[dento]

I find it rather rare that a relatively compentent dev couldn't get approximately equal compensation working for some other company. So if offered $X for volutary severance, where $X at least N months total compensation, most devs who can get a similar job in less than N months will leave. This leaves you with least capable people, which is (usually) not what's wanted when doing layoffs. (This is of course assuming that interview performance is correlated with work performance, which is not necessarily a great assumption to do)

[SilverBirch]

I think you need to consider that we're in the context of a job market that has been hoovering up devs for the last 10 years. There are 30 year olds who graduated into a fairly good market who are now expeirenced developers who have never seen a really difficult job market. It's all fun and games if you're a fungible 20 something who can go off to be another cog in another machine. But if the market dries up - as is starting to happen with all the big names slowing, it's a very difficult situation to be in, and long term unemployment isn't just a financial burden, it can be a massive emotional burden as well. One thing that has always troubled me in my career is that I look around and I don't see many 50+ or 60+ year old engineers, and partly it's that our industry is still emerging and 60 year old engineers pre-dated the industry. But some of it could well be that at some point attrition pushes people permanently out of the industry.

[stormbrew]

I think there are two problems with this in practice:

1) In the end those people will leave anyways once it's obvious the ship is sinking, so I think you wind up with a double whammy of attrition.

2) Mass layoffs don't usually allow for a particularly good perspective on who is a high preformer because it's hard to vet decisions on that scale. Also this assumes that performance is the primary axis, and not cost or tenure. You will likely lose high performers along with low and medium in a top down layoff.

[ml_basics]

What are reasonable ranges for N in a typical severance package?