🪤 The Three Strategies
When a company has decided it wants you gone but doesn't want to pay for it, there are three plays. Understanding them — and the cost asymmetry between them — is your entire defense.
The plays
| Aging-out | RIF | Trip-wire | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Mechanism | Make conditions unpleasant enough that you quit | Lay you off as "redundant" during integration or restructure | Manufacture a for-cause termination via new burdens |
| What they want you to do | Quit voluntarily | Sign the release agreement quietly | Miss a meeting, training, or deadline |
| Cost to them if it works | $0 — no severance, no WARN, no legal exposure | Severance + WARN obligations + ADEA exposure | $0 — no severance, often disqualifies you from unemployment |
| Cost to them if it fails | They keep paying you | They have to negotiate or face claims | They have to pivot to RIF (the expensive path) |
| Signals to watch | No manager, no investment, social shunning, exclusion from planning | "Integration," "consolidation," "focus" language; reorg announcements | New required meetings, new trainings, new status reports, new performance check-ins |
| Defense | Don't quit. Stay on payroll. Collect. The strategy fails. | Don't sign without a lawyer. Negotiate severance up, preserve claims, build the class case if multiple peers are affected. | Don't miss anything. Hit every gate. Document the addition of each new requirement; screenshot attendance. |
The company will run all three at once and hope one lands. The defense is comprehensive: you stay, you attend everything, and when the RIF finally comes you don't sign without legal review.
The lever
The cost asymmetry is the lever.
Aging-out and trip-wires cost the company nothing if they work. RIF costs them severance and legal exposure. By denying them the cheap exits, you force them to choose the expensive one — or keep paying you indefinitely. Either outcome is better for you than what they want.
Most of the pressure you feel during one of these campaigns is meant to feel personal, because that's how they get you to act against your own interest. Read it as cost engineering instead. The unpleasant manager, the suddenly mandatory standup, the cold shoulder from people who used to be friendly — these are not feedback about you. They are line items in a strategy that loses its leverage the moment you refuse to treat them as feedback.
The rule
Stay. Attend. Document. Don't sign anything alone.
The whole apparatus is built around the assumption that you will help it succeed. Decline.