(FORTUNE Magazine) – While CEOs manage to construct ever more artful--and lucrative--exit packages, their underlings who get the boot have a very good reason for being mad as hell at the boss. According to a survey of 3,000 discharged managers and executives by the consulting firm Challenger Gray & Christmas, median severance pay during the first quarter of this year was ten weeks--less than half what companies paid in 1999. Just what we needed: yet another reason to mourn the bursting of the bubble. --Ellen Florian