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...