Why would you give notice? Leaving people dangling for weeks while you figure out who will be cut is worse than making the decision, telling them it's effective immediately and giving a fair severance package so they can immediately start looking.
You're conflating notice and severance. It might be desirable to give enough notice so people can do more work, but it might not. I actually think it's more dignified to let people off the hook immediately. When you lay them off/fire them, you've typically failed in some way as a company, and expecting people to fulfill some responsibility knowing their time's up is pretty harsh.
In "sane countries" you can have people stop working immediately as long as you pay them. That's really all the notice period is for, it has nothing to do with continued responsibilities.
Tech company severance packages are usually pretty ok, I would bet stack overflow is giving packages that would be just fine in other countries.
Yes, but you forget "water cooler talk". Having worked at a large hedge fund that went through a massive layoff after a sub par year (we still made 10%) that resulted in 2/3s of all IT employees, roughly 600 people, being terminated. The announcement was made over email. First, all consultants/contractors were immediately shown the door. Those we wanted to keep were converted to salaried employees. This was the week before Thanksgiving in the US. Volunteers to be laid off from employees were asked for the Monday before Thanksgiving. Long of it was morale tanked. I informally asked my director to be let go and was told not to formally ask for it as they weren't going to cut me and it wouldn't look good in my official record. I saw a lot of friends and great developers walked out the door. The layoff was bad enough in of itself, but watching it dragged out over a few weeks was brutal.
