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Here’s a what if for you all this week.
If you were given a choice to layoff 1/3 of your employees (with no reduction in workload) or take 9 months severance, which would you do?
I’m pretty sure I know what I’m going to do, but will be waiting until the last possible moment to commit in case I change my mind. In my case, I could live 3-4 years on my savings (not counting the severance), but that would set back my retirement plans substantially. I’m not looking for advice, just thought this would be a good discussion topic and I’m curious how others would handle this in their own context (not in my shoes).
9 months severance. Here’s how I see it:
- layoffs - always awkward, and ticks people off; also, if they’re laying off my team, I’m probably getting axed soon anyway
- severance - basically paid vacation, I can easily find a job in that timeframe
I’m the type that would always take the fall for my team too, that’s just who I am. I wouldn’t even think twice about it or even bother running the numbers.
When I look at what they’re creating, I can see that they are trying to protect a lot of the “in” leaders and so they’re laying off too many workers and keeping too many leaders. I have no doubt they’ll have to make leadership cuts next year since they are approaching this completely backwards, so I definitely don’t see staying as “safe”.
I’m optimistic that I’ll be able to find a job quickly enough that the severance is actually a bonus, but I haven’t looked for a job in a long, long time, so I might be deluding myself. I have enough connections in the company that I could probably land something else, but the idea of taking a little break sounds nice. We just had a major reorg last year (when they should have made this change) that has been brutal to implement. We are just now getting stable from that and this is going to hit my employees hard.
When someone offers a large sack of cash to leave, I wouldn’t take it as a sign to stay. Unless your employees are super inefficient right now, keeping the same workload for 2/3 the head count sounds like being setup for failure.
The headcount reduction was the major thing for me. We’re merging 3 teams, which I expected for a long time now, but I expected more leadership cuts and fewer worker cuts. If I stay, I will have to significantly reduce the quality of work or drive my employees to burn out. I’m not very interested in either option.
Decided to play around with AI and asked it to create some outlines for a couple of story ideas I’ve had bouncing around in my head for years. Damn, they were pretty good. I may have to use this as inspiration to actually write these stories instead of waiting until I reach FIRE.
Side note: I tried asking it to do my job, and was decidedly not great. Granted I had to give it generalized instructions, but still. Fairly safe to say that AI can not replicate the domain knowledge of a human in my role just yet.
Nice! At one point I wrote a novel. I still have it, but I never did anything with it. Now between kids and work I can’t muster the wherewithal to drive these kinds of projects on my own time.
I do software development and AI tools are increasingly slipping in as an augmentation. Copilot in the IDE to suggest code (moderately useful and I’d be annoyed to lose it), pull requests with AI to provide an extra analysis or explanation of what a proposed change is doing, etc. So far it seems best suited to raising the baseline effectiveness of people rather than replacing them or raising their ceiling.
Lol just asked it how much I should have saved now if I want to retire at 40. I don’t think you should take AI’s advice when it comes to retirement…
Here’s a rough estimate to get you started: if you plan to retire at 40 and spend $30,000 per year, you’ll need to save around $180,000 by then. This is simply your annual spending multiplied by the number of years until retirement. However, this is a simplified calculation and doesn’t take into account factors like inflation, investment returns, or your desired retirement lifestyle. To get a more accurate idea of how much you need to save, you can use a retirement calculator or consult with a financial advisor.
I’ve been having a blast playing around with AI these past few months. I mostly use it to write NSFW fiction, but also for programming and web development stuff. It’s made my transition over to Linux a lot easier, having a place to ask all my dumb questions.
