[folkrav]

Kind of missing the forest for the trees here.

But okay, let's play that game. The 21k employees they laid off were _all_ high comp workers, really? The 150k employees that got laid off since the beginning of the year, just in tech? The slightly smaller amount from last year? All those workers from other industries? Come the F on.

[pb7]

The severance just continues their normal paychecks for several months. Either they were able to pay their mortgages while they were employed or they weren't, but nothing will have changed for the next few months as they job search.

[folkrav]

Again, you're assuming quite a whole lot, and ignoring just as much. The 150k people I mentioned were laid off just this year all were obviously not all high compensation/high severance package people[0].

> 1 in 3 laid-off workers received severance pay—worth 16 weeks’ pay, on average > Only 1 in 3 recently laid-off workers received severance pay, but those who did received 16 weeks’ worth of pay, on average. That far exceeds the current median unemployment duration of about 9 weeks, and may partly explain why unemployment insurance rolls haven’t swelled more substantially in response to recent mass layoffs. > Workers in financial services (57%), technology (56%), advertising & marketing (49%), and real estate (48%) were the most likely to have received severance.

The market is also saturated with laid off employees, so job search takes time. Companies are actually hiring more H1Bs than last year despite the layoffs, meaning even less roles for citizens/locals[1]. H1Bs touched by layoffs have to find new work inside 60 days. In this economy, tons of companies are on a hiring freeze, so even less opportunities. And I'm only talking about tech in this particular comment, but these layoffs have been happening on a much larger scale in multiple fields (although tech was hit particularly hard).

I don't understand what there is to gain by pretending like everyone's better off that way. The only winners in this whole crap are the companies laying off people, and that minority sliver of employees that happened to have good severance packages.

[0] https://www.ziprecruiter.com/blog/survey-of-recently-laid-of... [1] https://www.epi.org/blog/tech-and-outsourcing-companies-cont...