In the silver league of US tech, which is broader than most people seem to think, the standard severance pay is a nice cool 0. Usually the only conversation is about all the agreements they try to convince you that you have to sign for no compensation as they’re escorting you out the door.

What does "silver league" mean in this context? Can you give examples?

Is silver like "second place" or like "middle-aged" companies?

In my social circles we roughly categorize the tech industry into faang, gold tier, silver tier, and wood tier.

Faangs are obvious, good tier is up and coming businesses who pay and act like faangs. Examples are brex, stripe, Uber(at least back in the day, no idea what they’ve been up to the past year.

Silver tier are the places that still pay well above average jobs but don’t go into the mega compensation and suffer a talent drought as a result. Places where they’re paying 120k total comp for a senior engineer and won’t part with any equity because the leadership can’t emotionally handle the investment needed to compete for engineering talent for reasons that I could go on for hours about.

Wood tier are the companies that need tech but still try to pay <80k because they’d never pay high wages to any employee or still think they don’t need software and end up with some real shit engineering

I would wager that most companies in the US give NO severance. You get unemployment benefits, I guess.

> You get unemployment benefits, I guess.

Depending on the political environment of the state one is in. It could be capped at a useless amount, or the unemployment department minimally staffed. I know someone in NJ that has a pending status for 2 years with no response or ability to contact the state, and they have 8 years of W-2 showing they paid unemployment insurance.

Odd, NJ is usually pretty good with that stuff. Special situation, maybe?

No, you can see tons of Reddit posts about people not being able to speak to anyone at NJ unemployment. You can try calling at anytime of day and the machine will say (after 130 seconds of automated prompts) that all agents are too busy and to call back the next business day.

In the event you do get through, you reach a line level agent, and they say a supervisor has to look at the case, and to wait 6 to 8 weeks before calling back. That’s it, nothing else.

I assume many people just give up.

This is true in my experience

WARN Act requires 60 days (8-9 weeks) notice or 60 days on payroll if they walk you out the day of.

How does this work at companies that are very distributed geographically? The WARN act talks about "mass layoff affecting 50 or more employees at a single site of employment."

I'm genuinely asking this question - I'm not trying to be a smart ass.

I worked at a tech company (~3500 worldwide) that had an office in almost every major US city area (e.g. Bay Area, NYC, Boston, Chicago, Seattle, and a bunch of Tier 2 cities as well (Atlanta, Raleigh, Houston, etc), and remote workers (e.g. sales) as well.

They had a big layoff and in theory they could laid off 500/15% people worldwide without laying off 50 people at each site. Would that still trigger the WARN act?