Severance choke

[worker201]

Microsoft, even though they are rolling in cash, felt it necessary to jump on the recession bandwagon.  So they decided to lay off 5000 employees, about 5% of their total workforce.  This is the first time MS has ever done mass layoffs, so of course they fucked it up.  They accidentally sent too much severance pay to some workers (like $5000 extra), and not enough to some others.  There has been speculation that this was an Excel spreadsheet error - that's fucking classy.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/29353191/

Fortunately, MS has decided to eat the losses, and pay out the short-changed.

[davidnix71]

$5k for severance is a joke. When the company I worked for went under 5 years ago I had more than that in sick leave payout.

We were also given a choice between severance based on service time or a job (whatever was available) with a sister company.

I choose the job, but still got paid out for the unused sick leave because the sister company had a different paid time off plan.
The severance would have been an additional 3 months pay, plus the state would pay to send me to school to learn a new trade if
I wanted that.

My finances were marginal then, so I just kept working.

Things aren't too good now at the new company, the salaried office staff are putting in 'free' time doing what would have been done by
temps in better times. No overtime, No temps No outsourcing, until things turn around.

[worker201]

I don't think anyone received $5000 severance.  But what they received was up to $5000 more than what they were supposed to.

That being said, not everybody at Microsoft is a world-class programmer or a marketing genius.  Some of the lower-end marketing/sales people probably weren't making much more than $35K.  Most likely, their severance was way less than 2-3 months salary + unused time off.  So +/- $5000 would have been a huge deal to them.