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> "Sounds illegal, or at least quite borderline." It absolutely was illegal, and it was the first time in my life I ever hired an employment attorney (because

by mlthoughts2018 8y ago

> "Sounds illegal, or at least quite borderline." It absolutely was illegal, and it was the first time in my life I ever hired an employment attorney (because of the way the company acted when I quit). > "How so? That is, how does a candidate screen for this possibility in advance?" Ask more probing questions about company culture, workflow processes, and whether any particular things are mandated or enforced. Ask how the company handles diversity and what their goals on with staff of different backgrounds. Everyone will answer this with the same legalese insincere crap, but how they answer you can be very telling (e.g. are they very impatient with this line of questioning?) Biggest of all: never ever accept a position that doesn't offer a very large severance package, usually in the range of 1 month of salary plus benefits for every 1 month of time listed in any non-compete, non-disclosure, or non-disparagement agreements, or anything like that implied in a company handbook. If they aren't willing to offer competitive severance benefits, I take it as a sign that at best they want to costless restructure people at their whim without giving them fair compensation for the harm it would cause them, but at worst when they run away from severance, it means they take a top-down, dictatorship attitude to employees, and do not want anyone having any degree of bargaining power to disagree with how they are behaving (e.g. like outright religious discrimination). Sure, some companies are earnest and just don't want to budget for the severance. But the cost of incorrectly rejecting them is OK, compared with accidentally ending up in some place where you have to keep your head down when there is rampant religious abuse going on.

skellera 8y ago
> never ever accept a position that doesn't offer a very large severance package, usually in the range of 1 month of salary plus benefits for every 1 month of time listed in any non-compete, non-disclosure, or non-disparagement agreements, or anything like that implied in a company handbook. What level can you expect this? I haven’t personally come across this. Am I missing out on something?
- mlthoughts2018 8y ago
  It’s simple: just decline jobs that don’t offer it. Unless you are desperate for work or otherwise willing to compromise on it for personal reasons, turn it down. If a company says they either don’t offer severance as a policy, or that severance is calculated like, e.g. 1 week for each year of tenure, just push back or walk away. When I’ve negotiated this before, it hasn’t been an issue, in mid-level individual contributor engineering roles, one senior engineer role, and currently in a managerial role. Most companies will start out saying they won’t do it. But if you say that’s too bad, they’ll either pass on you (doing you a favor) or they’ll negotiate like grown ups. Is IBM going to do this for you? Of course not. So don’t work there. But a lot of places will, or at least will negotiate a large portion of the type of severance I discussed above. It’s not about levels. It’s about sensing that severance-minimization at the cost of missing out on a good candidate is a telling characteristic of dysfunction to be avoided. So just don’t work at those places.

skellera 8y ago

> never ever accept a position that doesn't offer a very large severance package, usually in the range of 1 month of salary plus benefits for every 1 month of time listed in any non-compete, non-disclosure, or non-disparagement agreements, or anything like that implied in a company handbook. What level can you expect this? I haven’t personally come across this. Am I missing out on something?

mlthoughts2018 8y ago
It’s simple: just decline jobs that don’t offer it. Unless you are desperate for work or otherwise willing to compromise on it for personal reasons, turn it down. If a company says they either don’t offer severance as a policy, or that severance is calculated like, e.g. 1 week for each year of tenure, just push back or walk away. When I’ve negotiated this before, it hasn’t been an issue, in mid-level individual contributor engineering roles, one senior engineer role, and currently in a managerial role. Most companies will start out saying they won’t do it. But if you say that’s too bad, they’ll either pass on you (doing you a favor) or they’ll negotiate like grown ups. Is IBM going to do this for you? Of course not. So don’t work there. But a lot of places will, or at least will negotiate a large portion of the type of severance I discussed above. It’s not about levels. It’s about sensing that severance-minimization at the cost of missing out on a good candidate is a telling characteristic of dysfunction to be avoided. So just don’t work at those places.