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Some places stipulates that if you return within some number of months after being laid off, you forfeit a prorated amount of your severance. This may make returning to the same company significantly less attractive.

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Yeah, this happened to me (late 2021): was laid off, had at least one Sr. Director in an adjacent silo spinning up the process of lateral'ing me into his org, but HR confirmed that I would have to pro-rata repay severance should I resume FTE during the severance-paid interval (in my case, 6 months). I wasn't surprised as the last thing HR and bean counters want is to let an employee "double-dip", but assuming the interest of the Sr. Dir. in my case was genuine, it's a classic case of myopia on their part: it seems pretty likely that when a layoff is being planned, that there is nothing resembling pro sports' "waiver wire" where a list of all the employees initially chosen for layoff is circulated amongst all of management to see if other orgs want to (offer to) "claim" any of them (they presumably don't do this for secrecy reasons). I took the severance and didn't look back; their decision and process, their loss.

Yeah, screw that. If someone laid me off then wanted me back they'd pay for the stress of the layoff in addition to the salary of the new job.

This is why people hate HR.

Will this count if you're returning to work for a contractor, which is reselling your time back to your former employer?

.. it's almost as if auctioning off our collective talent to the highest bidder to build their machines of dominance and then getting kicked out of that bubble back into the world that now isn't allowed to hold their own opinions was a bad idea after all ..

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