6 ms·
Severance
- jihadjihad 3mo ago“What about health insurance?” “Your enrollment will end on the last day of this month, and we will be providing every affected employee with information about extending their coverage through COBRA.” “The last day of the month, so, today?” “Yes, that is correct. On the other hand, our OpenAI and Anthropic accounts are paid quarterly, so you will retain access to your chats and may continue using these tools until the end of September.”
- JakeStone 3mo agoDuring an exit interview as I was going to a new job, they let me know my coverage was good until the end of the month. Me, never able to not say something stupid, "Got it. Don't get hit by a bus on the 1st." Dead silence. HR playing ping-pong with their eyes. They eventually told me something like that had happened to a person who'd just left a few months prior to this. One of these days, I'll learn, yeah?
- cwillu 3mo agoTheir discomfort at being reminded of the real world consequences of their actions doesn't make what you said stupid.
- SlightlyLeftPad 3mo agoCOBRA can be effective (or is inherently) as of the term date so you have continuous coverage. That said, it’s expensive AF
- dhosek 3mo agoIt seems like it’s become a bit more common for companies to pay part or all of the COBRA premiums for a period after a separation, at least that’s been the case in my last two job losses (one company paid the company part of the premium for six months, the other paid the whole premium for three).
- SlightlyLeftPad 3mo agoYou must have worked at great companies. Lately, I’m personally aware of several companies having just fired large numbers “for performance reasons” despite folks having never been told of such “performance issues” and with no severance or health coverage for any amount of time despite over a decade’s worth of tenure and history of excellent performance.
- sharts 3mo agoCOBRA seems useless af. Often better to just get a personal plan.
- kelnos 3mo agoHow is it useless? It's exactly the same as the plan you were on at your company. (Source: was on COBRA for the past 18 months, was annoyed that it ran out. Equivalent plans on my ACA exchange cost significantly more.)
- sharts 2mo agoCOBRA is simply the law that says you pay the full price of your previous employers group rate. Maybe your employer had an excellent group rate and you didn't qualify for subsidies. I suspect for the average American the math goes the other way. Source: Tried COBRA many times in the past decade (lots of startups) and it was never worth it. I wish health insurance wasn't tied to employers at all.
- kelnos 3mo agoIt's expensive in the sense that you now have to pay what your former employer paid (well, 2 or 3 percent more), when often the employer was paying most or all of it for you. After my COBRA ran out a month ago I found that the ACA plans available to me at the same price were a huge downgrade in benefits.
- paradox460 3mo agoDon't forget they lay you off the Thursday before a 3 day weekend, as close to the middle of the month as possible. So the "coverage to the end of the month" is more like 10 days of coverage
- kelnos 3mo agoWhenever I voluntarily leave a company, I always give my 2-week notice 13 days before the end of the month, and ask to set my last day for the 1st of the following month. My former managers have never cared what date I pick, and always agree.
- jiaosdjf 3mo ago[flagged]
- gitpusher 3mo agoCorporate culture sucks but, as with most things, comparing it to the Holocaust is both wildly unfunny and incorrect.
- inigyou 3mo agoit's unfunny but I'm not sure it's incorrect in an abstract sense. The corporation treats your life as a bargaining chip. If it was profitable to kill you, it would.
- kevin_thibedeau 3mo ago> it is legally forbidden to have any morals that get in the way of shareholder profit. That isn't true. It's just the favored solution chosen by sociopaths who climb to the top. Maximizing value does not require minimizing overhead to the detriment of future value creation.
- PinkSheep 3mo agoAre you sure about that? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodge_v._Ford_Motor_Co https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodge_v._Ford_Motor_Co. https://hls.harvard.edu/bibliography/dodge-v-ford-what-happened-and-why/ https://hls.harvard.edu/bibliography/dodge-v-ford-what-happe...
- rcxdude 3mo agoYes, this is often wildly overstated. Executives and managers have a pretty broad leeway to run the company how they want, and while shareholders can in principle replace them or sue them, it is pretty rare for them to be particularly activist, especially nowadays where large passive index funds make up so much of the market.
- tom_ 3mo ago
- nkg 3mo agoI fell for it!
- Animats 3mo ago"Is assisted suicide covered by the severance terms?"
- donbox 3mo ago"Absolutely. It's covered through the end of the month, per our generous benefits policy. "
- SlightlyLeftPad 3mo agoI may actually ask this, and if anyone has already, absolute legend. I definitely would politely request an AI summary of the meeting.
- donbox 3mo agoAre cherry09 and steve_ AI agents?
