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Comment by esel2k | Hacker News Reader

As a European the severance for a large company doesn’t sound all to different to what I am used to. Normally you have 3 months by contract plus some add a month per year tenure. Healthcare costs, career support etc is normal for larger/successful companies. Then certain countries (not the company) will pay 80percent of your salary for 2 years to find a new job.

Happy that some companies also start to do this in the US, but yeah it sounds that this is not a given. It will generate a better transition and avoid serious mental problems/personal issues.

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> As a European the severance for a large company doesn’t sound all to different to what I am used to

Note that Europe is a big place, and laws are not standard for layoffs/redundancy. I got laid off this year, and basically got one week's severance pay, plus my two weeks notice.

In Ireland, I believe the standard amongst larger companies is one month per year served, but the cap is very low so generally tech companies will make much of the payout conditional on an NDA.

For Norway it's usually three months both ways. For bigger layoffs it can be "anything" from three months and up. I was outsourceed once, and got nine months pay from day 1.

So I got doubly paid as soon as I found a new job. Good times. :)

>As a European the severance for a large company doesn’t sound all to different to what I am used to.

IME 14 weeks minimum is really generous in the US.

I've been at 2 companies where it was 1 week per year of employment. At one company they added on 1 month of severance during a really large layoff. The tenure at tech companies in the US tends to be quite short, so getting 14 weeks probably unusual at typical tech company.

In the silver league of US tech, which is broader than most people seem to think, the standard severance pay is a nice cool 0. Usually the only conversation is about all the agreements they try to convince you that you have to sign for no compensation as they’re escorting you out the door.

What does "silver league" mean in this context? Can you give examples?

Is silver like "second place" or like "middle-aged" companies?

In my social circles we roughly categorize the tech industry into faang, gold tier, silver tier, and wood tier.

Faangs are obvious, good tier is up and coming businesses who pay and act like faangs. Examples are brex, stripe, Uber(at least back in the day, no idea what they’ve been up to the past year.

Silver tier are the places that still pay well above average jobs but don’t go into the mega compensation and suffer a talent drought as a result. Places where they’re paying 120k total comp for a senior engineer and won’t part with any equity because the leadership can’t emotionally handle the investment needed to compete for engineering talent for reasons that I could go on for hours about.

Wood tier are the companies that need tech but still try to pay <80k because they’d never pay high wages to any employee or still think they don’t need software and end up with some real shit engineering

WARN Act requires 60 days (8-9 weeks) notice or 60 days on payroll if they walk you out the day of.

How does this work at companies that are very distributed geographically? The WARN act talks about "mass layoff affecting 50 or more employees at a single site of employment."

I'm genuinely asking this question - I'm not trying to be a smart ass.

I worked at a tech company (~3500 worldwide) that had an office in almost every major US city area (e.g. Bay Area, NYC, Boston, Chicago, Seattle, and a bunch of Tier 2 cities as well (Atlanta, Raleigh, Houston, etc), and remote workers (e.g. sales) as well.

They had a big layoff and in theory they could laid off 500/15% people worldwide without laying off 50 people at each site. Would that still trigger the WARN act?

I would wager that most companies in the US give NO severance. You get unemployment benefits, I guess.

> You get unemployment benefits, I guess.

Depending on the political environment of the state one is in. It could be capped at a useless amount, or the unemployment department minimally staffed. I know someone in NJ that has a pending status for 2 years with no response or ability to contact the state, and they have 8 years of W-2 showing they paid unemployment insurance.

Odd, NJ is usually pretty good with that stuff. Special situation, maybe?

No, you can see tons of Reddit posts about people not being able to speak to anyone at NJ unemployment. You can try calling at anytime of day and the machine will say (after 130 seconds of automated prompts) that all agents are too busy and to call back the next business day.

In the event you do get through, you reach a line level agent, and they say a supervisor has to look at the case, and to wait 6 to 8 weeks before calling back. That’s it, nothing else.

I assume many people just give up.

This is true in my experience

I worked with a person that was laid off with 6 months severance that was not reported to the state. They immediately filed for unemployment, and then the company hired them back as a contractor 4 or 5 weeks later. We labelled him the triple dipper and he said getting laid off was the best thing that ever happened to him and that he's basically rolling around in money coupled with a one month paid sabbatical.

In Texas, severance pay has no bearing on unemployment insurance. I did same thing but told unemployment office about severance pay, since I was too worried about breaking any rules.

They told me I could win jackpot but they would still legally owe me unemployment pay. It is all about actually woking. If you work and then get paid for that work, that's when you cannot claim unemployment pay.

So, technically, if you do contract work and still claim unemployment, then you are breaking the law.

Yes, I believe he was technically breaking the law by under reporting. My limited understanding was that he was able to avoid issues by billing as an LLC versus an individual and didn't draw a paycheck from his LLC while on unemployment, he just let the money stack.

> some companies also start to do this in the US

This is pretty normal in my experience. Having experienced layoffs (never as a target, always from the side) for the last 25 years. There are probably edge cases, but some amount of severance (based on time with the company, typicall), healthcare coverage, bonus acceleration, etc, is all completely normal.

On HN, of course, you're mostly only going to see the edge cases posting, so it's easy to get a distorted view of normal.

Yeah I have been laid off once, at Fortune 15 company. We got, at least, 2 month of severance pay. And 2 weeks extra for each year with company after first 4 years. It wasn't a tech company, so I always assumed that this is pretty common in mass lay offs.

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