of dollars for a healthcare emergency, but try not to be inbetween.
(I actually do not have any compulsion to drink coffee, or anything much other than tap water).
On a serious note, I cannot blame many young people for eschewing forming families of having kids when faced with the numbers I quoted.
Obviously family plans etc. will be considerably higher.
You'd get that withheld money back after filing taxes, but most people who are laid off would prefer to have that money now.
If Stripe is making regular salary-like payments instead of one lump sum, then the taxes would be pretty much the same as always.
At the moment the precedents are still heavily employee biased, but you ask for whatever you want in your contract during negotiations. Negotiate your sick pay, negotiate your PTO, negotiate your vesting schedules and exit terms, negotiate your hours and time in lieu policies. Negotiate your Intellectual Property terms. That one is super common to see lopsided toward the employer. We don't have unions or award rates, so we also miss out on some of those protections, hence why we need to make sure it's in the contract.
Even the nicest, fairest business owners I've worked for will start with industry standard contracts that do their best to shaft you, because it's industry standard and they don't see it as lopsided. But I've never had trouble negotiating for this stuff to be made clearer and fairer.
Generally, employees in America do not have contracts. While plenty of things are open for negotiation during the offer/hiring process, I doubt you'll get an exception to a corporate policy on paying out on PTO if it's not something they already do.
That said, IME, accrued PTO has always been paid on departure (voluntary or not). For this reason, most of the places I've worked heavily encourage (or even require) taking PTO, because it's a liability on their books.
Is that true? The company surely has terms for you, like expected working hours, terms about your sick leave, performance and health terms, out of office expectations, intellectual property disclosures and NDAs? Non-compete clauses? When does all that become binding if not through a contract?
I've never seen this in the US. The only things typically up for negotiation is the sign on bonus/equity and base pay. If you start trying to negotiate vacations and holidays, you're going to look pretty silly.
> The Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) does not require payment for time not worked, such as vacations, sick leave or federal or other holidays. These benefits are matters of agreement between an employer and an employee (or the employee's representative).
Everything is up for negotiation. Just depends whether or not you have options. I have seen PTO negotiated in the US.
Everything is negotiable. That said, the bigger the company, the harder it can be.
F500 company and you want a line out of your mid-level developer contract? Their legal likely doesn't have time and they will just hire someone else.
Startup? Literally write your own contract.
In California, accrued vacation is part of wages and must be paid out as part of wages. However, unlimited PTO policies typically don't accrue vacation.
In Washington, it's "read your contract." If your contract doesn't say that they pay out accrued PTO upon separation, they don't.
The smart businesses would just actually bank the dollar amounts and not worry about it, but those are rare.
That 3.5 months and healthcare buys them some time to start interviewing and line up new work. However, they're competing with everyone else that's been laid off recently. There's another article on HN right now about Lyft laying off staff. Meta is getting pummeled in the stock market right now and Google has recently had hiring freezes. I'm not sure now is a good time to be looking for tech work in SF.
Unused PTO should be paid out. That was already earned by the employees.
Accelerated vesting is only good if you can afford to use it. How long do they have to exercise their options? What's the secondary market like right now for Stripe stock? Are they allowed to sell stock currently or required to hold it? In a worst case scenario, people could be unable to exercise their options because they don't have the savings to cover the tax bill and want to hold onto cash because they're unemployed and need the liquidity.
As for healthcare benefits, that's a result of a very broken system in the US and not something that should be celebrated.