edit: "This feature, spotted by iDeviceHelp, was originally revealed as part of an expansion of the company's family tools designed for children's Apple accounts."
Pretty clear, this was at least in part designed to prevent child sexual abuse.
> The packages for departing employees will include the equivalent of their full base pay through the end of 2026. Healthcare coverage is different across the globe, and if you’re in the United States, we’ll continue to provide support through the end of the year. We are also vesting equity for departing team members through August 15th, so they receive stock beyond their departure date. And, if departing team members haven’t hit their one-year cliffs, we are going to waive those and vest their pro-rated equity through August as well.
The announcement reads as pretty heartless to me, but this is a very, very nice departure package
They have a reputation to maintain, otherwise it will be difficult to recruit the best people in future. That being said, damn, that is a very generous package by any measure.
First packages tend to be the best. If you work for them beware, the next round won't be as good (if there is one). The economy isn't the best, but if you get an okay job offer anyway you should probably take it rather than risk you will be in the next round that is worse.
True. I wasn't surprised when I was let go when my previous company had a first round. I'd clashed with management pretty openly for a while and knew if anyone had to go, I'd painted a target on myself. The people who were let go in rounds two and three were probably caught by surprise.
Dont' get it twisted, anyone; plenty of companies have a reputation to maintain for this reason (but don't do this). This is an absurdly generous severance package.
Damn. I got two weeks notice and then got shown the door with nothing. And now I get to compete with all these people who are going to be so much less stressed
Proper layoffs require at least 60 days of notice or 60 days of pay. Maybe you weren't part of a proper layoff, but if you think you were, check out the WARN act.
The WARN Act is triggered if there is a mass layoff of at least 50 employees (excluding PT) and that number represents at least 33% of the active employees at a single employment site
OR, if RIFF means closes location (with 50+ employees affected).
I want to agree, however, it will take every bit of that time for some to find new placement. These AI cuts aren't just making it harder to keep a job, but harder to get a job as well.
For better or worse, it isn't a company's job to pay laid off employees until they find a new role.
The industry standard for severance is 1-2 weeks pay per year at the company, paying out roughly 7 months is a big deal (and yes, an acknowledgment of how rough they know the job hunt will be).
Disagree. If a company puts someone in a precarious situation then they have the obligation to take responsibility. After all, its management who failed to keep the company successful. Unless we are saying that the C-suite doesn't actually deserve their massive compensation packages.
Are smaller tech companies also commonly doing larger severances? I've only been laid off once and its when the company was basically out of money, but my understanding was always that it was only FAANG and similar that considered larger severance packages.
Not as part of a layoff, though yes they can get fired. If they play their cards right apparently they can also be rehired days later and install a board that better suits them.
Maybe it should be the companies job, being jobless in the US is a potential death sentence and since we don't have universal healthcare, universal childcare, or universal higher education/vocational training the onus should be forced on the companies to provide welfare for workers since they are so adamant about not paying taxes to create a welfare system that doesn't mean homelessness or death.
There is also no industry standard for severance, it's not federally mandated and not a guaranteed benefit.
I'd be very hesitant to throw out so many of the fundamentals that made America into what it has been for the last couple centuries.
The goal, at least here, is to expect individuals to mostly take care of themselves rather than depending in the state or some other authority to do it for them.
Universal healthcare, guaranteed indefinite severance, universal childcare, etc are completely antithetical to our system. Maybe the majority is ready and willing to throw that old system out, but if so we need to do it by focusing on the fundamentals rather than getting distracted with higher level implementation details.
Yet people risk their lives to go in illegally. Something doesn't track.
Its because, inequality is not the problem.
The problem is the ability to move between income levels. That coefficient used to the highest in the US. Rich people could and did go poor. Poor people could be rich.
That index was always the highest by far in the US, but now its decreasing. That's the real issue.
It can be simultaneously true that the US has a serious wealth inequality problem (and other serious problems), and that other countries have problems far more severe, causing people to want to relocate to the US.
i recommend investigating what the root causes are for most the undocumented immigrants coming into the US and why their countries are destabilized (hint: the cause rhymes with Shamerica)
> Universal healthcare, guaranteed indefinite severance, universal childcare, etc are completely antithetical to our system.
I don't see how that follows. How is your system that different from e.g. the UK, which manages to have all of those things (severance is not indefinite and is unemployment).
