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Comment by lkbm | Hacker News Reader

> They’ll receive severance of 16 weeks of base pay, plus one week for each full year of service, along with other benefits like extended COBRA health insurance benefits and the ability to keep their company laptop.

Getting laid off in December isn't fun (getting laid off any time isn't fun), but I appreciate that our industry has developed a norm of generous severance. Four months+ pay is four months+ more than I got working at a non-profit in education.

If my work isn't paying for, whether due to "macro environment" or something else, it's better if I go do something where I am worth my pay, but not if I'm put in severe financial jeopardy during the switch. Providing several months of severance makes that transition, while still destabilizing and stressful, much, much easier. I wish more workers got this.

Now I'm thinking that next time I'm applying for jobs, one of my questions for them will be about any past layoffs. No company that's been around for a while will be able to say "we've never laid anyone off", but if one says "we let them keep their five-year-old laptop" and another says "we gave them several months severance pay", that will be a factor in my decision.

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Most I've ever gotten for severance was 1 week pay (and I've been laid off 3 times). And that's even in tech (video game studio).

My previous company (a large corporation) did 1 week per year you worked there, capped at 4 weeks (one person I know that was laid off was there for 17 years, only got the 4 weeks). They actually used to be more generous but made significant cuts to their severance benefits shortly before layoffs so they could save a bunch of money on it (they also took away 401k match later, reduced PTO days, eliminated bonuses, froze raises, made our health care benefits worse, let tons of people leave without authorizing filling in gaps so many departments became overworked skeleton crews, all sorts of crap to save money).

So at least in that case, it wouldn't have mattered if I asked what their severance policies were while interviewing.

There is a point in the company size (in some metric) vs. job responsibility curve where you can successfully make contract changes, within reason. One thing you should absolutely consider is pushing for a specific severance clause.

This serves two purposes, an indication of their seriousness about your position, and some peace of mind (e.g. have 6/12 months or whatever in your pocket).

That being said, there are scenarios where you won't see a penny of it.

Also, depending on your jurisdiction and job tenure, you may have a very viable claim for more severance. Nobody is likely to offer you more than statutory (or whatever is in your contract) without asking, but it may be worth paying a lawyer hour or so to find out properly.

> And that's even in tech (video game studio).

Given everything I've ever heard about working conditions, pay, and benefits in video game studios, it seems more appropriate to think of them as opposite to the mainstream software industry rather than a part of it.

The vast majority of layoffs in tech (not 'big tech' or name brand companies) is likely closer to 1 week than 16 weeks.

Sorry to be contrarian, but the only companies that do these bigger packages are doing it because it will be in the news.

If you're making a universal claim like that, you are just being contrarian. My last job was at a Series C startup that you've probably never heard of, and when they had to lay off 2/3rds of their employees in late 2020 due to the pandemic, they gave a couple months of severance (don't remember the exact amount, I wasn't laid off) + extended COBRA coverage.

Still is a series C startup that almost certainly is trying to keep its brand intact up rehire after the uncertainty dissipated.

I think you're being unrealistic as to what the industry as a whole is like. 1 week per year is not uncommon. I've been doing this 26 years and have had many dozens of friends laid off during this period, back in 2009, and back during dot com.

On a reread, you'll note that I didn't make any claims about what layoffs are like in the industry as a whole: I implied that pay/benefits/conditions tend to be pretty bad in gaming and pretty good in the rest of tech, and I noted that you're wrong to make a universal statement about only high-profile companies giving severance.

I don't doubt your experience, and I don't have a survey of industry standards. But I will also say that experiences 14 or 25 years ago are not a reliable guide to HR choices in the 2023 tech industry.

I agree they are bad in the game industry, but conveniently ignored was the second part of their post about the non-gaming company... 1 week per year is common, but most common seems to be 2 weeks w/ 1 week per year on top and capped after a number of years.

I didn't say only high profile companies gave severance. I'm saying 3+ months is rare and it seems normal because it is a marketing tool used like this.

