231–240 of 1001 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Your barista at Starbucks is not going to increase the stock price no matter how well he fills your order But 400k barista all doing it well might.
This is not tenable. 400k people aren't going to all individually work extra hard for starbucks if their own work doesn't individually benefit them.
Employee stock options are not a new idea, obviously. If the story is "every company should offer stock options to its employees", then sure, that's often a good business plan. The reason not every company does it to all its employees is probably that for those employees, it wouldn't affect incentives much and it would make payment subject to the vagaries of the stock market. Your barista at Starbucks is not going to…
Now please use the barista argument on what house wives should be paid.
Similarly, my estimate of the value of my life (infinite) differs from how society would broadly estimate it actuarily.
Such is the nature of things.
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Thanks for writing this. Owning a place to live and couple rental properties makes one economically independent. Leaving a toxic workplace means loosing fancy car and canceling expensive vacation. Loosing job before that wealth threshold means homelessness and poverty.
> Leaving a toxic workplace means loosing fancy car and canceling expensive vacation. > Loosing job before that wealth threshold means homelessness and poverty. No, it doesn't. Maybe don't borrow money and buy a fancy car and vacations you can't afford? Buy a normal car with cash and go on normal middle-class vacations? If you work in an mid-level engineer capacity at a FAANG or Nvidia in the Bay Area you can easily…
> I can't afford rental properties or any of that
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Then maybe "taking over the market" is a bad metric, and we should be optimizing for making a company that makes the workers' lives better. The US cultural bias is showing here, as it's assumed that profit is above all else, and a company that forgoes profit to make workers happier must thus be less good. The vast majority of people in companies are workers. Let's stop optimizing for owner wealth and start optimizing…
Overoptimize on worker happiness -> underoptimize for profit -> company goes bust -> workers lose their jobs -> no worker happiness
That's a wild statement that is going to need some strong proof
Employee stock options are not a new idea, obviously. If the story is "every company should offer stock options to its employees", then sure, that's often a good business plan. The reason not every company does it to all its employees is probably that for those employees, it wouldn't affect incentives much and it would make payment subject to the vagaries of the stock market. Your barista at Starbucks is not going to…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Now please use the barista argument on what house wives should be paid.
Turns out you can't project human values into a single (monetary) dimension... Similarly, my estimate of the value of my life (infinite) differs from how society would broadly estimate it actuarily. Such is the nature of things.
Also remember Bezos and Gates had to hand over a chunk of their wealth on divorce. That didn't happen without the nature of things changing.
How about every employee instead gets money every month, and then can go out an buy shares in any company they want, their own or others?
How does that work when 60% of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck? When you're not sure if you'll manage to pay the electricity bills to keep your fridge turned on, is your first thought going to be "let's invest in the market!"?
Employee stock options are not a new idea, obviously. If the story is "every company should offer stock options to its employees", then sure, that's often a good business plan. The reason not every company does it to all its employees is probably that for those employees, it wouldn't affect incentives much and it would make payment subject to the vagaries of the stock market. Your barista at Starbucks is not going to…
Pleast don't be so naive. The reason not every company does that is that giving ownership gives power and dilutes your own, reduces the chances at doing humongus profits that can be hoarded by a minority. Business owners are not operating out of sympathy for the workers, they are operating for themselves, by design
Employee stock options are not a new idea, obviously. If the story is "every company should offer stock options to its employees", then sure, that's often a good business plan. The reason not every company does it to all its employees is probably that for those employees, it wouldn't affect incentives much and it would make payment subject to the vagaries of the stock market. Your barista at Starbucks is not going to…
This isn't about stock options or public markets. These kinds of companies are owned by the employees . You or I can not buy stock in them. This can be a much bigger incentive than regular options or the toilet paper options startups offer. Payout is over several years after you leave, so people care about the long term rather than next quarter. From your comment it seems you're not at all familiar with this model. I…
But that means employees cannot sell their stock, either. So if one of those millionaire employees retires and the company goes bankrupt one year later, the million is worthless all of a sudden.