> stock options did become nearly universal in tech compensation

Although I've noticed that options have been replaced more and more these days with RSU's (plain old grants) because options have a tendency to go "underwater", suggesting that they weren't all that great to begin with.

▲

zozbot234 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Right, options go underwater precisely when the company is not doing well and you are at greatest risk of losing the job. That's not a great risk profile.

▲

JumpCrisscross 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> options have been replaced more and more these days with RSU's (plain old grants)

RSUs are also much-less liquid and tightly controllable by companies than actual stock. That has made them attractive to management and insiders.

▲

bluGill 3 hours ago | parent [-]

I learned long ago (when my company decided they couldn't give me options because we were too big so they did these "I can't believe it isn't an option", which expired worthless): until cash is in my bank account it is just a promise waiting to be broken. If I want to invest I want it my choice.

In any case, it is a bad idea to invest in the company you work for - unless you are high enough up in the company that you see the real books, or you have so much invested they have to show you as a large shareholder. (nobody is the later - large shareholders have a full time job managing their money not working for someone else). There have been a number of cases where a company has unexpectedly filed bankruptcy and someone lost their job and their savings on the same day.

▲

nostrademons 2 hours ago | parent [-]

> In any case, it is a bad idea to invest in the company you work for

I'd question this conventional wisdom, simply because you have a lot more information about the company as an employee than a random investor does, even if you are not in possession of things like financials that the SEC considers "material non-public information". Things like culture, intelligence of your coworkers, whether or not you're actually delivering on your commitments, how many feature requests and bug reports you get from your customers, mood of management, perks offered, etc. are all intangibles, but they are usually better predictors of long-term company performance than the financials that the company gives investors.

If your company is not doing well enough or is not something that you would consider investing in, you should find a different company to work for. Bad things are going to happen in your future, regardless of whether you own shares or not.

▲

raw_anon_1111 an hour ago | parent [-]

No you don’t. If you did, you would be subject to lock outs. The average rank and file employee at any BigTech company knows only a minuscule more than the general public.

Amazon for instance has over 1 million employees. You know nothing about most of your coworkers or whether other teams are delivering featured

▲

youarentrightjr an hour ago | parent [-]

> The average rank and file employee at any BigTech company knows only a minuscule more than the general public.

Huh? We're not talking about the custodial staff.

> Amazon for instance has over 1 million customers. You know nothing about most of your coworkers or whether other teams are delivering featured

This is a hilarious example; especially at Amazon, "rank and file" employees are privy to $100M+ AWS deals, they have to implement them after all.

▲

raw_anon_1111 39 minutes ago | parent [-]

I worked for AWS in Professional Services (full time blue badge employee). Part of “sales”. Even when we talked internally asking for advice from the service teams (the people who worked on the various AWS services) or even internally within ProServe outside the project team, when we spoke on Slack, we didn’t mention the customers in Slack channels outside of a need to know basis and used the acronym “IHAC” (I have a customer) when referring to the customer.

I assure you the random developer on the EC2 service team for instance knew nothing about the sales deals.

Also a “$100 million dollar sales deal” is nothingburger for AWS not enough to move the market.

Do you think someone on the Alexa team in the retail division (“CDO”) knew anything about what was going on within AWS?

▲

youarentrightjr 29 minutes ago | parent [-]

> Do you think someone on the Alexa team in the retail division (“CDO”) knew anything about what was going on within AWS?

Hmm, no?

As a solutions architect at Amazon I was very much a "rank and file" employee, and privy to large deals, so I'm not sure what you're on about. I haven't heard of Professional Services, presumably you guys had different responsibilities.

▲

raw_anon_1111 24 minutes ago | parent [-]

So you worked at AWS as an SA and never tried to sell its own internal consulting services?

https://aws.amazon.com/professional-services/

But either way, it’s monumentally a kind of weird statement to think that anyone besides “janitors” would know anything about the deals that would go through or to think a “$100 million sales deal” would move the needle especially as we see right now that AMZN is tanking because they reported they will spend more than all of their free cash flow on CAPEX for AI. You couldn’t have predicted that

▲

youarentrightjr 13 minutes ago | parent [-]

> So you worked at AWS as an SA and never tried to sale its own internal consulting services?

Not sure I understand the value proposition here, but then again Amazon is known for having redundant teams every now and again.

	▲	raw_anon_1111 8 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		SAs are not allowed to give the customer code or actually do anything. When a customer signs a contract (SOW) with ProServe, they are billable consultants who actually do implementations. Even they can’t touch production workloads and basically do everything in non production environments and teach the customer hope to do the work and move it into production

▲

lotsofpulp 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

It’s been standard advice on this forum for at least 10 years to value options at $0, and only consider cash comp + RSUs.

	▲	0x3f 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Options have some minor value in signalling that you're a true believer. You should in fact care only about base salary, but not telling the people doing the hiring that can be quite useful. Doing a fake come-down on base in exchange for options shows you are invested and surely worth hiring.