Most people's stock options are so underwater they're eternally worthless. An increase of a few bucks in the stock price isn't worth the cost on your morale.

How's your open-source Flickr coming along, man?

// sorry, using a throw-away account..

Why buy-outs? If I were looking for cutting costs, I would just lay them off.

I'm not the parent you responded to, but I'm assuming when they said buy-outs, they were including severance for layoffs.

In North America 1 month is pretty common if you've been with a company for more than a year with 2 months not being uncommon.

I've heard of people being given 1 month of notice of a layoff and then being asked to work that month only once:)

1 month is common because companies care about their public image when it comes to hiring new people, and they know that the remaining employees will watch how those being cut are treated. If you've got new folks in charge who don't care about it, or need to cut cash outlay _very_ fast because they levered up the company to buy it, you may not get that severance. There's certainly no legal obligation to give a month of severance when it comes to an "at will" employee.

I've been around at a few companies before where cuts happened. The first round of layoffs always got good severance, because the company wanted to make sure that the remaining employees didn't bail... but after 2 or 3 rounds, the jig was up, so the severance shrank from 2-3 months to 2-3 weeks.

> There's certainly no legal obligation to give a month of severance when it comes to an "at will" employee.

I see, this is news to me.

I'm Canadian so I guess the laws can certainly be different, but I was under the impression that 2 weeks was a minimum severance required by law.

I've never seen less than a month, I guess this could be enforced by employment contracts. I know it's been in every one I've signed:)

There's no minimum severance (at least at the national level), as far as I know. (http://www.dol.gov/dol/topic/wages/severancepay.htm) ... In theory it could be in your contract, but I personally can't recall ever seeing a contract that had such a clause. The standard is "at will" - if you come in to work one day and they don't need you any more, that's it, just the same as you don't really have to give two weeks notice when you leave (but most people do for the sake of the relationship.)