It was four in the morning when the email arrived. More than any of the numbers, that particular detail has stayed with me. Before the coffee had even begun to brew, about 8,000 Meta employees in Singapore, Europe, and the US woke up, checked their phones out of habit, and discovered their jobs were gone. The way it is timed—staggered by time zone, sent to personal inboxes instead of work accounts, with a note telling recipients to check their spam folders—is almost clinical. Just picture that. losing your job and being informed that it may have been sent to the wrong address.
On paper, the package is not too bad. Base pay is sixteen weeks, four full months, plus an additional two weeks for each year of service. For the engineers who joined back when the company was still known as Facebook and operated on the old “move fast” energy, the fact that there is no cap is crucial. The better part of a year’s salary could be taken home by a ten-year veteran. You can understand why some of the Blind threads practically glowed with relief when you consider the reported extension of healthcare to eighteen months, which is three times longer than Meta’s previous rounds. One post merely referred to Zuckerberg as “better than Elon,” which is considered a compliment in 2026.
However, generosity is a relative term, and the analogies are reciprocal. Recently, Block, under Jack Dorsey, offered a $5,000 transition stipend and twenty weeks plus six months of medical care. In contrast, Oracle reportedly gave employees four and a half weeks annually, up to a maximum of twenty-six. Thus, Meta is in the comfortable middle, just short of the most compassionate but better than the cruelest. It’s possible that the business approached that line knowing exactly where it was.
The part that doesn’t make the headlines is what bothers me. There is a clause that states that the severance agreement is nullified if you find another position at Meta within a week of your termination date. There is no payout. Either you stay and lose the cushion, or you completely leave the building. What about the unvested RSUs? Absent. No acceleration as usual, forfeited on the way out. That’s more than just a footnote for a workforce that receives high stock compensation; it’s the actual money that leaves with them.
Observing this process gives the impression that severance has subtly evolved into a negotiation that most people are unaware they are permitted to have. Meta isn’t being generous. It involves purchasing signatures on a release of claims, and those signatures are valuable. In order to allow more stock to vest, some senior employees have allegedly pushed back the end dates. Few regular employees ever consider asking.
In the meantime, more than a thousand positions remain open, and 7,000 coworkers are being moved into new AI teams. The entire situation was presented as managing the business “more efficiently.” The redwoods that Zuckerberg planted in the rooftop garden outside the Menlo Park campus are probably still standing. It’s difficult to ignore the difference—the trees now have a permanent home. They didn’t.
