> 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?
Nope it isn’t. I did it as a joke initially (I also had a version where every 2 stories there was a meeting and if a someone underperformed it would get fired).
I think there are multiple reasons why it actually works so well:
- I built a system where context (+ the current state + goal) is properly structured and coding agents only get the information they actually need and nothing more. You wouldn’t let your product manager develop your backend and I gave the backend dev only do the things it is supposed to and nothing more. If an agent crashes (or quota limits are reached), the agents can continue exactly where the other agents left off.
- Agents are ”fighting against” each other to some extend? The Architect tries to design while the CAB tries to reject.
- Granular control. I wouldn’t call “the manager” _a deterministic state machine that is calling probabilistic functions_ but that’s to some extent what it is? The manager has clearly defined tasks (like “if file is in 01_design —> Call Architect)
Here’s one example of an agent log after a feature has been implemented from one of the older codebases:
https://pastebin.com/7ySJL5Rg
What OpenCode primitive did you use to implement this? I'd quite like a "senior" Opus agent that lays out a plan, a "junior" Sonnet that does the work, and a senior Opus reviewer to check that it agrees with the plan.
You can define the tools that agents are allowed to use in the opencode.json (also works for MCP tools I think).
Here’s my config: https://pastebin.com/PkaYAfsn
The models can call each other if you reference them using @username.
This is excellent, thank you. I came up with half of this while waiting for this reply, but the extra pointers about mentioning with @ and the {file} syntax really helps, thanks again!
> [...]coding agents only get the information they actually need and nothing more
Extrapolating from this concept led me to a hot-take I haven't had time to blog about: Agentic AI will revive the popularity of microservices. Mostly due to the deleterious effect of context size on agent performance.
Why would they revive the popularity of microservices? They can just as well be used to enforce strict module boundaries within a modular monolith keeping the codebase coherent without splitting off microservices.
And that's why they call it a hot take. No, it isn't going to give rise to microservices. You absolutely can have your agent perform high-level decomposition while maintaining a monolith. A well-written, composable spec is awesome. This has been true for human and AI coders for a very, very long time. The hat trick has always been getting a well-written, composable spec. AI can help with that bit, and I find that is probably the best part of this whole tooling cycle. I can actually interact with an AI to build that spec iteratively. Have it be nice and mean. Have it iterate among many instances and other models, all that fun stuff. It still won't make your idea awesome or make anyone want to spend money on it, though.
In a fresh project that is well documented and set up it might work better. Many issues that Agents have in my work is that the endpoints are not always documented correctly.
Real example that happened to me, Agent forgets to rename an expected parameter in API spec for service 1. Now when working on service 2, there is no other way of finding this mistake for the Agent than to give it access to service 1. And now you are back to "... effect of context size on agent performance ...". For context, we might have ~100 services.
One could argue these issues reduce over time as instruction files are updated etc but that also assumes the models follow instructions and don't hallucinate.
That being said, I do use Agents quite successfully now - but I have to guide them a bit more than some care to admit.
> In a fresh project that is well documented and set up it might work better.
I guess this may be dependent on domain, language, codebase, or soke combination of the 3. The biggest issues I've had with agents is when they go down the wrong path and it snowballs from there. Suddenly they are loading more context unrelated to the tasks and getting more confused. Documenting interfaces doesn't help if the source is available to the agent.
My agentic sweet spot is human-designed interfaces. Agents cannot mess up code they don't have access to, e.g. by inadvertently changing the interface contract and the implementation.
> Agent forgets to rename an expected parameter in API spec for service 1
Document and test your interfaces/logic boundaries! I have witnessed this break many times with human teams with field renames, change in optionality, undocumented field dependencies, etc, there are challenging trade-offs with API versioning. Agents can't fix process issues.
Isn't all this a manual implementation of prompt routing, and, to a lesser extent, Mixture of Experts?
These tools and services are already expected to do the best job for specific prompts. The work you're doing pretty much proves that they don't, while also throwing much more money at them.
How much longer are users going to have to manually manage LLM context to get the most out of these tools? Why is this still a problem ~5 years into this tech?
I'm confused when you say you have a manager, scrum master, archetech, all supposdely sharing the same memory, do each of those "employees" "know" what they are? And if so, based on what are their identities defined? Prompts? Or something more. Or am I just too dumb to understand / swimming against the current here. Either way, it sounds amazing!
It's not satire but I see where you're coming from.
