> If I was a Twitter engineer, I'd be trying to figure out how to maximize my severance package right about now.

Absolutely. This is how I would spend every minute of my workdays until the eventual layoff. It’s a degrading experience for sure, but it could pay off big.

What are some strategies for this? I can't think of any and would have been a sitting duck.

Get everything in writing. If someone wants an in-person meeting with no notes taken send an e-mail to them afterwards confirming what was said in the meeting. That way you have a paper trail of what was said/known and when.

Do you have more context as to why this is important? Is this for all project work, or is this for meetings discussing severance?

If your employer is trying to fire you "with cause" then they will be producing a paper trail of their own, to justify their decision. Their paper trail will be very one-sided, of course.

You will need your own paper trail to demonstrate your side of things, either as part of the severance meeting - if you even get the opportunity - or after you get fired if you choose to make a claim against it.

This is advice if you think your employer is going to try firing you for cause so they don't need to pay a severance. When they're trying to do that your manager will try to have more face to face meetings so none of the discussions are recorded. Then they will send some e-mails to their manager with some colored description of what took place. For instance they'll say your productivity dropped or you're mismanaging your time because you didn't work on project A but in your one-on-one they explicitly told you to stop working on project A and instead focus on B. When it comes time to drop the hammer they'll have one-sided documentation of your performance.

If they're start talking about your performance definitely follow up with an e-mail about what metrics they are using to measure performance and pressure them to give you a path for correction.

If you don't have any documentation it will be easier for them to fire you and offer you nothing. If you have a bunch of documentation, especially if they know you have it, they'll be more likely to offer a severance. A wrongful termination suit will likely cost them more than your severance, especially if you have a lot of documentation of your work and performance.

Also remember HR exists to protect the company, they don't give a shit about you beyond whatever the legal requirement is for giving a shit. Don't sign anything without reading it carefully.

Twitter is a private company now. There are no more stocks to vest, so the idea that this is to dodge vesting schedules doesn't make any sense whatsoever.

According to blind, vesting schedules are converted to cash grants on the same schedule.

So essentially there is still vesting, and no acceleration for regular employees.

Curious to hear if anyone knows otherwise.

https://www.teamblind.com/post/Twitter-Accelerated-Vesting-L...

another reason I think taking twitter private immediately was a wide choice

Yes, according to those I know at twitter this is the case.

Private companies have stocks. They are just on traded on exchange

I think you have a typo.

The technical term is stonks

I blame all typos nowadays on the sorry state of autocorrect on phones. Nine out ten “typos” from me are bad autocorrects that I missed.

Not Twitter. They all got bought on Friday by Elon. There's no way they would have time to create the necessary legal structure by Tuesday to be able to allocate shares and even to give them to employees.

Until recently I worked at a private company with a stock vesting plan.

Completely irrelevant. Twitter just got bought. There are no shares anymore and Twitter hasn't had time to go through the process to create and distribute them.

That’s true. Maybe I misread your comment, but it sounded like you were saying that the reason there cannot be stock grants is because Twitter is private. The reason that there cannot be stock grants is because Elon happens to own all the shares, not because Twitter is private.

The employees are vesting the cashed out value (at $54.20/share) of whatever stock they were vesting as of when the deal closed.

Although SpaceX apparently has vesting stock in a way that keeps the company private. Some of the text messages Elon sent that were published alluded to that.

The company just buys back the shares. It’s essentially a cash bonus.

It’s not mandatory, spacex employees can keep their shares in hope of an eventual IPO

For SpaceX? I knew the company offered to buy back the shares at regular intervals. I am disappointed to learn they are mandatory.

I didn't mean to imply that. I think you can keep the shares.

But there are limits to how many non-insider (e.g. former employees), non-accredited investors a company can have before it is required to go public. For this reason a lot of companies do try to make it mandatory and/or offer sweet deals to buy the shares back upon leaving the company.

