61–70 of 383 posts
Could this be happening in this case?
I read the beginning of this page (http://www.ca-employment-lawyers.com/Wrongful-Termination.ht...) and it seems to depend highly on the contracts and employee handbook that Zynga have.
In any case, you would think that this should make hiring talents more difficult…
Sometimes you just have to sue to enforce a contract and your rights. Many employees either don't realize this or they don't have the stomach for it. If you find yourself in this position, my advice is to play the game and see it through. 1. Don't resign, don't capitulate and hire a good lawyer immediately. If you don't have the cashflow, but are defending a huge pile of stock about to IPO you'll probably find a lawy…
as an executive, do you think that zynga's executive team gave any thought to the bad press this might generate and the talent that this might scare away? From my perspective, this sort of thing scares me away from companies, because they might do it again in the future.
There's no way that this actually turns out to be a net positive for the Company. It's going to make it significantly harder to hire actual talent, it's going to cause morale decay and revolt from within the company, and it erodes Zynga's brand. Literally the only benefit here is that the execs end up with more stock when the IPO happens.
In order to determine which employees would be asked to give stock back, Pincus and his executives tried to pinpoint workers whose contributions to Zynga--in the execs' eyes--didn't necessarily justify the potential cash windfall they could receive when the company went public I'm going to take a wild stab here and guess that none of their own names were on the list they came up with. Whenever crap like this happens,…
That way the don't have to over-compensate the performers beyond what they've already promised them.
Is it just me or is tech particularly sleazy right now?
It's not tech. It's anything that can make money. People have stopped considering others and only do what they can to make money. Not that there aren't still ethical people out there, it's just that the unethical ones make it so hard to see them.
Sometimes you just have to sue to enforce a contract and your rights. Many employees either don't realize this or they don't have the stomach for it. If you find yourself in this position, my advice is to play the game and see it through. 1. Don't resign, don't capitulate and hire a good lawyer immediately. If you don't have the cashflow, but are defending a huge pile of stock about to IPO you'll probably find a lawy…
Stories like this reduce the value of stock for all companies who issue it - most with good intentions - and leave our community morally poorer. So what if a chef in an early stage team made out with $20M later - an army marches on it's stomach - he probably contributed more to delivery than some of the management team at the time.
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Somehow, that doesn’t seem like his best work as a CEO...
Not now, I would not take it, it would be an all cash deal for me after those shenanigans. Even if they don't go throw with it, they have shown their hand.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
CA law provides for at will employment but if the original option was not contingent on specific performance beyond what is needed to continue as an employee, and they are willing for the employee to continue working there provided they surrender their stock they may be in more of a gray area. It's in the nature of a targeted pay cut but it doesn't seem to involve a demotion or change in position, they are effectivel…
I would agree with the analogy if the stock compensation was payed out along the way. I think it is more akin to "we are not satisfied with your work on the contract we are taking what you have produce so far and are only going to pay you a portion of the original agreed upon amount."
Sometimes you just have to sue to enforce a contract and your rights. Many employees either don't realize this or they don't have the stomach for it. If you find yourself in this position, my advice is to play the game and see it through. 1. Don't resign, don't capitulate and hire a good lawyer immediately. If you don't have the cashflow, but are defending a huge pile of stock about to IPO you'll probably find a lawy…
It would be interesting to know the facts from someone in this situation but I also expect that such folks should not be blabbing to folks other than their lawyer.
My interpretation of the story was that they were asking for folks who had stock that was not vested which is to say part of some future vesting pool, to give that up their right to that stock. So if you gave someone 100K shares over 4 years, and they had been there 2 years, 50K was vested and 50k yet to vest, they are asking that you give back the 50k that have yet to vest.
This would be different than Skype's 'clawback' clause, and it would be slightly less onerous than canceling vested but not yet exercised options.
The article also suggests that choices were made based on some measure of value (and implied performance). I have seen folks who are doing ok work, but its not at the level that they are being compensated, that puts you in a tight spot. Few, if any, folks are open to a restructuring of their compensation package in a downward way (which is what Zynga is proposing it would seem). In California at least you simply ask them to leave (and the article suggested that the choice was 'accept this new lower compensation package, or leave, your choice.')
Frankly I think it would be less painful on the company oversall if they just laid off the folks they felt they had made the compensation error on. I don't see anything good coming out of this approach for the company, and I recognize they may think they are being compassionate by not firing people who, except for the size of their option grant, are doing ok.
Google's innovation here is something they call a 'Google Stock Unit' (GSU) (which is not an 'option' it is more like restricted stock) where the ratio of GSU to actual stock is fixed at the time it vests by a perfomance multiplier. That way they can offer a hot shot person 2500 shares of 'restricted' stock (market value of 1.25M$) which vests in four chunks of 625 'units' a year, and if you didn't meet your goal that year your multiplier could be less than 1.0 even 0. So they wouldn't actually have to give it to you if you weren't a hot shot inside of Google. To be fair the multiplier could, in theory, be greater than 1.0 too. The cleverness of that scheme is that the company could 'tune' the compensation of someone dynamically.
I'm guessing Zynga might be wishing they could do something similar for ISO type options.