Is there a good time? If anything I'd rather get fired before the holidays and spend time with family rather than work through it all and miss time and then get fired afterwards.
I guess the robustness of the economy too. Losing your job when there’s a lot of hiring might not be the worst. Of course, most mass firings happen when the economy isn’t doing well and finding work can be a challenge if you’re not top talent.
In this most recent set of layoffs (which I'm defining as starting in 2022 since that's the dataset they have available) January is the worst month for layoffs.
As an evil corp thought experiment - Dec is normally low productivity.. lots of vacations ,etc. If you are going to lay someone off in Jan, why not lay off in Dec and avoid paying for paid holidays?
I know my company is hinting at layoffs in Q1, well hinting, they've literally said they've budgeted money as an expense in Q4 to pay out severance packages in Q1. So they're at least waiting until after to give people their walking papers. That said, I'm not sure if the anxiety of not knowing if you're in a future layoff is maybe worse since now everyone is concerned, but then again, at least you can act accordingly, maybe layoff the credit cards.