[spacefearing]

I'm not a fan of Airbnb's business but this is highly commendable.

The severance package is the core metric to judge a company that is doing layoffs. In this case, it sounds like Airbnb did the right thing. Airbnb fired people well in advance of when they were actually forced to. This enabled them to provide an ethical severance.

Some companies wait until the last minute and then provide two weeks or similar. These companies should be publicly shamed for all time.

[mgiampapa]

I wouldn't judge them too softly, they did after all promote having an internal services food team for years and virtue signaled all over the place that they wanted them to be team members and not contractors like every other tech company (they got stock, sick days, vacation, benefits etc), then fired them all over Christmas break one year and replaced them with contractors.

[texasbigdata]

Agree with you but....

4x12 = 48 weeks of compensation disbursed by the entity. Restated compared to some nightmare no severance scenario meant they effectively terminated 4 FTEs to achieve slightly less than 3 FTEs of cost savings (adjusted for healthcare costs).

I'm not arguing against AirBNBs approach btw. Their CEO had a wonderful podcast on the Masters of Scale pod roughly two weeks ago.

However the Rawlsian philosophy on that marginal employee that got terminated effectively to fund the severance for herself and her colleagues is a tricky ethical consideration.

[danenania]

It doesn't seem all that tricky to me. While losing any job is rough, losing a job with enough severance and benefits to cover the ensuing period of uncertainty and a job search likely isn't going to be that bad for people who were able to get hired by Airbnb to begin with. But losing a job without a safety net could be a disaster. Imo it's far better to put more people in the 'bad, but not that bad' situation than to put anyone in the 'disaster' situation.