[d4mi3n]

Shopify is my guess; I was part of that layoff and the timing lines up. They had those exact terms and paid them out in addition to WARN act minimums contingent on signing of a severance agreement. I had the same offer but declined due to issues I had with the severance agreement.

[dabber]

> I had the same offer but declined due to issues I had with the severance agreement.

Is it too prying to ask what that means in terms of your outcome? Idk what the WARN act is, and I understand that my question may be neive or too personal to post an answer to publicly, but I'm curious what the alternative to signing is/was and if the answer is generally applicable or specific to the company/agreement.

[d4mi3n]

Not at all—I would not have mentioned this if I was unwilling to talk about it.

The WARN Act[1] is a bit of federal legislation that applies during mass layoffs. There are some variations from state to state, but it generally ensures anyone caught in a mass layoff (50 to 100+ people) is required to receive either 2-months advance notice or 2-months salary+medical benefits.

When Shopify performed their layoffs, there were subject to WARN payouts as they did not furnish 2-months notice.

The severance agreement they gave me and others paid out an additional 8 weeks + 1 week per year of seniority, contingent on signing.

I declined to sign, which was painful, but my main concerns were over two clauses:

* a non-mutual NDA Shopify was unwilling to change to a mutual NDA.

* a provision to appear in court on Shopify’s behalf, uncompensated, for an indeterminate about of time, whenever requested.

There was a lot of other oddness about that whole layoff I’ll leave out here for the sake of brevity, but the whole process was quite the shitshow.

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