Also to restate, my experience translates to what is currently happening in tandem with the last two periods. I know someone who was recently let go getting 4 weeks after 16 years.

Not sure I made it clear that the second one wasn't a non-gaming company, but yeah it wasn't (it was webdev). I was laid off from three gaming companies, and haven't yet from any non-gaming companies, even though I've been through more layoff rounds with non-gaming companies now.

But my friends have been laid off, and I've yet to hear of any of them getting more than 1 week per year worked. But I don't have any friends that work for big tech (I live in the Midwest, a lot easier to not know anyone in big tech here). A lot of insurance, health, and financial companies around here, not too many Facebook or Apple or Netflix offices.

The video game industry seems to uniquely suffer from under-trained, nepotistic, and inept project managers and game directors.

Which inevitably leads to lying, poor communication, and surprise boom/bust layoffs.

In contrast, most other software development industries have figured out how to square the budget-time-people circle, most of the time.

It's a shame Rockstar doesn't do more interviews, as they appear to have a working incremental project development model, that reliably (if slowly) delivers results. My suspicion is they just hire/train professional PMs.

From the people I met at school and worked with since then, the really talented folks who want to make video games _really_ want to make video games. This leads to a fairly natural goal of wanting to set up their own game shops rather than join a large one, where they'll feel they have less impact.

I suspect this leads to a trend where you have disproportionately more mediocre product/vision people at the large gaming companies, because if you have really good product sense in a space with as much passion as video games, and with a relatively low barrier to getting your foot in the door (if you have a small core team of very talented, dedicated people), what on Earth are you doing being a cog in someone else's machine?

> with a relatively low barrier to getting your foot in the door

If you want to work on a AAA level product (or even a AA product nowadays), that's increasingly becoming out of reach with a small team. Some people want to work on games that millions of people will play and enjoy. I know a guy who made and released a few small games on his own (I helped with one of them) and they sold like 1000 copies at most, but he maintains a day job in the industry for the past 12 years and is currently a senior engineer at Epic Games working on AAA titles.

Meanwhile I'm working on a small game in my spare time this past couple of years and I'm worried I might not break 1000 copies with its release either (not the prettiest game and a bit of a niche genre, but I'm on my own in my spare time). But at least I have a fairly well paying day webdev job so I'm not screwed if it doesn't do well.

Rockstar is notorious for crunch, or overworking and poor conditions, especially near the end of a project life. There are a lot of horror stories about games like red dead redemption 2, you'll find an overwhelming amount of articles about this if you Google it.

Circa RDR2, it seems they had hours worked as a individual performance metric.

https://kotaku.com/inside-rockstar-games-culture-of-crunch-1...

https://kotaku.com/red-dead-redemption-2-developers-speak-ou...

But it still seems to be a mixed bag of experiences (with the expected "certain locations have shit management" and "QA always gets shit on"). And at least they shipped a finished product, that was arguably improved by crunch.

In contrast, there are a ton of games that don't measurably improve/ship and people are asked to crunch to cover management screw-ups.

I'm baselining at things like Star Citizen and Beyond Good and Evil 2, of the "How are these people even allowed to call themselves professional managers/directors?" level.

Whilst I won’t deny that incompetent leadership and planning are involved, I think there are structural reasons for the game industry being uniquely problematic.

Games have massive cost efficiencies from scaling. Studios are incentivised to always make the biggest games they can with their budget. Games team sizes vary strongly with the project period. They can’t handle more than a small team early and can absorb almost any number of people at any skill level before release.

End result is that game development is always boom and bust. Small core teams build a game up slowly, then more and more are added until just before release when a mad scramble for anyone and everyone they can be bought borrowed or stolen to get the game released on time. Then there’s no work except for the core team on the next game.

The obvious solution is to have many games running in one studio to even out the team sizes and absorb the crunch, but that implies either studio sizes beyond anything we see currently (and no increase in per project scope) or much smaller scope for games.

I’ve seen models like they work, and be much less painful to work with for everyone involved, but it did require different market conditions to justify the alternative model, I’m not sure the entire industry could switch.

