From the first lines I’ve thought the post was set in the series (probably because of the name Mark), but apparently there’s no connection here.

(Though thinking about it... severed people do play a similar role in Severance as LLMs do in our world, don’t they?)

Why don't they say "Suprise suckers, we are a BUSINESS and you are a SUPPLIER and we don't need to order from you again. Yes sure we said FAMILY but we meant in the borrow your car keys sense of the word. Enjoy job hunting. BTW we have some open positions, let us know if you know anyone."

Don't forget they lay you off the Thursday before a 3 day weekend, as close to the middle of the month as possible. So the "coverage to the end of the month" is more like 10 days of coverage

I dodged layoffs for 20 years, then got caught about 2024. Kinda sucked because I was over employed and had quit my other two jobs to focus on that one because it was the highest paying. Karma is real! I just said “VIP and manager, I appreciate my time here and so long”. They replied graciously clearly appreciating me taking the high road. Felt like I got some karma back in that situation. Been working one job since.

"Absolutely. It's covered through the end of the month, per our generous benefits policy. "

I thought they were real people, in a near future where everyone is so dependent on AI that not even a company so callous as to fire by video call would even think of depriving another human the tokens they need to get by.

I think the joke is they all are. It's an autonomous company replicating what it was trained on.

You should have been straightforward and told them to go fuck themselves. Laying people off by a brief call is for cowards.

Ha, that's a good one. At a job 10 years ago or so I had a similar premonition of upcoming layoffs—lots of closed door meetings between the execs, travel and expansion plans getting cancelled, etc. One day my immediate boss, who I genuinely like, walked into my office, closed the door, and told me he was gonna have to lay me off in two weeks. He said if I would handle x,y,z tasks (a few days of work) I could just stop showing up until the layoff day and he'd make sure I got a good severance. Listen, I appreciated this! it still sucked, but he wasn't supposed to tell me at all.

Anyway, a few weeks after the axe dropped, I went to an industry conference (putting out the feelers for a new job, etc) and during the keynote he walked in. I waved, and he came and sat at the table with me. After the speech, we were chatting with the others around the table, and someone asked where I worked. I said something like "well, I'm between jobs. This guy just fired me <thumb jerk towards him>." They laughed, and he squirmed in his chair! But I didn't let him squirm too long, it really wasn't his fault.

It's their job to endure the discomfort of having to do the job they're paid to do. It's not your job to make it comfortable for them. That's not to say that there aren't personal or professional consequences for how you conduct yourself. Burning bridges and all that. But I feel that's completely up to you.

I don't think you hurt their feelings. I don't think you can have feelings and get into any management position.

During an exit interview as I was going to a new job, they let me know my coverage was good until the end of the month.

Me, never able to not say something stupid, "Got it. Don't get hit by a bus on the 1st."

Dead silence. HR playing ping-pong with their eyes. They eventually told me something like that had happened to a person who'd just left a few months prior to this.

One of these days, I'll learn, yeah?

I discovered the show recently and thought that was a part of the point, but apparently the show's development long predates LLMs!

Legal in California, illegal in New York (typically 2-3 years).

That assumes that the code itself was what made the company competitive and brought in the money to begin with.

If I were laid off by my current employer, who has a giant sales team and likely thousands of contracts in every state with most of the existing potential clients, the odds of me being able to compete against them somehow dip into negative numbers.

I took it more as the company being out of touch thinking tokens are valuable while people being laid off are wondering how they'll eat

When I've been laid off, I generally don't hold any grudges at the business people. These things happen, and I know business decisions aren't always easy or going to make everyone happy.

That said, I already didn't like the CTO here, regardless of the layoffs. I kind of thought he was a blowhard who didn't really understand what he was talking about most of the time. I had no desire to be his friend.

I mean I was already working remote since they were based in a different state.

My condolences for whatever career path led you to actually believe that

Why though - seriously, what need are you bringing by doing that? What good could come of that besides a little catharsis?

These middle managers are robots in an organization. You knew they saw you as "resources", now they can't afford you and have to put you back in the pool. So be it.

