On the "Fork in the Road" OMB thing.
This is a typical Elon playbook, and not really an Elon playbook, but something large companies do. Varies by company but usually they give you 2-8 weeks of pay per Year of Employment (YOE). Given these are Feds, a lot of them probably already have 10+ years so they'd be at 5-20+ months of pay, although usually there would be a cap of 10-12 months. So 8 months isn't really that much from that perspective, although for most people who would just get laid off with nothing it's a lot.
https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/tesla-aims-cut-400-jobs-germany-via-voluntary-programme-2024-04-23/
This method has a few benefits:
- One set of people that are going to accept are the ones who know they're the most likely to be fired, so you're naturally culling the worst of your workforce
- Another set are people near retirement, that also probably aren't doing a lot of work
- This is why they do "paid administrative leave", so that people that are ~8 months out from hitting some Social Security/Medicare cap will accept it and just retire early
- Another set are people that are unhappy in the job, which, one again, is a good set of people to get rid of
- It's voluntary, so the PR against it isn't as bad as forced mass layoffs
- It circumvents the Unions
- It has less secrecy, people generally feel fine informing their coworkers if they decided to accept, this helps the coworkers to know what's coming vs random mass layoffs
The main negative I know of is that the best of the best will look at it as a way to resign, work on their skills for 8 months, then just get a new job since they know they can get one easily. Although these are fed workers so size of that pool of people is probably much smaller than the circles I run in.
I've personally been through this type of layoff before and it was actually a very good experience, at least compared to normal layoffs. Out of the people we lost, around 80% were people that I thought were shitters vs 20% I thought were good. Less panic around "mass layoffs", more predictable, less hurt feelings, etc.
