3 ms·

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

by d4mi3n 3y ago

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 3y ago
> 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 3y ago
  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_Retraining_Notification_Act_of_1988 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worker_Adjustment_and_Retrai...

by d4mi3n 3y ago

dabber 3y ago

> 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 3y ago
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_Retraining_Notification_Act_of_1988 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worker_Adjustment_and_Retrai...