[dan-0]

Maybe it's just the segment I'm in, but I feel like Salesforce was hiring pretty hard up until recently. They wouldn't be the only company to go from a hiring spree to layoffs that quickly over the last quarter.

We really need to lock this absurdity down and increase severance requirements for large companies heavily. It's one thing to gamble risk for the company, it's something completely different to gamble employee livelihood when you're signaling job security by hiring.

[fatnoah]

Salesforce is giving a minimum of 5 months severance to affected people. That's not too shabby.

[time_to_smile]

I really hope that I get laid off in the first round of these layoffs where everyone gets good severance.

My current worry is that the first round of layoff at my first company will get 4 months severance, I'll miss that round, and 2 months later get laid off with only 2 months severance. This would of course mean that my severance ends at the same times as the first group but I had to work an additional 2 months.

[mortenjorck]

It could always be worse. I got laid off last month with 2 1/2 weeks of severance. And of course there are plenty of industries outside of tech where severance itself is an alien concept.

[reaperducer]

And of course there are plenty of industries outside of tech where severance itself is an alien concept.

Absolutely. People in tech don't realize how good they have it.

The first time I lost a job I found out when my company phone started showing alerts on a Saturday night that it couldn't connect to the e-mail server. It turned out that my entire department was canned.

The second time, I came to work on a Thursday only to discover the door locked, and a couple of coworkers lingering around. Eventually, we decided we had the day off. Same story Friday. In the Sunday newspaper there a small note that the company has been bought. So Monday morning, it was off to the Unemployment office.

For 99% of American companies, you're lucky to get notice before you get laid off, let alone severance pay.

[sequoia]

My first full time programming job I got laid off (or terminated anyway, they got rid of 25% of the small staff) at 90 days, and my severance was being paid to finish the project as a contractor. I took the offer of course.

[rkunde]

It’s should be possible to volunteer.

[bsk26]

Affected by this, and unless I'm reading the docs wrong 5 months is a bit of a PR exaggeration. Health insurance is longer but pay and vesting end mid-March.

[fatnoah]

Interesting. Somewhere else in (this or another thread on HN) someone mentioned that their wife was affected and would have pay & benefits into March, and then 5 months severance after.

My hope for folks affected (and, as a former SFDC employee, I know several affected) is that it's pay & vesting for the WARN period, with the severance period following that.

[bsk26]

You're correct, I 100% misread my docs. My package appears to be the same and really is quite generous (and makes me feel a bit better about sfdc, which is nice)

Overall will probably be a good change - as much as I liked our product, the sfdc transition was rough. For better or worse the layoffs don't seem to have been totally random: most of the affected folks I know had larger than normal equity packages

[fatnoah]

Nice, glad to hear it's a good package. I had only a 60 day warn period to find a new job, which was a bit stressful. Good luck!

[peanuty1]

Including accelerated RSU vesting?

[fatnoah]

The letter doesn't explicitly say (I'll way to hear from friends at CRM to get actual details) but their SEC filing mentions stock-based compensation as an associated cost of the layoffs, so it sounds like accelerated vesting might be happening.

[kerbs]

I read that they will technically be on payroll until late March. If that's the case, it's not so much accelerated vesting as it is vesting while not being "employed".

So same result, to some extent.

[fatnoah]

FWIW, I was laid off earlier in the year, and was put on garden leave for 60 days. My vesting stopped immediately, even though I was still employed for 2 months.

[sushid]

Probably the best after Meta and Airbnb from what I've seen. Looks like most large companies have been generous with their severances with the exception of Twitter (not sure about Amazon).

[llampx]

There was a slide deck by Sequioa going around recently, wherein one of the points was that the companies that cut costs hard and fast at the beginning of the recession were more likely to survive to the end of it.

Either that or they see something the rest of us don't when looking at economic data (a long recession).

[__coaxialcabal]

https://content.fortune.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/Adapt...

[bink]

That's the general consensus, especially around YC companies. Didn't they send out warnings early last year suggesting people cut early and deep? I really don't think Salesforce falls into that category though. They aren't going out of business any time soon and their revenue may not even drop if there were a recession.

[berkes]

Why would their revenue not drop?

Typically, revenue suffers if either clients downgrade or stop their contracts. Or go out of business. Is Salesforce in a position or niche where that doesn't apply?

[coredog64]

WARN Act already exists and has state level analogs that strengthen it to some extent.

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

[alistairSH]

WARN doesn't apply if...