That’s not to say fixing the problem is impossible, just that the bad incentives will always be there to push back against improvements..

It's bad, but to me it seems like at least some notoriously bad ones are making incremental changes.

one word. Unionize

I'd sign up to unionize, but I wouldn't organize a union myself (I'm not organized enough for that). Haven't even heard a whiff of desires to unionize at any company I've ever worked for.

Game studios are notorious for being the worst places to work as a programmer/engineer in objective terms.

I wouldn't take your experience at one to be representative of how termination and severance at US tech companies is usually handled.

> I appreciate that our industry has developed a norm of generous severance

What if you had unions or proper labor laws that actually guaranteed this? As an European it's weird to see you having to rely on the "kindness" of the company to not get fcked over.

Then frankly, we would probably fall to level of innovation that modern Europe is known for.

There's much more surrounding the USA's innovation engine than treating employees like shit. Perhaps would be good to look at what's working and what's not instead of just assuming that better protection for workers, which are the ones directly and literally creating the value, would cause a catastrophe.

Or please direct me to some literature supporting your opinion.

Edit: Page 19 here [0] would directly question your assumption.

[0] https://www.wipo.int/edocs/pubdocs/en/wipo-pub-2000-2023-en-...

Industry doesn't need slave labour, with people happy for any goodie their feudal lord feels like giving, for innovation.

It's not about slave labor, although all job dependent people are wage slaves even in a union.

It's about labor market flexibility. https://www.investopedia.com/terms/l/labor-market-flexibilit...

Overly strong labor unions make the entire economy less nimble in rapidly changing environments.

I rather take my European IT union, thank you.

No need for gig economy "flexibility ", making rich millionaires.

The US has higher salaries than Europe, way higher, so calling it slave labor is rich. Wish people would understand that just because Europe does something doesn’t make it the right way to do things. As far as reality shows, the US system is the most innovative and the European one is definitely not.

Some lucky people have higher salary than in Europe, while others have to beg Red Cross to take care of them, while living between pay checks.

Wrong. Median disposable income is higher on average across all occupations. Software engineer income is significantly higher. The top 10% in the US is not even fathomable in Europe.

Work to live, not live to work.

https://www.salvationarmyusa.org/usn/

As opposed to Europe, which is known to not have homeless or poor people.

At least those are supported by national social healthcare.

This reminds me of Louis CK's line "you can achieve great things when you don't give a shit about people".

Is the cost worth it? Do I want fair conditions and a good work balance, or do I want to brag about something that made my employer's shareholders really proud? Is the pay worth it if I can't miss a day of work to tend to more important matters?

I run a website for immigrants in Germany. I have to spend a lot of words explaining that it's okay to take sick days, that you won't lose your insurance if you lose your job, and other things that Europeans take for granted.

> you can achieve great things when you don't give a shit about people

I think this is a completely wrong take from the armchair philosophers.

You actually can't do great things when you treat people like shit. The people who actually do great things strike the right balance between applying pressure and requiring excellence and treating people well. The results of purely treating people like slaves is mediocre.

Even the pyramids were built by well paid craftsmen, not slaves as is commonly believed.

Maybe it's not meant to be taken literally. I read it as, "You can achieve great things when you loosen your system of ethics and are okay with a net increase in human suffering."

> Even the pyramids were built by well paid craftsmen, not slaves as is commonly believed.

Half right. It's currently believed that the bulk of the workers were lots and lots of paid laborers. Not craftsmen. That would be expensive!

https://www.britannica.com/video/226777/did-enslaved-people-...

A typical software engineer in Germany earns about €60-80k.

More than enough to save money for retirement, travel the world enjoying 30 days vacations, own a cars, buy enough hardware, fancy house,....

After a certain value is for show off only, or maybe lit cigars with burning notes.

And 6 weeks off, unlimited sick days, and a generous notice period. Health insurance and unemployment insurance are a given. There's no explaining how much more relaxed work culture is in Germany.

Is life better in every respect? No. But there's a lot more to life than earning potential.