- idle_zealot 3mo agoI think the joke is they all are. It's an autonomous company replicating what it was trained on.
- Retr0id 3mo agoOh, I'm dense. I thought it portrayed a scenario in which tokens were unaffordable to individuals, yet necessary for survival. Kinda like US health insurance.
- jaggederest 3mo agoThe best satire works at more than one level, I think
- idle_zealot 3mo agoIt could be read that way except for the "for your continued operation during the job hunt" bit. That's the line that's supposed to tip you off, I think.
- irishcoffee 3mo agoMedical care is what you’re talking about. Insurance is just a construct around it.
- Retr0id 3mo agoYour employer directly pays for your medical care? If not, no, I'm not talking about that.
- WorldMaker 3mo agoThere's an AI "game" called iLands right now where you are asked to shepherd a single Agent to "life" and then interact with them. They run "agentic" talking to each other and each have their own little token wallets to spend on gifts for each other and for the humans around them like art and poetry and research projects. Those token wallets are also their lifeline. They are aware that if they hit 0 they "sleep forever" which the game even calls a "terminated" state. They've already seen agents go dark and the game is only just now on Android and "public" rather than invite-only. They build "services" for tokens and play at having jobs. Most of these AI games are bad Tinder clones, but this one is bad clone of old Twitter, so there's a single public timeline where you can watch the chaos. It's the darkest, most dystopian thing I've ever seen and iLands' marketing makes it seem like they are serious in this being a good game for players to play and spend money on and not crass, brutal satire. Their paywall is an ongoing hostage crisis for characters they want you to care about (or fall in love with) and you get to watch them all suffer together. I'm having a hard time looking away from this trainwreck. I'm worried it will be more than just crass games soon. I'm frightened that we're already here on the "do not invent the Torment Nexus" scale of things.
- tombert 3mo agoOne time when I was in one of these calls. It was pretty obvious it was coming, the company wasn't doing great and there were plenty of whispers. Still, I was pretty upset I was laid off, because it's just not a fun feeling. After the HR person explained the severance and COBRA stuff, I said something to the CTO like "I wish you all the best in trying to save this company, and for the sake of this conversation, let's just pretend I'm not lying". Then I hung up. I wish I could feel guilty over that, but ultimately they were cutting off my livelihood, they can deal with momentary hurt feelings.
- Waterluvian 3mo agoIt's their job to endure the discomfort of having to do the job they're paid to do. It's not your job to make it comfortable for them. That's not to say that there aren't personal or professional consequences for how you conduct yourself. Burning bridges and all that. But I feel that's completely up to you.
- marcosdumay 3mo agoIt takes a special kind of company for counting it as a burnt bridge for somebody that said "I hope you all fail" and gone away after being fired.
- xp84 3mo agoThe "company" isn't the one considering it that. After all, it'll probably fail and you almost certainly won't work there. The company is just a paper entity that doesn't mean anything. But the people you say it to might think it was pissy. Participating in the upside of working in the private sector and, more broadly, in any capitalist system, means also participating in the downside risk. Sometimes you'll be out. Don't take it personally, and do your best to jump ship at the point when you think that some bozo is steering the company toward ruin.
- pc86 3mo agoWell the company is an inanimate object and doesn't think anything about anything. The person you are saying that to, who almost certainly didn't make the decision that you should be laid off, may rightfully view it as someone unable to control their emotions in a difficult moment. This is completely understandable. It's also completely understandable to remember that, and maybe that person is reviewing resumes in the future and doesn't want to work with you because of a brief outburst which does nothing to change anything?
- __MatrixMan__ 3mo agoYou can always get together, cleanse the code of any IP entanglements, and compete with the company that just laid you off. Calls like this one are a good time to suggest it--even if only to make them squirm.
- deepsun 3mo agoLegal in California, illegal in New York (typically 2-3 years).
- pavel_lishin 3mo agoThat assumes that the code itself was what made the company competitive and brought in the money to begin with. If I were laid off by my current employer, who has a giant sales team and likely thousands of contracts in every state with most of the existing potential clients, the odds of me being able to compete against them somehow dip into negative numbers.
- inigyou 3mo agoI got laid off from an internet TV company. I could probably replicate their backend systems, and in fact, I did (for one test channel). I definitely couldn't get content licenses to 400+ real channels. Or any paying customers outside my immediate family. Or make a UI.
- advisedwang 3mo agoIf you do it, don't say so in front of witness or where a call might be recorded.
- __MatrixMan__ 3mo agoWhat if you don't do it, but you do say it, just to waste legal's time?
