Just heard from a friend at QCOM who says that they are offering some people a choice of two options:
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Take a package and leave the company. Since this is voluntary, it would count as a voluntary quit, not a layoff.
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Perform a task for a period of time (say a month) and get reviewed. If your score is under a certain threshold, then you get terminated with cause.
If this is really happening, it means that management is sleazy and is trying to do several things. One, to hide the true number of layoffs by encouraging people to voluntarily quit. Two, to avoid paying higher taxes to the California EDD by making people who do leave ineligible for unemployment insurance. They're trying to do it by making people fear being terminated with cause, because as everyone knows, the rating system is a sham. If the company wants you to get a poor score, there's little oversight and no legal protection even if you did an exemplary job. And they seem to be betting that few people will take option 3, which is to get terminated with cause and sue the bastards for wrongful termination (I'm guessing that they'd probably offer you a package at that point).
Can anyone confirm that this is true?