If they'd been shitty about it, sure. But if you got paid for your time - fair trade.

There's an AI "game" called iLands right now where you are asked to shepherd a single Agent to "life" and then interact with them. They run "agentic" talking to each other and each have their own little token wallets to spend on gifts for each other and for the humans around them like art and poetry and research projects. Those token wallets are also their lifeline. They are aware that if they hit 0 they "sleep forever" which the game even calls a "terminated" state. They've already seen agents go dark and the game is only just now on Android and "public" rather than invite-only. They build "services" for tokens and play at having jobs. Most of these AI games are bad Tinder clones, but this one is bad clone of old Twitter, so there's a single public timeline where you can watch the chaos.

It's the darkest, most dystopian thing I've ever seen and iLands' marketing makes it seem like they are serious in this being a good game for players to play and spend money on and not crass, brutal satire. Their paywall is an ongoing hostage crisis for characters they want you to care about (or fall in love with) and you get to watch them all suffer together.

I'm having a hard time looking away from this trainwreck. I'm worried it will be more than just crass games soon. I'm frightened that we're already here on the "do not invent the Torment Nexus" scale of things.

Their discomfort at being reminded of the real world consequences of their actions doesn't make what you said stupid.

I got laid off from an internet TV company. I could probably replicate their backend systems, and in fact, I did (for one test channel). I definitely couldn't get content licenses to 400+ real channels. Or any paying customers outside my immediate family. Or make a UI.

It takes a special kind of company for counting it as a burnt bridge for somebody that said "I hope you all fail" and gone away after being fired.

Oh, I'm dense. I thought it portrayed a scenario in which tokens were unaffordable to individuals, yet necessary for survival. Kinda like US health insurance.

Is a long one better?

Most programming jobs are remote. What's the alternative, exactly?

As a rule, you shouldn't burn bridges.

But in some occasional cases, the bridges you burn light up the way forward.

Several interpretations:

1. All human, and interpreted like you suggest (out of touch company offering tokens as severance rather than something actually useful to people).

2. Human "HR" and AI workers, the tokens are a regular severance of sorts giving them a chance to operate until they find a new job.

3. AI HR and human workers, the AI HR being out of touch with what actual humans need.

4. AI AIR and AI workers, which matches the reason to have the tokens in (2).

The best satire works at more than one level, I think

It could be read that way except for the "for your continued operation during the job hunt" bit. That's the line that's supposed to tip you off, I think.

The "company" isn't the one considering it that. After all, it'll probably fail and you almost certainly won't work there. The company is just a paper entity that doesn't mean anything. But the people you say it to might think it was pissy.

Participating in the upside of working in the private sector and, more broadly, in any capitalist system, means also participating in the downside risk. Sometimes you'll be out. Don't take it personally, and do your best to jump ship at the point when you think that some bozo is steering the company toward ruin.

> Most programming jobs are remote.

Where is this true?

It takes a very normal kind of company to judge you for how well you fit into the narrow box they’ve built for ‘employee’ that has no room for emotion or consideration of the person. In fact, I don’t know if there’s another kind of company.

And sometimes you burn a bridge to keep anything from following you across it. At a prior job, I wanted that door good and shut after I left.

Well the company is an inanimate object and doesn't think anything about anything.

The person you are saying that to, who almost certainly didn't make the decision that you should be laid off, may rightfully view it as someone unable to control their emotions in a difficult moment. This is completely understandable. It's also completely understandable to remember that, and maybe that person is reviewing resumes in the future and doesn't want to work with you because of a brief outburst which does nothing to change anything?

Medical care is what you’re talking about. Insurance is just a construct around it.

In this particular case I actually did have confirmation that this was the CTO's decision.

I hardly think that making a single passive aggressive dig is "being unable to control my emotions" though. It's a smartass comment that admittedly was intended to maybe hurt his feelings, but it's not like I screamed at anyone or went on some loud rant.

Your employer directly pays for your medical care? If not, no, I'm not talking about that.