I wish all my FRIENDS WHO STILL WORK AT MICROSOFT a very THE BUYOUT OFFERS PRESENTING A CLEAR CORRECT YES OR NO DECISION RELATIVE TO YOUR PERSONAL SITUATION AND NOT A TERRIFYING GAME OF "PRESS YOUR LUCK"
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Kinda sounding like I'm not going to get my wish here
@mcc it's a nice thought but "press your luck" is kind of inevitable given how healthcare works in the US and the current you know... state of the world.
@lambdageek Yes :(
It is *wild* how much being in Canada changes one's perspective.
"Being laid off is an option"
"You can start a small business"
"When you take a new job, you can have one or more days between the old and new jobs"
One time around 2012, I got a new job, my last day of job A was Friday, my first day of job B was Monday.
On Saturday I got a sinus infection.
It was a *big problem*. I hadn't set up CORBA ahead of time. I couldn't see my regular doctor.
@lambdageek I wound up having to find a fee-for-service clinic, which I used only that one time, and had never used before, and never used again.
@mcc I couldn't quite understand your point about pressing your luck. Can you clarify that? (signed, someone who is eligible for the buyout offer)
@knutaf Well I guess I mean, if I imagine having got the buyout offer, I could imagine a scenario where it wasn't really what I wanted but I'd feel tempted to take it unless there was a round of proper layoffs after the buyout offers expire and I came out worse in that than I would in the layoff. Sorry, I'm not trying to make you more worried than you were before.
@mcc I think we can actually make a decent guess here. The current package is similar to the voluntary retirement package from a few months ago. That was followed by a round of layoffs, where the severance package was fairly similar to the buyout. I think the calculus on whether to take the buyout is pretty clear: take it only if you already were planning on leaving
@knutaf This sounds like really useful analysis.
@mcc if they are offering it to you, they already want you gone.
@ariadne@treehouse.systems @mcc@mastodon.social I guess in America there's no law saying things like "identical voluntary redundancy offers must be offered to every employee with the same job description"?
@erincandescent @mcc no, AFAIK. employment in WA can just be terminated at any time for any reason.
@ariadne @erincandescent So one wrinkle is that both federal law and many states (Washington does have such an act, it's named WARN) require layoffs above a certain size be *reported*, which has a side effect that layoffs above a certain size cannot be done without however many weeks notice the reporting implies.
Many companies who don't want to wait work around this by offering voluntary settlements to the laid off workers, which somehow lets them circumvent the requirements.
@ariadne @erincandescent there are some caveats, like you can't send early retirement offers to only old people (b/c that's age discrimination) or to other protected groups
so in practice, some kinds of soft layoffs get done like "everyone with X job description" for maximum legal defensibility
@mcc A year ago I would've said, "Don't take the offer, make the bastards lay you off!" But at this point, yeah, the correct move is to take the offer. It's not guaranteed the company will still be around when this whole thing falls apart.