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The severance package is great! I don’t think I would be upset (unless I was extremely passionate about a project I was working on)
by absoluteunit1 2y ago
The severance package is great!
I don’t think I would be upset (unless I was extremely passionate about a project I was working on)
- BossingAround 2y agoReally? 16 weeks of salary, or 4 months of pay. In my country, you get 3 months of pay as standard when you're fired from your job. Doesn't seem that great to me to be honest.
- ahstilde 2y agoIt sounds like it's 25% better than what you get in your country?
- triceratops 2y ago33%
- klausa 2y ago“25% better than legally required minimum” is not generally considered “great” in many circumstances.
- nsxwolf 2y agoComparison is the thief of joy. In the US, any amount is... infinity %? Undefined %? better than the legally required minimum of 0.
- BossingAround 2y agoPersonally, I'd consider this nothing to write home about. It's OK. Not great, not terrible. If we're laying off 20% of the company, I'd expect the package to be somewhere in the 6-12 months range. To me, that would seem more fair, considering they are completely restructuring the whole company.
- geodel 2y agoYeah, nothing to write home about until they pay inflation adjust salary till retirement age of 67 for all laid off employees.
- pembrook 2y agoI'd rather take having a tech industry at all and the 2-4X bigger US salaries (and 30% lower average taxes) than having my fellow citizens shoulder the burden of giving me 6-12 months of daycare. In the US luckily the job market is still quite dynamic (and extremely tight by historical standards) so only in an extreme scenario would someone with Dropbox on their resume need 12 months to find another job. They might have to take a pay cut from a 99th percentile salary to a 96th percentile salary though. Rough, I know.
- nsxwolf 2y agoIn the US, the minimum required is usually zero. The most I ever got was 4 weeks.
- lesuorac 2y agoThe minimum needed in the US for this situation is 60 calendar days [1]. Hence the 16 weeks. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worker_Adjustment_and_Retraining_Notification_Act_of_1988 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worker_Adjustment_and_Retraini...
- nsxwolf 2y agoThe WARN Act doesn't mandate severance payments AFAIK.
- rsanek 2y agoI think perhaps that's why poster used "for this situation" -- if a company doesn't want to have to provide advance notice, their only option with WARN is to do it with this kind of severance payment. Not sure if it was intended but that's a pretty cool outcome of the law.
- _gabe_ 2y ago16 x 7 = 112 days, I’m not sure I understand your comment? Even if it was business days only, 5 x 16 = 80 which is still above the minimum needed.
- aprilthird2021 2y agoIn big tech in the US, 4 months is usually enough to find another similar job in the industry. Also in the US for mass layoffs at big firms, the minimum is effectively 2 months because you are required by law to give 2 months notice to workers about such layoffs, 2 months severance is a way to not have to give such notice.
- harimau777 2y agoIn this market, 4 months definitely isn't enough to find a similar job.
- Epa095 2y agoBut are you not expected to work those 3 months? 4 months of pay without work is decent, but not amazing.
- prmoustache 2y ago> But are you not expected to work those 3 months? When you are leaving on your own term yes. When you are laid off you are technically still an employee for those 3 months but nowadays many companies will just tell you to not show up for security reason.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- ramraj07 2y agoUS salaries are quite a lot more; lifestyle creep is a thing but at least for developers they get paid a lot more than the average worker in the US than say in the Europe. Factoring that, 4 months is amazing.
- opjjf 2y agoDo you earn SF salaries in your country?
- cbzbc 2y agoThey probably don't have SF housing costs in their country.
- yellow_lead 2y agoI dunno. It may take 1-2 months to prepare for Leetcode style interviews, and this can be pretty mentally exhausting. Every time you fail to solve a leetcode question, it feeds your imposter syndrome, which is probably even worse due to getting fired.
- FredPret 2y agoIf leetcode wasn't hard enough to make a good programmer fail now and then, there would be no point to it.
- neilv 2y agoIf Leetcode didn't provide discrimination defense and neg the candidate shortly before offer, there would be no point to it.
- johnnyanmac 2y agoIf companies just accepted good programmers and were frank with themselves that they are not going to find rockstar 100x programmers for half the market rate, Leetcode would be acceptable.
- pembrook 2y agoWow, that's horrible. And you might even have to stay at a 4 star instead of a 5 star resort in Bali when you take a vacation during your severance, job market is tough. Even worse, you might have to miss one contribution to your FATfire investment account to deal with the extra risk. Compounded, that missed contribution might mean you'll have to retire at 46 instead of 45. How dare these companies treat these people this way. They took the massive risk of working for an already-successful company at $250K/yr with a $200K stock package, and now fat cat Drew Houston dares to leave them with just an abnormally large severance after they are no longer needed.
- iaw 2y agoI don't think your tone aligns with the community guidelines[1]. Please consider not being snarky and sarcastic but actually responding to the merit of what people say here. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- harimau777 2y agoConsidering how horrible the job market is right now, four months of pay may not go very far.
- reverius42 2y agoI've heard of folks with 10+ years of experience not finding work in 9 months or more.
- johnnyanmac 2y agoHello, I'm one of those. Well, 9 years but close! It really is a circus out there.
- gcr 2y agoThis is a bullshit package because of the healthcare. I was laid off from a different company with access to 18 months of COBRA. Dropbox is offering a third of that. Lots of job searches take longer than 6 months, so the employees are going to be left high and dry right when they need it the most. For the non-Americans, my COBRA expenses are about USD$2,000/month for me and my partner. I’m paying as much for healthcare as I am for rent. Even so, it’s still financially better to take COBRA than pay out of pocket for my prescriptions.
- erikw 2y agoAll West Coast states have free healthcare (medicaid) available if your income is below a certain threshold. And there is no time limit on that. It won’t help with rent, but at least these folks won’t be completely without healthcare access.
- vel0city 2y agoThere's pretty much no way they'd qualify for Medicaid if they were a dev at Dropbox. The income limit for Medi-Cal is $20,783 for a single adult, $28,208 for a household of two adults. Chances are they were past that income limit the first few months of the year. You don't just immediately qualify after making $140k annualized for the first 10 months and then hit $0 one day. Plus, they're getting 16 weeks of salary. At $140k/yr, that's $2,692/wk. Lets say their severance starts next week. There's 8 weeks left in the year. So they'll get 8 weeks of pay in 2025. $2,692 * 8 = $21,538. So no, they won't qualify for Medicaid at all in 2025 if they make that much as a single person.
- cruffle_duffle 2y agoTrue but even making $140k/year does qualify you for tax credits on ACA marketplace health insurance plans. COBRA is kind of obsolete, honestly. You should be switching over to a insurance plan purchased through your state's health insurance marketplace.
- 2y ago
- insane_dreamer 2y ago> The severance package is great! that's a function of how low the bar is in the US