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Comment by atlas_hugged | Hacker News Reader

Name and shame please.

Shopify is my guess; I was part of that layoff and the timing lines up. They had those exact terms and paid them out in addition to WARN act minimums contingent on signing of a severance agreement. I had the same offer but declined due to issues I had with the severance agreement.

> I had the same offer but declined due to issues I had with the severance agreement.

Is it too prying to ask what that means in terms of your outcome? Idk what the WARN act is, and I understand that my question may be neive or too personal to post an answer to publicly, but I'm curious what the alternative to signing is/was and if the answer is generally applicable or specific to the company/agreement.

Not at all—I would not have mentioned this if I was unwilling to talk about it.

The WARN Act[1] is a bit of federal legislation that applies during mass layoffs. There are some variations from state to state, but it generally ensures anyone caught in a mass layoff (50 to 100+ people) is required to receive either 2-months advance notice or 2-months salary+medical benefits.

When Shopify performed their layoffs, there were subject to WARN payouts as they did not furnish 2-months notice.

The severance agreement they gave me and others paid out an additional 8 weeks + 1 week per year of seniority, contingent on signing.

I declined to sign, which was painful, but my main concerns were over two clauses:

* a non-mutual NDA Shopify was unwilling to change to a mutual NDA.

* a provision to appear in court on Shopify’s behalf, uncompensated, for an indeterminate about of time, whenever requested.

There was a lot of other oddness about that whole layoff I’ll leave out here for the sake of brevity, but the whole process was quite the shitshow.

1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worker_Adjustment_and_Retrai...

Curious, what would be a severance package HN would be satisfied with? I suspect the average US employee would be stunned to hear an offer of 6 months.

So much negativity around these statistical outliers. The majority of companies in the US don't offer severance and it's very rare in some industries. Not saying that it's fair, but name and shame? Maybe we're living in different worlds.

Given the gauntlet that is modern tech interviews, 3 months. 1 month severance isn't an issue in a market where you can grab a new gig in 2-3 weeks. But all these places want 5 rounds of interviews.

One week per year of service is so standard, no company is going to be shamed by it. That doesn't mean it's not lame.

Is so standard in the USA, it's not the standard in any other place on Earth I worked at (Brazil, USA, Sweden). Even in Brazil you'd get at least a few months of severance.

That's literally all you get in the UK:

https://www.gov.uk/redundancy-your-rights/redundancy-pay

To quote:

"half a week’s pay for each full year you were under 22

one week’s pay for each full year you were 22 or older, but under 41

one and half week’s pay for each full year you were 41 or older

Length of service is capped at 20 years."

And also it's pretty shit because it's capped, so for most software devs it won't be anywhere near what their actual salary was:

"If you were made redundant on or after 6 April 2023, your weekly pay is capped at £643 and the maximum statutory redundancy pay you can get is £19,290. "

The UK has an awful standard living for how wealthy it is.

For example, if you happen to be classed as a "worker", rather than an employee, you do not have a legal right to leave work or take time off to care for a sick family member or pick a child up from school.

Yep. And there are many many many other examples like this - for instance UK employee protections are quite good.....unless it's your first 2 years of employment. In which case you get almost nothing - within the first 2 years you can be let go without any reason, and it's not redundancy either so it doesn't trigger all kinds of protections - it's just "it's not working out, bye" - same as US, or worse actually in some ways.

This is the money the government will pay you rather than severance from an employer.

Redundancy also comes with a required notice period that the employer must pay you through as well. And there’s a bunch of other rules around how people can be selected for redundancy.

I got laid off when Realtime Worlds went into administration and only got the statutory pay until years later the company was wound up and I got a follow on measly cheque from them for part the money they still owed me for the notice period.

>>This is the money the government will pay you rather than severance from an employer.

Nope, that money is entirely paid by the employer.

https://www.springhouselaw.com/knowledge-hub/redundancy/who-...

"Your redundancy pay is called a statutory redundancy payment. It is calculated based on your age, weekly pay and number of years you’ve worked for your employer. You are also entitled to a paid minimum statutory Notice Period. It’s your employer’s duty to pay these, but your payments are capped"

If the employer can't pay (as in my case) this is also the money the government will pay in their lieu. Which is why it's so shit/capped. Normal payments from employers are generally more in my experience.

Likewise the notice period is paid at full rate.

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