Severance
lcamtuf.substack.comI 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.
You 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.
One 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.
It'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.
As a rule, you shouldn't burn bridges.
But in some occasional cases, the bridges you burn light up the way forward.
It 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.
The company isn't considering it that. After all, it'll probably fail and you almost certainly won't work there. 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.
You should have been straightforward and told them to go fuck themselves. Laying people off by a brief call is for cowards.
I 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.
Are cherry09 and steve_ AI agents?
I thought they were real people, in a near future where everyone is so dependent on AI that not even a company so callous as to fire by video call would even think of depriving another human the tokens they need to get by.
I think the joke is they all are. It's an autonomous company replicating what it was trained on.
Oh, 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.
The best satire works at more than one level, I think
“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.”
During 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?
I fell for it!
"Is assisted suicide covered by the severance terms?"
"Absolutely. It's covered through the end of the month, per our generous benefits policy. "