The worst case scenario is not taking the offer then getting let go for performance, which means zero severance, health insurance terminated same day. This has been happening at Microsoft for the last few years, sometimes in large waves. Many of these people were not egregious non-performers, just people who had been marked as not quite meeting expectations, and thought they had another chance.
The worst case scenario is not taking the offer then getting let go for performance, which means zero severance, health insurance terminated same day.
That's generally not legal in the U.S. or most of the EU. The company would have to establish a very significant paper trail to establish that these individual "performance-based" layoffs were not part of a layoff subject to WARN regulations (or their European equivalents which are even stricter). The hurdle is so large that no company has successfully pulled off such a feat, and many of the companies that tried ended up paying significantly more in penalties to their local Depts of Labor than they would have saved with this stunt.
I don't really know the legality of it, but I can tell you that last year around April there was quite a big wave of sudden performance terminations within Microsoft and these people did not get severance. I know because I was a manager of one of these people and had to deliver the news. I know that many of these people had had a below 100 rating on their previous performance review, but we were unaware at the time that this meant a death sentence for these employees several months later when we got the email a few days in advance of the termination. It was hundreds, if not thousands of affected people.