91–100 of 274 posts
This is part of the reason a cash-biased compensation package at a startup can be attractive. Effectively it places less coupling between your career path and financial success, which IMHO reduces unnecessary stress and gives you freedom to make the trade-off between these two at the time of _your convenience_, rather than some fixed number of months.
The C-level to IC comp ratio is still way too astronomical. If a VC is telling you he feels there’s a better way to comp, he has a financial interest in ensuring your loss. Do not support investor-focused comp models like backweighted vesting (Amazon) or outright fraud like a start-up giving you a stock offer with no percentage or no 409A. Employees deserve high-quality equity on par with investors. The OP’s suggesti…
Why? As an employee I'm taking on nearly 0 risk. Maybe if they are paying me poorly I can see the argument where I'm "investing" more time/work into the company that I am being paid for and that difference should be made up with equity but otherwise this seems divorced from reality.
I don't mind Golden Handcuffs. Its just one part of a companies toolbox to increase retention. If you would tell me that i get my current additional bonus as it is without splitting it up to 3 years, i would of course take it but i assume that internally they were able to form/create this type of program and the 3 years was an internal bargain chip.
Not in any way that's good for the company, though. That'd be a classic application of optimizing for the metric, not in what you really want optimized.
Usually if an employee is staying solely or mostly because of the handcuffs, they're not producing their best work, and aren't fully engaged or focused. Do you really want to keep an employee like that around? Wouldn't you rather they left, voluntarily?
On the flip side, as an employee, I like the idea of golden handcuffs. In a hypothetical situation where I didn't like where I worked, I could drop down to doing the minimal amount of work that wouldn't get me fired, and coast along while collecting the money. Sure, it's not a particularly fulfilling life, and probably wouldn't be sustainable for the long term, but maybe it's not that bad for a while.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> A union would. This claim is disputed by, like, many unions. Tenure based promotions/compensation is one, but certainly not the only approach that unions use.
Nearly every major union I've seen supports seniority-based promotions. I imagine that this is not popular with many employees, and so it cannot be a part of their initial pitch — as you said, not the only approach unions use. If established unions support seniority-based promotions but nascent ones don't publicly support them, it would follow that they must develop into supporting seniority-based promotions. This is…
There are a number of well known counterexamples, sports and acting unions/guilds for example.
> If you have evidence that unions don't support seniority-based promotions
I've yet to see any tech union advocate for this position, and they generally advocate against it. Tech Workers Coalition and the Alphabet Workers Union are the two I know of in this case.
> If established unions support seniority-based promotions but nascent ones don't publicly support them
This isn't really correct. Unions in certain fields support seniority based promotions. But on the other hand, certain professional fields support seniority based promotions without unions. Like medical and legal fields have non-union professional associations that afaik don't advocate for any sort of tenure based compensation. Despite that the most sought-after biglaw companies use a mostly-tenure based compensation process. The medical field uses an unholy combination of merit (exams and matching) and tenure (residency).
> This is possibly one of those issues where a union gets power and then takes overarching, unpopular measures
It's unclear how this could happen. Unions are democratic. The members vote on things. They generally cannot take unpopular measures[*]. It may be that there is a majority in some industries that prefer tenure based seniority.
[*]: Ok the exception here is if in a "Right-to-Work" state people refuse to join the union, but it still has a majority membership and is therefore NLRB recognized, so you have say, 51% employees in the union, and those 51% have a directional bias. For example, everyone who supports tenure based compensation is a union member, and they make up 26% of the company, and 52% or so of the union. Then they vote and win and the union contract includes this clause. The fix here, of course, is for other people who don't support this to join the union. But then they don't want to because of the idea that unions are bad and support unpopular policies.
What it seems to me this is saying is the following: - before we'd give you X options (say, 40,000) vesting over 4 years - now you get 1/4 of that, 10,000 vesting annually The strike price of both grants is the same (say, $1/option) Now the question is, what happens year 2? If the company is a lot more valuable, two things will change: - strike price will be higher (say, $3/option) which makes the options slightly le…
Precisely this. Coinbase has made it and now they want to keep employees from resting and vesting. Stripe did this too. they're just being cheap.
The C-level to IC comp ratio is still way too astronomical. If a VC is telling you he feels there’s a better way to comp, he has a financial interest in ensuring your loss. Do not support investor-focused comp models like backweighted vesting (Amazon) or outright fraud like a start-up giving you a stock offer with no percentage or no 409A. Employees deserve high-quality equity on par with investors. The OP’s suggesti…
> Employees deserve high-quality equity on par with investors Why? As an employee I'm taking on nearly 0 risk. Maybe if they are paying me poorly I can see the argument where I'm "investing" more time/work into the company that I am being paid for and that difference should be made up with equity but otherwise this seems divorced from reality.
You can argue that employees are fungible, but so is investor money, and frankly I'd rather take random money than random programmers.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Always ask for a non-diluatable percentage early on.
I imagine that that would be really hard to achieve (or manage for the company) in practice, although I'd love to see a world in which employees could essentially get pro rata rights to purchase more shares built into their employment. That'd allow them to participate more fully in the upside of companies taking off like rocket ships.
I've seen this done, for what it's worth. Both contractually and ad-hoc.
Don't do it.
The C-level to IC comp ratio is still way too astronomical. If a VC is telling you he feels there’s a better way to comp, he has a financial interest in ensuring your loss. Do not support investor-focused comp models like backweighted vesting (Amazon) or outright fraud like a start-up giving you a stock offer with no percentage or no 409A. Employees deserve high-quality equity on par with investors. The OP’s suggesti…
> Employees deserve high-quality equity on par with investors Why? As an employee I'm taking on nearly 0 risk. Maybe if they are paying me poorly I can see the argument where I'm "investing" more time/work into the company that I am being paid for and that difference should be made up with equity but otherwise this seems divorced from reality.
It's an investment by the employee. Coinbase is being cheap and it will come back to bite them. Odds are they don't care for the lifetime of the company since they're so tied to bitcoin's success.