Hacker News Reader

Some friends at Facebook have expressed conflicted feelings around the ongoing threat of layoffs – they sort of want to leave the company for something smaller, but they have an incentive to stay because they may get severance if their function is cut next month

View on HN

I feel very similarly at Amazon. I wish I could volunteer for being laid off. I could use 3 months (with severance) without any work to try curing my burnout.

I guess the issue with allowing voluntary departures is that you could lose numbers of engineers in vital functions. Also I imagine there tends to be a bias towards your most confident engineers leaving since they know they'll have the highest likelihood of easily finding a new role?

You can I've known a few co-workers who have. They had another job already lined up so when the boss came looking for heads to chop they volunteered. They got a very nice severance, a short vacation and a new gig and the boss was happy he didn't have to pick someone to fire.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com