[mallyvai]

This is an absolutely silly mentality:

1) A lot of people do make money off of employee stock, you just have to be reasonably intelligent about it. This blog post is a good way to model risk/reward.

2) Thinking of your employer as your enemy is a great way to set yourself up for failure.

3) Don't think of stock as worthless, think of it as a bunch of lottery tickets. It has some probability of being worth something based on the lottery.

[bhayden]

The lottery comparison would be fair if the organization running the lottery was incentivized to not pay you if you won and could very easily, in both a legal and acceptable-in-the-course-of-businesss way, deny you your winnings. You are basically relying on a huge pool of people who are making the decisions to be a nice guy and true to their word.

I'm not suggesting you consider your employer an enemy, there's obvious a mutual benefit to you working there, but never should anyone assume a business has your best interests at heart because they almost never do.