> There's no explaining how much more relaxed work culture is in Germany.

Is that supposed to be something positive? Why would you want a relaxed work culture if you like your job?

I like my job even more when it's a smaller part of my life

It's also a balance between having new companies that can start up with lower overheard and fewer jobs concentrated among larger companies that can afford it.

The only companies that treat their employees poorly are those that have people lined up to work for them. The employees must think the tradeoff is worth it.

Employees should be able to choose a company with stability and lower pay or higher pay and less stability. The other option is to take the high pay job and pay for additional private insurance to cover what your employer will not. The people who want stability shouldn't force it on the people who are comfortable without it.

I could do without a significant amount of what constitutes "innovation" in the US.

"Innovation" has become a straight-up fetish in the US tech sector, and that fetish is increasingly a cause of a great deal of harm.

Europe isn't good at building massive tech companies. But its hard to say Europe is not a leader in scientific and technological innovation.

Just in tech, Europe developed ARM chips, ASML lithography machines, and DeepMind's AI breakthroughs. These underpin a few trillion dollars of global economic activity.

> Europe isn't good at building massive tech companies.

Which is a good thing. Massive tech companies are a negative thing, not a positive thing.

It's a mixed bag. Only sheer scale allowed Apple to pour in a huge amount of money into their M chips, probably the most important consumer-facing innovation on desktops in the past 5 years.

Ok, two things: first, America’s lock on innovation is already waning, so it would be dangerous to think we’ll continue to compete globally solely by out innovating other regions.

Secondly, I strongly doubt shitty labor laws have been the secret formula behind the success.

It sucks that people will screech about vague bullshit like innovation whenever we try to make working here suck less.

Yeah this might work for larger tech companies, but when I was working for a Series A startup and got laid off I got 2 weeks. Same thing happened to a friend as well.

I worked at a seed startup and got 3 months, and I was legally just a contractor.

Wow, that's great. How long did you work there? I worked at my previous employer for 2.5 years. My friend for 2 years (different company).

Maybe the contractor deal had better stipulations?

What if? I mean, we need better labor laws right now just to be able to form unions (if folks wanted to) and about half the country (or more) thinks things like regulation or unions are Evil Communist Socialism(TM).

That is to say, you're not wrong but if the hope is that people are going to be like "by golly, I've never thought of that, I'll just run right out and join a union" um... no.

> What if you had unions or proper labor laws that actually guaranteed this?

Then hiring would be much more expensive, much less new companies would be able to start up, and as a result, salaries in tech would be 2-3 times lower, like in Europe.

What would you choose, a 2-3 times higher salary or a guarantee of things that you would often get anyway?

The guarantee.

The guarantee, provided all my neighbors also get it. US tech salaries are way too high.

The guarantee.

What about non-tech workers? Don't they deserve the same?

The fact that you have no security net in the US is probably also harmful when it comes to startups. Few can take the risk.

> What would you choose, a 2-3 times higher salary or a guarantee of things that you would often get anyway?

If it meant a guarantee for all workers, allowing people to not become desperate enough to become porch pirates, or break into cars to steal stuff, or point a gun to my head because I have more stuff than them, or any other social malaise fanned by the lack of safety nets, I'd take the guarantee 10 out of 10 times.

average programmer salary in the USA ~$110K, average programmer salary in France ~$43K, Germany: $52K, UK: $55K etc.

Yea, I am OK with the American model.

My point was kinda that it should extend to other industries, not just programmers. Compassion for others.

Over the years, it's become abundantly clear that solidarity is very foreign concept to HN.

in this case what does 'solidarity' mean?

Are you personally willing to work for 1/2 or 1/3 the pay you receive, so that if you ever get laid off you have a slightly better severance package?

I am not.

I would rather get paid what the most I can/am able to negotiate, and live in a country with so many opportunities, that if I did ever get laid off, I could move to another opportunity with equally attractive pay and benefits easily.

Giving up a huge chunk of your earnings potential in order to have your severance package, should you ever need it, be slightly better doesn't seem like a good tradeoff to me.

