[ghostoftiber]

> So the employer has a financial inventive program to encourage people to stay in the organization long term

That's not correct. The financial incentive program of vesting is designed to keep the cost of actually paying people down, plain and simple. If you're interviewing, I would encourage you to pretend the stock compensation doesn't exist. I've had offers of $60k actual cash with $300k stock with a five year cliff and my next question is always "what's the average tenure here?" If they look uncomfortable, I know they know it's a golden poison pill.

Consider the fact that Amazon, for instance, won't let you pay for EC2 instances in stock options at your company. They darn well know what they're doing.

[eschneider]

Do you mean a five year vesting schedule or a five year cliff before you start vesting. The former is...bad, but I don't think I've seen the latter. That's just...no, absolutely not.

[ghostoftiber]

The mechanism I'm trying to describe is when employers pay a base in X dollars and stock in Y dollars which takes Z years to mature. AWS sounds like they're being somewhat reasonable about it by giving an employee cash before their options mature, but I have interviewed at places (Envestnet in New York City) where I was offered a base comp which was meh and then options which were gonzo. The offer, if I remember correctly, was $105k/y base and then $100k/y in stock which took three years to vest. I passed on the offer because $105k/y in NYC was cutting it too close for me. They did not have a "cash float" mechanism.