Applying distributed human team concepts to a porting task squeezes extra performance from LLMs much further up the diminishing returns curve. That matters because porting projects are actually well-suited for autonomous agents: existing code provides context, objective criteria catch more LLM-grade bugs than greenfield work, and established unit tests offer clear targets.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that the setup seems absurd because it is. Though it also carries real utility for this specific use case. Apply the same approach to running a startup or writing a paid service from scratch and you'd get very different results.
I don't know about something this complex, but right this moment I have something similar running in Claude Code in another window, and it is very helpful even with a much simpler setup:
If you have these agents do everything at the "top level" they lose track. The moment you introduce sub-agents, you can have the top level run in a tight loop of "tell agent X to do the next task; tell agent Y to review the work; repeat" or similar (add as many agents as makes sense), and it will take a long time to fill up the context. The agents get fresh context, and you get to manage explicitly what information is allowed to flow between them. It also tends to mean it is a lot easier to introduce quality gates - eg. your testing agent and your code review agent etc. will not decide they can skip testing because they "know" they implemented things correctly, because there is no memory of that in their context.
Humans seem to be similar. If a real product designer would dive into all the technical details and code of a product, he would likely forget at least some of the vision behind what the product is actually supposed to be.
I mean no offence to anyone but whenever new tech progresses rapidly it usually catches most unaware, who tend to ridicule or feel the concepts are sourced from it.
ai is actually useful tho. idk about this level of abstraction but the more basic delegation to one little guy in the terminal gives me a lot of extra time
I think many people really like the gamification and complex role playing. That is how GitHub got popular, that is how Rube Goldberg agent/swarm/cult setups get popular.
It attracts the gamers and LARPers. Unfortunately, management is on their side until they find out after four years or so that it is all a scam.
I've heard some people say that "vibe coding" with chatbots is like slot machines, you just keep "propmting" until you hit the jackpot. And there was some earlier study that people _felt_ more productive even if they weren't (caveat that this was with older models), which aligns with the sort of time-dilation people feel when gambling.
I guess "agentic swarms" are the next evolution of the meta-game, the perfect nerd-sniping strategy. Now you can spend all your time minmaxing your team, balancing strengths/weaknesses by tweaking subagents, adding more verifiers and project managers. Maybe there's some psychological draw, that people can feel like gods and have a taste of the power execs feel, even though that power is ultimately a simulacra as well.
Extending this -- unlike real slot machines, there is no definite state of won or not for the person prompting, only if they've been convinced they've won, and that comes
down to how much you're willing to verify the code it has provided, or better, fully test it (which no one wants to do), versus the reality where they do a little light testing and say it's good enough and move on.
Recently fixed a problem over a few days, and found that it was duplicated though differently enough that I asked my coworker to try fixing it with an LLM (he was the originator of the duplicated code, and I didn't want to mess up what was mostly functioning code). Using an LLM, he seemingly did in 1 hour what took me maybe a day or two of tinkering and fixing. After we hop off the call, I do a code read to make sure I understand it fully, and immediately see an issue and test it further only to find out.. it did not in fact fix it, and suffered from the same problems, but it convincingly LOOKED like it fixed it. He was ecstatic at the time-saved while presenting it, and afterwards, alone, all I could think about was how our business users were going to be really unhappy being gaslit into thinking it was fixed because literally every tester I've ever met would definitely have missed it without understanding the code.
People are overjoyed with good enough, and I'm starting to think maybe I'm the problem when it comes to progress? It just gives me Big Short vibes -- why am I drawing attention to this obvious issue in quality, I'm just the guy in the casino screaming "does no one else see the obvious problem with shipping this?" And then I start to understand, yes I am the problem: people have been selling eachother dog water product for millenia because at the end of the day, Edison is the person people remember, not the guy who came after that made it near perfect or hammered out all the issues. Good enough takes its place in history, not perfection. The trick others have found out is they just need to get to the point that they've secured the money and have time to get away before the customer realizes the world of hurt they've paid for.
If this is all that's blocking you (not the fact that they don't want your business), you might have a friend who's been playing the T-Mobile free phone number game. I know some people with 4+ phone numbers they don't need/use, simply because they were free (one-time activation with old byod or taxes-only free phone).
I've considered asking to borrow a number to verify with Discord so they don't actually have my phone number, but decided I'd rather just be unverified.
The announcement reads as pretty heartless to me, but this is a very, very nice departure package
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