> there are limits to how many non-insider (e.g. former employees), non-accredited investors a company can have before it is required to go public.

I thought that limit was some trivial number. I thought the much larger number (2,000 IIRC) was made up of investors who were either insiders or accredited investors.

500. Although I thought the JOBS act increased that number to 2500, but my google-fu is failing me. In any case, once you have that many shareholders on record, you HAVE to go public. This is what forced Google and Facebook to eventually go public.

Companies often get around this by not doing everything possible to prevent an employee from becoming a shareholder on record. E.g. settling option contracts for cash.

This doesn't make sense. There are certainly options and stock to vest; every pre-IPO startup employee in the world knows about the four-year vesting schedule.

It makes total sense. Twitter was just bought on Friday. All existing shares are now owned by Elon. There are no private shares of Twitter yet, and it won't be ready to distribute by Nov 1, which is Tuesday.

If you were a decent engineer, you could spend your days writing good code knowing there won't be layoffs for productive employees.

Crazy way to think about it, I guess, but if you're planning to spend your workdays maximizing your severance instead of doing your job, you deserve nothing. You deserve to be terminated and they will know that reviewing your code.

This reeks of the arrogance someone who has never gone through recession layoffs. Sometimes your division gets slashed for no reason other then your vp wasn’t slightly more persuasive. When investors want to see cuts, lots of good people end up fired for no reason other than bad luck.

Trying to time a parachute into a not super terrible market isn’t the worst idea. Plus usually the first and second round are the most generous. As belt tightening gets worse and the PR isn’t as bad expect worse benefits.

Yeah lol, it definitely has the same vibes I see from people that are like:

"Corporations aren't people, they're capitalistic entities. They don't owe you anything" while also turning around and saying "how greedy of you to act in your own self interest and not to the benefit of your company!!"

Sorry, but there's so much fat these days I don't buy the sob story.

I saw the datacenter engineers at work for Twitter, they do fck all and get a handsome reward scanning barcodes and rolling racks around

What’s your point? It’s an organizational failure for over-hiring and/or not having enough work, not the employees fault. Good for them for making the money with minimal effort.

So when the organization makes attempts to correct what amounts to a failure and cleans house the people getting a free ride should also get a handout on their way to the door?

Freeloaders have always existed, getting their position thanks to their connections and not their effort. It isn't something new and other work is being done that could be shared. A few people are working hard while a bunch of others pray on them for a paycheck. Haha, and my other post got flagged, ha, that's the pettiness in action.

If this is you, then I don't think you want to view it from the other perspective. Somebody is working really hard to get things done and a bunch of others jump in at the last minute to grab some credit, then go back to doing nothing. Or worse still, back to undermining the hardest workers out of promotions and recognition for not being "a team player"

They have everything to lose if they don't defend this attitude, but you have everything to gain if you start realizing your worth

Why do you care? And why do you focus on people who have it ok like they took it from poor people? There’s a whole layer of people who are used and abused by rich, but hey, fvck datacenter sob, how dare he not work up to your standards?

I've never been laid off but my productivity would definitely tank if I knew half of us were getting cut. I think I'm pretty good, but not above getting the axe. Which is also why I choose my teams/projects wisely because a lot of them disappear

> I'd be trying to figure out how to maximize my severance package...

How would one go about doing that? Is there a way to have influence on that?

i don't know, but quit vs fire probably makes a difference.

Quit vs fire vs layoff is the strategy of deciding to have a severance or not having one.

Fire = chance of lawsuit

Layoff = severance (to avoid the lawsuit)

Quit = neither

It's obvious which one Musk would prefer.

sometimes quitting voluntarily can give you better severance than forced layoff

How does that work? Do they make an open offer to everyone if they quit they get $x?

That can happen, but people tend to call that a voluntary layoff.

yes, though not exactly sure how is it beneficial to company, maybe then they are not obliged to follow stricter rules for mass layoffs, if they can lower the threshold of leaving people