[pvarangot]

Not also pay them less. It turns out that for the average person sometimes this four year grants when fully vested are enough to retire or to switch to a job that pays less but has better WLB.

They are paying people less because they want to keep them in the "golden handcuffs" for longer. The way it's painted by this particular VC is particularly gross.

Also executives usually keep the upside potential. So as an engineer if because of your work the company skyrockets and becomes 8x more valuable over the year you share 0% of that upside, while executives cash in. On the downside, as an engineer you can just leave because the market is very fluid, truth is you don't need job security from your employer if you are a good software engineer. If/when that changes probably compensation will go down enough so that this mega-grants are not going to be a problem anymore. They are just counting pennies.