THE MONTY HALL DILEMA

Monty (GSK) has offered you one of three doors. You get to take home the prize behind the door. The prizes behind the doors in no particular order are:

Door #: Voluntary severance

Door#: Involuntary severance

Door#: Keep your current job at least through the end of this year

Monty (GSK) has opened Door # 1 to reveal the voluntary severance package. For those of you qualified this is a sure thing. For everyone else there are two doors left, neither of which you get to choose; Monty (GSK) will pick the next door for you!

However, Monty (GSK) reminds you that there is still another door and behind that door is your choice to quit.

What will you do???

I don't work for GSK and never have, but my spouse does. I know a couple of things from my world that may enhance your awareness of the probabilities. I truly hope it helps someone:
Door A. Voluntary severance with retirement. Predictable, if you meet the requirements

Door B. Voluntary severance without retirement. Predictable, but no retired medical and maybe a couple of other benefits.

Door C. Involuntary severance with retirement. You pull the trigger but unpredictable because GSK has no intention of people knowing the picture before you must accept the voluntary. For some reason they think it is in their best interest to get as many to sign up as possible as soon as possible. I called an HR VP in Raleigh I know and he has heard nothing about the package because he said GSK HR have always isolated themselves from the other HR professionals in the region. He said when he did his layoffs he did it the exact same way, except he told them involuntary would not be as good. For those who think they know the involuntary severance, what is it and what evidence do you have?

Door D. Involuntary severance without retirement. This is a workforce reduction of enough scale that it is apparent the ruling has been made that it will be 60 days from the day of declaration. If the rule of thumb is one month needed to find a job for every 10k of compensation and an industry tradition is 2 weeks for every year of service, you can get an idea. Assume there will be a continuation of benefits component, but who knows how much? Again, For those who think they know the involuntary severance, what evidence do you have?

Door E. Roll the dice for whatever reason. If you don't have the numbers, you are here by default. That's the bad news. The good news is you can assume that GSK will provide legislated fairness to those who are impacted. No heart, no soul, no caring, just an amount that is the least payout per person under the circumstances. I doubt there are any special deals out there for those who are impacted. But how much?

There is a lot of speculation out there attributed to "leaders" that is inconsistent. Lord knows I have already heard enough to convince me nobody knows, but somebody does. I would go with the idea that, unless it is in writing, it is not true. Why? Because anyone in the know has most likely been threatened with keeping to himself. Do some people in the know talk anyway? Sure, but do you really know who they are?

I don't believe for a minute that being on PIP is anything but a big strike against you. I may be wrong, but my 25 years of HR experience won't let me see anything positive about being in the "bottom 20%", no matter how much BS there is around how they came up with it. That's why they have lawyer weenies, I guess, because no HR person is smart or cunning enough to defend it.

Do you have an advocate? I read that the tradition is managers always have a couple of "wild cards" in their pockets. I believe that, but in this big a layoff, we are suggesting that nearly all jobs would be filled with wild cards. Do you believe that? Would your advocate play a card for you. Take a risk for you?

So what is the net/net? A wise person wrote, "The Dream Job is doing the work you love, where you love, with the people you love, on purpose." If you are working every day miserable because you have on a pair of golden handcuffs, could this be the chance to break away? If you are so overcompensated that you must do whatever it takes to stay on, don't be surprised when that finally catches up with you. It happened to me at various times (sure as hell not today, btw).

And why would I write this today. My spouse is looking into the eyes of the tiger, too. Has options but doesn't know what to do. I wrote this for my reasons because I can give advice, but at the end of the day, it is my spouse's decision. Part of a team, but empathy is not the same as walking in one's shoes. I hope this helps someone....it did me.

For those who are statistically inclined, not all probabilities are created equal. See below.

Monty Hall problem
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In search of a new car, the player picks a door, say 1. The game host then opens one of the other doors, say 3, to reveal a goat and offers to let the player pick door 2 instead of door 1.The Monty Hall problem is a probability puzzle based on the American television game show Let's Make a Deal. The name comes from the show's host, Monty Hall. The problem is also called the Monty Hall paradox, as it is a veridical paradox in that the result appears absurd but is demonstrably true.

A well-known statement of the problem was published in Parade magazine:

Suppose you're on a game show, and you're given the choice of three doors: Behind one door is a car; behind the others, goats. You pick a door, say No. 1, and the host, who knows what's behind the doors, opens another door, say No. 3, which has a goat. He then says to you, "Do you want to pick door No. 2?" Is it to your advantage to switch your choice? (Whitaker 1990)
As the player cannot be certain which of the two remaining unopened doors is the winning door, most people assume that each of these doors has an equal probability and conclude that switching does not matter. In fact, in the usual interpretation of the problem the player should switch—doing so doubles the probability of winning the car, from 1/3 to 2/3.

When the above statement of the problem and the solution appeared in Parade, approximately 10,000 readers, including nearly 1,000 with PhDs, wrote to the magazine claiming the published solution was wrong. Some critics pointed out that the Parade version of the problem leaves certain aspects of the host's behavior unstated, for example, whether the host must open a door and must make the offer to switch. However, such possible behaviors had little or nothing to do with the controversy that arose (vos Savant 1990), and the intended behavior was clearly implied by the author (Seymann 1991). More general interpretations of the problem in which, for example, the host may sometimes reveal the car, have been discussed in mathematical literature.

The Monty Hall problem, in one of its common formulations, is mathematically equivalent to the earlier Three Prisoners problem, and both bear some similarity to the much older Bertrand's box paradox. These and other problems involving unequal distributions of probability are notoriously difficult for people to solve correctly, and have led to numerous psychological studies that address how the problems are perceived. Even when given a completely