[bachmeier]

I don't completely disagree with your take, but people in this world have it pretty good. Most of the employees being laid off were taking home good paychecks for years. They had good benefits and they paid into retirement. According to the article, the company is going to pay on average around $125,000 in severance per employee.

Contrast this with the staff member at a university making $40,000 a year that gets laid off with little notice and no severance. Or the guy working in manufacturing that gets laid off because a major customer changed distributor so the company has to reorganize. Those are people having their lives upended.

[kevinventullo]

That some people losing their jobs have it better than others has nothing to do with the hypocrisy of a CEO claiming to take full responsibility while suffering zero consequences.

[blitzar]

The market love the announcement of 20% cut in staff so the share price is up 2.85%.

The full responsibility personally benefited the CEO by ~$56,000,000

[bachmeier]

I was responding to this

> I'll upend your life instead

$125,000 of severance for high-salary employees that have large retirement accounts isn't "upending" their lives. Complaints about a severance package like that belong in the same bin as billionaires complaining about paying taxes.

[kevinventullo]

White-collar Dropbox employees have infinitely more in common with minimum wage hourly workers than any billionaire. Not just qualitatively in terms of freedom, but even quantitatively: the relatively extreme 10x difference of a $40k versus $400k salary is dwarfed by someone with a net worth 5000x the high end of that range.

[whoknew1122]

As someone who has worked for less than $40,000 a year, and someone who now makes more than the average pay of someone at DropBox--I'm not sure it's a useful conversation to say "Hey, someone else has it worse." Yes, it'd suck to be a laid-off staff member of a university making $40,000. It also sucks to be a laid-off cashier at a grocery store making $16,500.

This talk of money also ignores the negative effects on mental health from being laid-off.

But the most important point here is that a CEO making an obscene amount of money takes "full responsibility" and... still gets paid an obscene amount of money. Easy to take responsibility if you have 0 consequences.

[bachmeier]

> I'm not sure it's a useful conversation to say "Hey, someone else has it worse."

That's wasn't the point of my comment. The point was the $125,000 severance package. You have someone making $40,000 a year getting laid off with little notice and no money to live on. That's bad. Then you have someone getting laid off but the company is giving them another $125,000. To the extent that that's bad, it's something that most folks could never dream of.