Severance
lcamtuf.substack.com
lcamtuf.substack.com
I received a meeting invite the night before for 9am with two HR people and some middle manager above me that I never met. It was obvious what the meeting was going to be.
One cool touch would be a 2 bullet AI summary at the end with em-dashes.
That's the most irritating part.
1. All human, and interpreted like you suggest (out of touch company offering tokens as severance rather than something actually useful to people).
2. Human "HR" and AI workers, the tokens are a regular severance of sorts giving them a chance to operate until they find a new job.
3. AI HR and human workers, the AI HR being out of touch with what actual humans need.
4. AI AIR and AI workers, which matches the reason to have the tokens in (2).
so they got Slop Rations instead of tokens and it was funnier
It's the darkest, most dystopian thing I've ever seen and iLands' marketing makes it seem like they are serious in this being a good game for players to play and spend money on and not crass, brutal satire. Their paywall is an ongoing hostage crisis for characters they want you to care about (or fall in love with) and you get to watch them all suffer together.
I'm having a hard time looking away from this trainwreck. I'm worried it will be more than just crass games soon. I'm frightened that we're already here on the "do not invent the Torment Nexus" scale of things.
But who knows, some companies do wacky things these days.
“Your enrollment will end on the last day of this month, and we will be providing every affected employee with information about extending their coverage through COBRA.”
“The last day of the month, so, today?”
“Yes, that is correct. On the other hand, our OpenAI and Anthropic accounts are paid quarterly, so you will retain access to your chats and may continue using these tools until the end of September.”
Me, never able to not say something stupid, "Got it. Don't get hit by a bus on the 1st."
Dead silence. HR playing ping-pong with their eyes. They eventually told me something like that had happened to a person who'd just left a few months prior to this.
One of these days, I'll learn, yeah?
(Source: was on COBRA for the past 18 months, was annoyed that it ran out. Equivalent plans on my ACA exchange cost significantly more.)
I suspect for the average American the math goes the other way.
Source: Tried COBRA many times in the past decade (lots of startups) and it was never worth it. I wish health insurance wasn't tied to employers at all.
Still, I was pretty upset I was laid off, because it's just not a fun feeling. After the HR person explained the severance and COBRA stuff, I said something to the CTO like "I wish you all the best in trying to save this company, and for the sake of this conversation, let's just pretend I'm not lying". Then I hung up.
I wish I could feel guilty over that, but ultimately they were cutting off my livelihood, they can deal with momentary hurt feelings.
Anyway, a few weeks after the axe dropped, I went to an industry conference (putting out the feelers for a new job, etc) and during the keynote he walked in. I waved, and he came and sat at the table with me. After the speech, we were chatting with the others around the table, and someone asked where I worked. I said something like "well, I'm between jobs. This guy just fired me <thumb jerk towards him>." They laughed, and he squirmed in his chair! But I didn't let him squirm too long, it really wasn't his fault.
I honestly don't think most people would do that, but I think there's a worry that "one bad actor is enough". Consequently, when I've been laid off in the past, usually my access to the computer (Slack, company email, and the computer itself) is cut off about a minute after I get the bad news.
That said, usually I get severance when I've been laid off, which is admittedly a small consolation, but a consolation all the same.
That said, I already didn't like the CTO here, regardless of the layoffs. I kind of thought he was a blowhard who didn't really understand what he was talking about most of the time. I had no desire to be his friend.
But in some occasional cases, the bridges you burn light up the way forward.
The person you are saying that to, who almost certainly didn't make the decision that you should be laid off, may rightfully view it as someone unable to control their emotions in a difficult moment. This is completely understandable. It's also completely understandable to remember that, and maybe that person is reviewing resumes in the future and doesn't want to work with you because of a brief outburst which does nothing to change anything?
I hardly think that making a single passive aggressive dig is "being unable to control my emotions" though. It's a smartass comment that admittedly was intended to maybe hurt his feelings, but it's not like I screamed at anyone or went on some loud rant.
Participating in the upside of working in the private sector and, more broadly, in any capitalist system, means also participating in the downside risk. Sometimes you'll be out. Don't take it personally, and do your best to jump ship at the point when you think that some bozo is steering the company toward ruin.
Most programming jobs are remote. What's the alternative, exactly?
Where is this true?
Maybe in 2021...
These middle managers are robots in an organization. You knew they saw you as "resources", now they can't afford you and have to put you back in the pool. So be it.
If they'd been shitty about it, sure. But if you got paid for your time - fair trade.
You don’t need to even replace them outright, just make your agent so effective that [big tech company] requires fewer VPs and GMs etc.
Modern frontier LLMs are incredibly good at all types of knowledge work - this should be possible with enough elbow grease
There will just be like 75% fewer of those individuals because they all can do so much more per head
I should start acting surprised, and ask why they're telling me about someone being constipated.
If I were laid off by my current employer, who has a giant sales team and likely thousands of contracts in every state with most of the existing potential clients, the odds of me being able to compete against them somehow dip into negative numbers.
I definitely would politely request an AI summary of the meeting.
(Though thinking about it... severed people do play a similar role in Severance as LLMs do in our world, don’t they?)
…
What?
In reality, we’re tasking the LLMs with dull work, and use their output for our benefit. It’s a stretch, yeah.
Just imagine they are conscious for the time they are autogressing.
Wouldn't it be like the experience of the Severed?
Even if you don't want to click on the article, reading the other comments should give you enough context clues.