- layoff results in fewer than 50 workers losing their jobs at a single employment site

- If 50 to 499 workers lose their jobs and that number is less than 33% of the employer's total, active workforce at a single employment site

These seem to let some* tech companies off the hook.

* Those that are highly remote or distributed.

[symlinkk]

If you do that companies will be more reluctant to hire, since they’ll have to factor in the risk of paying a hefty severance.

[majormajor]

Would the overall economy be worse off if companies hadn't gone nuts with hiring in 2020/2021?

Does "more reluctant" here = "more thoughtful"?

I'm sure you could take it too far, but I'm highly skeptical that we're in any sort of optimal situation today.

[willcipriano]

The people downvoting you are suffering from a sort of survivorship bias. Sure, now you'd like the comfort of knowing your employer would have to pay you a ton of money if they laid you off, but what if you were somebody who was recently laid off looking for a job and people were reluctant to hire beacuse of this requirement? It's not clear to me that it's a net win, from my perspective I'd rather be able to easily replace my employer as opposed to them paying me for a few months.

A strong labor market has been effective in rasing the real incomes of the bottom 25% or so over the past few years, it's entirely possible that a weaker labor market with stronger workers protections would've been less effective at doing so leaving the very poor worse off.

[rybosworld]

> A strong labor market has been effective in rasing the real incomes of the bottom 25% or so over the past few years

Source?

[jfghi]

Gaslight handwavy talking point

[mym1990]

Not really the source and not specific to the bottom 25(but the bottom 50), based on this graph(https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/WFRBLB50107) we can see net worth going up quite dramatically. If you look at pretty much any metric of capital(https://fred.stlouisfed.org/release/tables?rid=453&eid=81366...), it has been rising for the bottom 50. How much of that is attributed to income vs government stimulus is unclear.

[bcrosby95]

That chart basically mirrors real estate prices.

[andrekandre]

  > A strong labor market has been effective in rasing the real incomes of the bottom 25% or so over the past few years

do you mean the increase in demand/jobs we had after the initial covid lockdowns + wfh?

is it possible that strong labor market was due to increased demand from the stimulus checks?

[neon_electro]

Do you like the current status quo where employers are not reluctant to hire, and they're just as likely to lay folks off?

Where's the efficiency for employee or employer?

[sokoloff]

I like it more than the (admittedly extreme) situation in France. There could be a happy medium, but going far enough down the road to making it hard to fire makes it hard to get hired.

[mattkrause]

I feel like there's a fairly big difference in effects between:

- "If we hire this specific person, we might be stuck with them for a while" and

- "If we build out this entire department, we can't close it down on a whim"

[sokoloff]

I think where a lot of companies find themselves is "[last year] we think we're going to grow 20% next year and need to hire 15% to cover that business growth; [this year] oops, we only grew 5%, meaning we should have only grown headcount by 2% and now need to layoff around 10% of our staff to keep our financials sound and protect the jobs of the other 90%"

I think that's a lot of repeated applications of the former case.

[BurningFrog]

I like it.

Employment should be easy to find, switch and end.

More like dating than marriage.

[alistairSH]

Sure, if we roll out some sort of socialized medical coverage. At least for my family, stability of medical coverage is a major impediment to changing jobs.

[orangecat]

I continue to not understand the position that the default provider of health insurance has to be either your employer or the government. What makes it fundamentally different from housing, food, or transportation, where you just pay money and there's assistance for people who can't afford it?

[erik_seaberg]

This was a mistake the US government made in World War II—they made it illegal for wages to change in response to actual shortages of workers, so employers competed by offering health insurance and other perks instead of more pay.

[jmspring]

Companies have leverage due to size that individuals do not. Private insurance for worse coverage than I have now (and mine is good) is almost 2x what I and my employer pay.

[alistairSH]

Group negotiating power.

Tax implications (maybe - not sure how the credits/deductions work today).

[mrguyorama]

Nah, the average human being wants a career. Not everyone is like SWE who feel comfortable hopping jobs every two years and never really settling in.

[BurningFrog]

To me, a career is something you have in an industry, not in a company.

[orangecat]

Yes. And the corollary is that you shouldn't be dependent on your current employer for basic needs, e.g. health insurance.

[scarface74]

No matter where you work in any major city in the US, whether you are working for a major tech company or your run of the mill enterprise shop, you should be making at least twice the median household income of your local area if you have at least three years of experience. If people making half of what you make can manage to survive and it be homeless or go hungry, you should be able to save enough “to live in a position of f%%l you” (https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=xdfeXqHFmPI).