Unless I'm drastically misinformed, the UK is dealing with a mountain of issues including immigration, economic problems, and quality of the healthcare being provided.
First of all, are those problems you would say do not exist in the US?
And if that's the case, I'd disagree. But would any of those problems be somehow explained by the differences between the British and American systems? Especially when countries with very different systems (like all of continental Western Europe), and the US, have then too.
Many (all?) of those problems do exist in the US as well. My point, though, was that the US was historically based on ideas that don't align with welfare programs. I only raise the issues in the UK because you were comparing the two and it seemed important to note that though the UK has many welfare programs, it isn't going well for them currently.
Toy original point, the US was based on individual freedoms and rights that simply didn't exist in the monarchical UK system. For much of the US's history the, albeit politically idealized, expectation was that you come here and make your own way. We didn't have a feudal system and didn't depend on a monarch to run many details of our daily life. We have seen more and more of that creep into the American system over the last century or so though, and yes we are coincidentally also running into many of the same issues seen in more socialist European countries today.
> We didn't have a feudal system and didn't depend on a monarch to run many details of our daily life.
Neither were the British by the time the American revolution started.
I don't see much difference in the personal opportunities and rights between post-independence US and industrial Britain. Apart from, you know, the US having slaves with no rights nor opportunities.
The British absolutely was a monarchy during the American revolution.
The British don't have a right freedom of speech, for example. They gave been arresting and charging people for social media posts.
We're getting way off on a tangent here though. The original point you were commenting on was that welfare programs, including those the US already has, don't fit in the model the US was original founded on and operated under for a majority of the time the country has existed.
You are mistaken. Socialism (or the streams of thought that would eventually become socialism) have always been a part of American culture. Perhaps most famously Thomas Paine advocated for a universal basic income.
Thomas Paine's writing, especially Common Wealth, inspired many of the revolutionaries but he had no direct role in the country and we never implemented his UBI. Its also worth noting that his writings themselves were fiction, he invented a past to paint a picture of how he wanted the future to look.
What socialist type programs can you point to in the US, say before the New Deal?
I don't think it should be the companies job, but I would be ok with it being paid for by taxes companies pay.
Requiring companies to do all of these extra things just gives larger companies more and more advantages, since they have an economy of scale to provide go government-type services.
I don't want my company to be in charge of my whole life. Let them pay taxes to a government that can provide those things equally for everyone.
What's the difference in it being a responsibility of the company and it being a program paid for by races paid by companies?
I mean this as a genuine question, in case that isn't clear. To me the latter is just socializing the cost across multiple companies, but I'm happy to be wrong here.
I just tried hiring someone and received over 200 resumes that looked mostly fake. Thinking about adding a final in person interview in an attempt cut down the garbage when I repost.
What do you think can be a solution to this? I guess the problem is only going to grow as more people use AI, I'm sure someone out there is also using agentic workflows (basically spamming every job opening). Is the solution to use AI to filter the results or do you think that will not work out if the target is to find the best candidate
Use a good recruiter to do the dirty work for you, it’s not cheap but it’s worth the lack of hassle.
With that said, at my firm we switched to using an in-house non-technical HR recruiter using nothing but a LinkedIn Job listing and the results are exactly as you’re experiencing. Perhaps 1 in 100 is a real human with a real resume, the rest are AI being fed our job description to generate a resume.
Onsite final interviews and technical assessments are our stop-gap.
I’ve considered writing informally and putting subtle typos in my cover letters, for example, to signal humanity. Is this a good idea or do recruiters look down on it?
The people I hired in my last round, with over 600 slop and fake applicants, had honest and informal cover letters that stood out. I’m sure I passed up on real decent people as a result, but there’s no perfect way to avoid this right now.
It helps that we have something closer to a lifestyle business, where I can ask for a brief paragraph about your relationship to the outdoors and cycling, but that just means I had 500 slop cover letters gushing about cycling. The three that made it through were short concise honest and linked to real world activities they did.
Good luck, it’s a hard problem , and very very adversarial. You have true scam level applications from North Korea and India, and you have unqualified people trying to appear qualified. Sprinkled in are unqualified people who would be a good hire because of raw capability, and qualified people who are looking to do bare minimum.