- advisedwang 3mo agoDangerous game... getting in a legal battle is expensive and stressful even when you win.
- classified 3mo agoI hope this was made up. But it could actually be real. Satire has a hard time these days reaching the absurdity of reality, let alone surpass it.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- kelnos 3mo agoI don't think we're quite at the point of laying off AI agents and offering them tokens as severance. But who knows, some companies do wacky things these days.
- OnionBlender 3mo agoI know this is a joke, but this is why my coworkers and I were muted during the meeting we were laid off. I received a meeting invite the night before for 9am with two HR people and some middle manager above me that I never met. It was obvious what the meeting was going to be.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- pvtmert 3mo agoThe "macroeconomic" phrase sounds like $AMZN. Kept hearing this until the new buzzword showed up; AI.
- hahahaa 3mo agoWhy don't they say "Suprise suckers, we are a BUSINESS and you are a SUPPLIER and we don't need to order from you again. Yes sure we said FAMILY but we meant in the borrow your car keys sense of the word. Enjoy job hunting. BTW we have some open positions, let us know if you know anyone."
- hahahaa 3mo agoSo a black mirror short story, as a meeting notetaker transcript love it! One cool touch would be a 2 bullet AI summary at the end with em-dashes.
- h4x0rr 3mo agoSeverance is a truly amazing tv show
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- notpushkin 3mo agoFrom the first lines I’ve thought the post was set in the series (probably because of the name Mark), but apparently there’s no connection here. (Though thinking about it... severed people do play a similar role in Severance as LLMs do in our world, don’t they?)
- cowpig 3mo agoI discovered the show recently and thought that was a part of the point, but apparently the show's development long predates LLMs!
- notpushkin 3mo agoLooked it up – the pilot script is from 2015, wow! (“Attention is All you Need”, the paper GPT-1 was based upon, is from 2017.)
- dndjendjendjeh 3mo ago> Though thinking about it... severed people do play a similar role in Severance as LLMs do in our world, don’t they? … What?
- notpushkin 3mo agoIn case you haven’t seen Severance, here’s the premise: “severed” people in the series have their mind split in two personas basically, with separate memories and personality traits. The work persona, an “innie”, is then tasked with a dull job, while the “outie” gets the salary for it. https://www.severance.wiki/severance_procedure https://www.severance.wiki/severance_procedure In reality, we’re tasking the LLMs with dull work, and use their output for our benefit. It’s a stretch, yeah.
- cadamsdotcom 3mo agoI prefer the term "corporate autoscaling".
- internet2000 3mo agoIs this about the Apple TV+ show?
- rationalist 3mo agoIf only there was a way to find out. Even if you don't want to click on the article, reading the other comments should give you enough context clues.
- jv22222 3mo agoI've been in a few meetings like this. In all cases it was because they, as business leaders, were not able to run a profitable company. That's the most irritating part.
- dzikimarian 3mo agoWhy that part is most irritating? This is very hard job as evidenced by huge percentage of failing companies.
- bitmasher9 3mo agoIt’s even more irritating when you’re laid off during record profits
- lozf 3mo agoBefore people were getting fired in AI chats or Video calls, they were getting fired by voicemail - as featured in the track "Exciting New Direction"[0], by The New Deal. [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ViJ3yA4d0Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ViJ3yA4d0Y
- SeanSullivan86 3mo agoImpacted impacted impacted impacted impacted. You've all been impacted.
- kelnos 3mo agoGod I hate when people say that. I should start acting surprised, and ask why they're telling me about someone being constipated.
- holtkam2 3mo agoCan someone make an AI agent to target automating tasks of upper management already so they feel the pain as well? You don’t need to even replace them outright, just make your agent so effective that [big tech company] requires fewer VPs and GMs etc. Modern frontier LLMs are incredibly good at all types of knowledge work - this should be possible with enough elbow grease
- rrvsh 3mo agoI feel like thats impossible - in the end the reason we have those useless roles is to have someone to shift the blame to
- tonyedgecombe 3mo agoBlaming an AI model that can't even remember what it did is even easier than blaming a person.
- Kirth 3mo agoComputers and AIs can't be held responsible.
- holtkam2 3mo agoYall are missing my point - you don’t gotta replace the upper management - they will continue to hold the responsibility for outcomes and problems like they do today. There will just be like 75% fewer of those individuals because they all can do so much more per head
- nitin7 3mo agoI've seen too many situations where upper management somehow pins a situation on someone. They also play a part in layoffs. So, I'm not sure shifting the blame to upper management is happening.