You may not be able to put little Timmy in private school and he may have to gasp go to a public college.

[neon_electro]

What does this have to do with my comment?

[scarface74]

That you should save money and not be dependent on the generosity of your employer or the government to make sure you can continue to have food and shelter.

[bobkazamakis]

Please tell me what the purpose of living in a society is? Also, be sure not to use the words "firetrucks", "military jobs program", or "I pay my taxes for this exact purpose, in the event I need these services"

[shafyy]

That's the whole point

[dinkumthinkum]

Does that really make sense if layoffs only happen a minority of the time after hiring sprees?

[chucksmash]

If the answer to "am I likely to have to lay this person off soon?" isn't "probably not" then it's good that the company becomes more circumspect in hiring.

The other side of the token is that such a guarantee would help convince more people to accept an offer. I'd personally be hesitant to switch to a less stable job right now, and getting an offer yanked or immediately laid off with minimal severance would be brutal for many. A company providing "we changed our mind" insurance would retire a lot of risk for job seekers - and, if things are going well, it costs them essentially nothing to do.

[dantheman]

Why do you want to make it harder for people to get hired?

[chucksmash]

I've laid out my thinking above, which part was unclear?

Many people taking a job are leaving some other job or passing up on other offers to do so. Imposing a cost on employers when they pull a "whoopsie daisy" and rescind offers or immediately lay off a new employee seems like a reasonable trade off to me.

[wintogreen74]

>> since they’ll have to factor in the risk of paying a hefty severance

Typically there is not a hefty severance paid by most companies though. There's some restructuring costs and lots of disruption though.

[dmitryminkovsky]

That's the point...

[water-your-self]

Thats the point

[Spivak]

At minimum if you're gonna lay someone off then any employee benefit that required they worked there for x months/years should be immediately paid out.

[Eumenes]

Severance requirements are not an entitlement. It'll make hiring harder than it already is.

[mr_00ff00]

It’s all about trade-offs and I think it’s worth it.

I’d rather it be harder to get a job, but have higher job security when you get it.

[dantheman]

Then choose companies that offer that, you can sign a long contract. Or avoid companies that are rapidly growing. Why should you force your preference on everyone else?

[Spivak]

"My preference is the current state of things so I pretend that it wasn't forced on people in just the same way I accuse others with different preferences of doing."

Welcome to "government is the means by which a group of people make collective decisions about the way we want our city/state/country to work." When striving for liberty, the thing we actually want, anarchy is just as much a preference as order.

[Eumenes]

Yeah, liberty is totally defined by draconian policies on employers/companies to give hand-outs for lay offs. If that's the case, we need to mandate employees give 3 months notice, for the employer to backfill the position properly. Its only fair.

[Spivak]

Literally nothing could be considered a handout to your own employee. By definition they’re selling their labor to you for a public contract called “legally being an employee” which comes with obligations on the part of the employee and employer.

Everything else is haggling over the specific details. If we decide that one of those employer obligations is to provide guaranteed runaway for employees in the case of termination then that’s that. If we decide that one of the employee’s obligations is providing 3 months of notice then that’s also that. But the two things aren’t at all related except in your mind.

Right now today with no change in policy whatsoever you have to make the choice as to weather you are willing and able meet your obligations as an employer before taking on employees and you have as much say and the same votes as everyone else to decide what those obligations are.

Fairness informs but does not ultimately decide the employer employee relationship. The only thing we get for sure if the system works is that over time it tends toward what is considered fair by the current working citizens.

[AbrahamParangi]

That seems like a deal that adversely affects the people at the bottom of the stack, so to speak, in favor of people in the bottom-middle.

[oDot]

Some people do not prefer that, and it is NOT ok to force it down their throats by force

[ejb999]

>>I’d rather it be harder to get a job, but have higher job security when you get it.

If you were out of work, 3 months behind on your mortgage, and wondering if you have enough money saved to keep your kids fed until you get another paycheck - I doubt you would make the same statement.

[Eumenes]

If I'm fired/laid off, I want free money too, but come on - companies already fund unemployment programs. The government should keep their dirty hands off severance and stop regulating employment within tech/software biz. Alot of these companies have given out very generous packages. These aren't low wage factory workers. These are highly paid/well compensated white collar workers, probably making 2x the median US income. They'll be okay.

Look into how hard it is to fire someone in Germany post trial period (Probezeit).

[tyingq]

> Severance requirements are not an entitlement.

Depends on where it happens. They are in many places.