In general, you should ask if you’ll be required to sign any NDA, non-compete, or non-disparagement agreements, either as part of a company handbook or as standalone documents. If so, the severance package should be commensurate with the duration and condition of those.
It is common to negotiate severance equal to your salary for the duration covered by the agreements, or at least a large fraction like 30-50% of the duration, so a competitive severance package would certainly be in the range of 4-6 months of your base salary.
You can also negotiate to have company-paid insurance benefits extend past your termination date as part of severance, to avoid needing COBRA in the US.
The severance agreement should also cover anything like a company issued laptop, etc., if you are promised you can keep it after employment ends.
To get this, they’ll likely require you to sign waivers to any additional monetary claims, and draconian IP, NDA, etc., agreements. And this is why you should force the issue of negotiating severance up front and why you should walk away from companies (like IBM) that won’t negotiate.
Otherwise, they’ll announce the restructuring or layoff and then hold you over a barrel, by claiming you have to honor their company policy non-compete anyway, and pressure you to sign restrictive documents at your HR exit meeting, generally offering some insultingly low severance benefit, like only a few weeks or months of pay and no continuation of benefits.
All of this advice is specifically for junior-level employees as well. Never let anyone treat you like you cannot negotiate severance just because you’re a junior employee. Walk away from those companies.
For experienced employees, the amount of severance should absolutely be at least 6 months of pay and continued company-paid health coverage, and in many cases you can negotiate for it to fully match the duration of the non-compete or NDAs, usually 12 months.
Above all, don’t accept any baloney nonsense about “standard policies” restricting severance to a small number of weeks of pay per each year of tenure, or any of that garbage.
That’s just the standard line they feed to people who don’t negotiate. And if a company refuses to be flexible on it, walk away.
