She reported not being particularly high paid compared to her peers. When she was hired Facebook didn't care at all about her area (government relations).

As that became more important her role grew but she was never really promoted.

She also was not well informed about how tech compensation works and negotiated poorly (no stock) she came from an NGO background in New Zealand.

Her salary was probably quite a bit more than the average American but she was living in expensive areas (DC and SV) and interacting with extremely wealthy people. At one point Sheryl Sandburg got annoyed that she was leaving work for childcare and told her to hire a live-in nanny. She was living paycheck-to-paycheck on a high income with no wealth accumulation (many such cases).

COBRA means you pay the full cost of the insurance. So suddenly instead of paying $150 you are now seeing a $500 or more bill, especially if your employer is a major company that pays for all sorts of benefits. COBRA is a joke when you consider you just lost all source of income.

From the article it sounds like it was a condition of a severance package.

6 months of senior executive wages is nothing to sneeze at.

But then Facebook would have had no incentive to offer the agreement to her. And she must have been very happy with what she got in the deal, given she gave up the option of talking about all the apparently horrible misdeeds she witnessed while they were still fresh, rather than a decade later.

Then she would get no money either.

She had world-class health insurance. You build up savings. You collect unemployment. Your spouse continues working. These are all things to help you.

She wasn't homeless, on the street, alone, without skills or education, where she had no choice. Let's keep things in perspective here.

So yes, it is absolutely voluntarily to sign something like that. Otherwise, what does taking responsibility for your actions even mean?

They are using the same kind of exit NDA used to coerce OpenAI employees who left that organization. We should all be afraid for ourselves as these organizations turn into black boxes where the only people who could speak out feel they cannot. This thing where you stop working for a company but they can still penalize you financially if they don’t like your annual “post-employee performance” evaluations is Kafka-esque.

https://www.reuters.com/technology/openai-whistleblowers-ask...

Just to clarify, OpenAI did change their agreement (to some degree) after the SEC put pressure on them. In Facebook’s case the SEC has been notably silent despite the calls from US senators (AFAICT).

Facebook execs need safety nets now?

I am all for safety nets, and I actually live in a country with stronger safety nets than the USA, but I still don’t feel sorry for the author who basically has had every card to be extremely wealthy and squandered it.

Also realize that it isn’t private companies job to fix the broken social system in the USA, usually separation agreements for high paid employees offer severance well above and beyond the legal requirements (I have seen 3 months to a year including accelerated vesting in some cases), and a condition of accepting those benefits above and beyond the laws is you don’t disparage your employer. If you don’t accept the agreement you get the bare minimum according to the laws but you are then not bound to the disparage clauses.

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