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 dow

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.