I'm glad I read this. Pre AI, I've always wanted to tell the company about myself using my own language instead of this fake corporate LinkedIn style language, which seemed like was the norm, and was expected. Now it seems like employers are looking for some hint of humanity. I guess I'll remember this if I ever decide to apply for a job again.
You can't, this is the issue with an extremely unregulated industry. You want to stand out as a single individual among 10,000 similar qualified people on paper? Good luck.
This is likely an unintentional, but beneficial, side effect in thwarting labors power.
Since workers have a hard time getting interviews due to AI slop, that means they'll have a harder time developing leverage rather than being forced into accepting any job because the alternative is to become homeless and die.
It’s hard to say because I’m not the recruiter nor am I or HR staffer.
Historically, typos on a resume are immediately filtered out. Lack of duty to care or some such.
We have some type of tooling to filter out obvious AI slop writing. We also check your submitted social media, not for offending content, but to make sure it’s been around for some number of years, especially pre-AI.
We’ve had folks spam both our hiring manager and Senior+ level staff begging for a leg up. We turned them down.
To honest answer is the hiring market sucks for all involved and there is no good answer here other than be honest and organic and pray. I wish I had a better answer, but it’s a hirers market. We can afford to be picky and lose a good candidate.
This isn’t my experience, but I think it depends highly on the segment. We have mainly senior C++ devs (database company), and it’s still a challenge to find great engineers.
I think the current job market isn’t “one size fits all”. Having said that, obviously if they’re getting laid off, they may very well be in the segment that’s less desirable.
I've got a couple of friends that left London to go back to Poland during covid. They first continued to work remotely, but ended up switching to Polish companies because the pay was better.
Yes I think salaries are still a bit lower, but the gap has closed a lot. And cost of living is lower in Poland plus there is some tax break for self employed contractors that means you only pay ~20% tax compared to ~40% in the UK.
With those two factors you could easily end up better off overall, especially if you have kids
The kids factor is even bigger if you move back close to relatives. The ability to drop your children at grandma's instead of paying for childcare is an easy 1k a month you're saving.
Daycare is completely free in Poland since 2024 (you need to submit an application to ZUS, but there are no limits, it's always accepted), even the private ones.
You only pay separately for food (10 zł per day the child is actually attending to the daycare).
I switched from a Polish company to a German one (both remote), but my pay is more or less the same.
The difference is that in Poland to get that money I have to be a "top performer" with a lot of stress and not a lot of time, while in Germany I can be just a mid dev.
> however, it will take every bit of that time for some to find new placement.
Isn't this another way of saying the severance package is generous enough to cover the time needed to find another job even in a down market?
If a severance package that covers the time needed to find a job isn't enough then it's starting to feel like we're being angry just to be angry. I don't like layoffs either (I've been laid off before) but if a company is giving 7 months of severance on what was already a very high paying job, that's very good.
Depends on what you specialise in. Sysadmins seem to be in demand (which isn't a programming job but is in tech still) and embedded hasn't been killed by AI yet (and I doubt it will)
I'm not saying that it couldn't be true, but we have no way of concluding that from just comparing such rates. There are many differences in daily life and thresholds for reporting beyond surveillance levels.
anxiety in the sense you're talking about is a function of private surveillance and in that regard America is much worse. State led surveillance in Chinese public spaces is real and effective in producing compliance (20 years ago public theft, pulling people off motorcycles was a daily occurrence) but in private China is a significantly freer society.
Foucault used to distinguish between models of authority that operate on "make die and let live" vs "let die and make live". China's the former, the US with its moral busybodies both in progressive and religious flavors the latter.
The US now is a society of public disorder and personal policing, China is a society of public order and largely indifference in private life. Of course the former creates anxiety. American Beauty, a film about permanent surveillance without any state, would make no sense in China.
I think it’s a cultural thing. On average, people seem to hate cops more in the USA.
Personally I like having little cop boxes in 5 minute walking distances in Tokyo. There are people who are very against it, bring up bad encounters, but net positive, I would say.
There are various extensions you can get to automatically redirect Twitter links to xcancel or something, very much recommended.
I don't like that these get submitted either, but unfortunately people do post worthwhile stuff there and only there, and I don't want to just categorically forbid those posts.
Twitter still does have quite a lot of unique content that either appears there first or isnt accessible anywhere else at all, unlike paid article websites, previews without logging in actually work for the most part, and xcancel as you said is a thing. Which extension are you using for redirects?
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