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Comment by fatnoah | Hacker News Reader

Salesforce is giving a minimum of 5 months severance to affected people. That's not too shabby.

I really hope that I get laid off in the first round of these layoffs where everyone gets good severance.

My current worry is that the first round of layoff at my first company will get 4 months severance, I'll miss that round, and 2 months later get laid off with only 2 months severance. This would of course mean that my severance ends at the same times as the first group but I had to work an additional 2 months.

It could always be worse. I got laid off last month with 2 1/2 weeks of severance. And of course there are plenty of industries outside of tech where severance itself is an alien concept.

And of course there are plenty of industries outside of tech where severance itself is an alien concept.

Absolutely. People in tech don't realize how good they have it.

The first time I lost a job I found out when my company phone started showing alerts on a Saturday night that it couldn't connect to the e-mail server. It turned out that my entire department was canned.

The second time, I came to work on a Thursday only to discover the door locked, and a couple of coworkers lingering around. Eventually, we decided we had the day off. Same story Friday. In the Sunday newspaper there a small note that the company has been bought. So Monday morning, it was off to the Unemployment office.

For 99% of American companies, you're lucky to get notice before you get laid off, let alone severance pay.

My first full time programming job I got laid off (or terminated anyway, they got rid of 25% of the small staff) at 90 days, and my severance was being paid to finish the project as a contractor. I took the offer of course.

It’s should be possible to volunteer.

Affected by this, and unless I'm reading the docs wrong 5 months is a bit of a PR exaggeration. Health insurance is longer but pay and vesting end mid-March.

Interesting. Somewhere else in (this or another thread on HN) someone mentioned that their wife was affected and would have pay & benefits into March, and then 5 months severance after.

My hope for folks affected (and, as a former SFDC employee, I know several affected) is that it's pay & vesting for the WARN period, with the severance period following that.

You're correct, I 100% misread my docs. My package appears to be the same and really is quite generous (and makes me feel a bit better about sfdc, which is nice)

Overall will probably be a good change - as much as I liked our product, the sfdc transition was rough. For better or worse the layoffs don't seem to have been totally random: most of the affected folks I know had larger than normal equity packages

Nice, glad to hear it's a good package. I had only a 60 day warn period to find a new job, which was a bit stressful. Good luck!

Including accelerated RSU vesting?

The letter doesn't explicitly say (I'll way to hear from friends at CRM to get actual details) but their SEC filing mentions stock-based compensation as an associated cost of the layoffs, so it sounds like accelerated vesting might be happening.

I read that they will technically be on payroll until late March. If that's the case, it's not so much accelerated vesting as it is vesting while not being "employed".

So same result, to some extent.

FWIW, I was laid off earlier in the year, and was put on garden leave for 60 days. My vesting stopped immediately, even though I was still employed for 2 months.

Probably the best after Meta and Airbnb from what I've seen. Looks like most large companies have been generous with their severances with the exception of Twitter (not sure about Amazon).

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