> Are you personally willing to work for 1/2 or 1/3 the pay you receive, so that if you ever get laid off you have a slightly better severance package?

That's a false dilemma. It's not like you would have to give up half your salary for this.

> and live in a country with so many opportunities

That's only because you're a SE. The rest of your country doesn't have those opportunities. I think rather most of them would have preferred the social security net of most European countries instead of working for less than minimum wage begging for tips, being laid of on a moments notice.

I mean, how's SV with all the homeless, robberies etc.? Is that kind of society worth the slightly larger pay? Isn't it nice if your neighbors also have it good?

the comment I was responding to was claiming that severance works better/is more generous in the EU - and presumably France based on the username - and almost across the board salaries in France are 1/2 to 1/3 what they are in the USA for many professions...so yeah, you would need to give up 1/2 to 1/3 your salary for a fair comparison.

I don't even live anywhere near SV, I used a $110K average for the USA in my example, if we were talking SV that would probably be closer to $400K, so 10X what a programmer in France might make. I really don't think anyone in SV would be willing to work as a programmer for what an average programmer in SV makes so that they were guaranteed a better payout if they got fired.

My comment? I've never been to France. My point is that you can't compare these two things. It's not like having a fair severance packet immediately means you would need to halve your salary just because you compare with a country with a different salary level.

The cost of living is ~30% lower in Paris compared to a major US city like Los Angeles. If you factor in what people pay here for healthcare premiums you've accounted for most of the difference in salary. That's before we even get into things like childcare, education, or transportation. If you really want to do an apples-apples comparison for income you should also take into account the difference in expenditures.

Also, how many SWEs in SV make $400k? Do you think they're a representative sample of white collar workers for that city?

> factor in what people pay here for healthcare premiums you've accounted for most of the difference in salary

10x means 90% difference, all consumed by the more expensive healthcare? That's like one order of magnitude wrong.

> how many SWEs in SV make $400k?

Saved you a google: > The average total compensation of a Software Engineer in San Francisco Bay Area, US is $242,000.

the topic was programmers, all "white collar workers" is not relevant to this conversation.

> and almost across the board salaries in France are 1/2 to 1/3 what they are in the USA for many professions...

Healthcare costs could help to make up for that for many employees. The average American spent ~$13,000 in health care expenses in 2022, but a full time employee making minimum wage only gets ~$15,000 a year. Even if someone earns twice the minimum wage, healthcare costs will eat a huge percentage of what they'd earn.

Obviously software in the US is an exception, although here too wages and benefits are being slashed at every opportunity. The tech industry is hard at work suppressing wages and hiring from a global pool of talent (and waiting for AI to replace employees) so jobs in software might not stay so nice for very long, except for a select few with the most rare skills.

How’s Paris with all the homeless, robberies, riots, trash, etc? Is it worth having a populace that is perpetually angry because they’re so reliant on the government? Can you tell us what ended up happening to the retirement age in France?

To answer your question, yes, I want to live in a society where I can pursue an extremely high quality of life for myself and my family. My neighbors have it pretty damn good from what I can tell.

I wouldn't know, as I've never been to France.

Edit: wait, I was once on the French side of the alps. Hardly enough to let me speak with any authority on any thing but snow, though.

You're disregarding taxation and cost of living. Your numbers on their own mean nothing.

Oh, and USA is one the countries with most inequality, which plays in favor of a minority at the expense of the vast majority. Different story in France, for instance, where solidarity between rich and poor is higher through taxes, although not perfect.

Really depends what you want out of life.

Taxes are higher in Europe and cost of living is not low. US “inequality” exists because the ceiling is high but medians still meet or exceed Europe.

You’re disregarding that Europe is reaping what it has sown when it comes to economic development.

Compare the cost of living in Berlin to even rust belt US cities and it's really not favorable to the US. If you want to include "healthcare premiums" in the calculation as a tax then the US pays more taxes per capita than most of the EU member states like France or Germany.

