upvote
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).

reply
Not in tech. Larger severance packages are common.

Going forward, I wonder if severance packages should be a point of competitive recruiting advantage

reply
> but harder to get a job as well.

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.

reply
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.

reply
How can humans stand out to companies like yours?

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?

reply
I dealt with this exact problem in my last hiring phase too and used this technique to screen them out earlier: https://thomshutt.com/2026/03/24/interviewing-in-the-age-of-...
reply
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
reply
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.

reply
Very regional as well, Eastern europe is supposedly doing well, western europe (UK/NL) is doing alright, north america seems significantly worse
reply
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.
reply
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

reply
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.
reply
I wtedy przynajmniej babcia będzie szczęśliwa pilnować dzieci.
reply
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.
reply
Yes Poland in particular is booming. It’s an outsource destination that’s higher skill and less risk than India.
reply