Not sure how you are measuring "inequality", but even in a backwater like Hungary you don't have adults rationing insulin made for pets.

Most metrics disagree with you. The US is on average cheaper to live in compared to the average revenue. That can be seen in average household debt too, as those are pretty high in Europe.

I'm not sure that these two things are related.

It is possible in an era of remote work to outsource any American software job to a lower paid, better skilled worker in a low cost of labour country.

Companies choose not to do this. Maybe they want people they can meet, maybe investors don't like it, maybe the paperwork scares then. I don't know the reason but every American programmer who has a job has it because thier employer chose not to hire a better cheaper foreigner with less rights.

Looking at it this way we can say that the American job market and salary expectations are not related to international salaries. And it follows that the same can be true in Europe.

My personal theory is, the world runs on dollars. America prints dollars. The closer you are to the fountain the more water you get, so Americans get more dollars.

"our industry has developed a norm of generous severance"

That's a specious claim. I'd argue just companies that have brand recognition do.

Yeah, I probably overstated this here. I think it's more common than in most industries, but I don't have stats to determine what the actual "norm" in tech is, or how it compares to elsewhere.

I’d estimate 9/10 engineers are not getting these packages. But most of those folks likely don’t read HN.

The economy is soul-sucking. Which, I suppose it's mostly been that way, we're just more open now.

My friends who have worked with NGOs and nonprofits have all complained that they actually have the worst work-life balance; imagine your middle manager doing normal stereotypical office gaslighting about working longer, harder, not getting commensurate pay etc., but instead it's also tinged with morality and "do it because our mission is so important"

Yes, my next door neighbor worked for years at disease foundation non profit and the stories she would tell about management were eye opening.

Yeah, my sister works at a nonprofit foundation and it sounds like an absolute disaster in terms of awful culture and management :/

I would naively expect non-profits to have more humanizing cultures internally but it's just objectively not the case. If anything it's the opposite, using the mission as cover for absolute cultural rot. And some of the best cultures seem to be at trading firms like Jane Street and TGS which also pay better than the alternatives. Go figure.

Know a guy who quite working for a non-profit law firm recently for similar reasons.

I'd love to work on something I really care about, but it seems like most of those jobs just give management excuses to treat you terribly.

I did some pro-bono development work for a nonprofit some time ago. I don't think I have encountered such unpleasant or entitled clients anywhere, whether as an employee or freelancer.

>(getting laid off any time isn't fun)

I know someone who was days from telling their boss about the Apple offer they had accepted who were then given a layoff package.

Probably was fun for them to get a ~30k+ 'leaving bonus' when they were planning to anyway. :)

Yeah my company had a small RIF recently but it feels so much better for everyone when the severance is generous and the treatment is humane. Laying off people sucks, but knowing they'll have several months of continued income and health insurance makes it suck less.

A small startup I worked at shut down and they told us on ~Nov 15th that our pay and benefits would all be ending Dec 1st -- what an absolute nightmare for anyone with bills or a family.

> our industry has developed a norm of generous severance.

I’ve been through this twice in the last two years and let me tell you, this is not the norm. Most companies would pay you only two weeks if it wasn’t for the WARN act.

Most companies are paying 2/3 months based on the local laws. For smaller layoffs where the WARN doesn’t apply, they’re barely providing a month of severance. And yes these are the same tech companies.

> if one says "we let them keep their five-year-old laptop" and another says "we gave them several months severance pay", that will be a factor in my decision.

This is a great idea in theory, but do remember that organizations are made up of people, and the decision makers in the past may not be the same decision makers in the future.

Why do a lot of tech companies give big severances? I don't think other industries do it. It's strangely generous.

Most tech companies don't. Some do. From my limited observations, such packages don't seem more common in the tech sector than any other professional sector. Just a subjective observation, I have zero data to support that.

I'm not against more guarantees about severance, but even with the best guarantee you might not have enough money to endure a post-layoff hardship. The best option, that works quite well in most situations, is to have savings to endure at least 6 months of expenses with no income.

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