[tinco]

Perhaps it's a bit evil for me to suggest this, but I have the feeling that distributing that much wealth to so many employees in these super exits that they might not be inclined to work any longer.

If I were a 4th level worker at your company implementing some important but invisible part of the core product, and suddenly the kicker pool rewards me with a couple of million, I might seriously consider quitting. Who wants to be a middle class salaryman in (pretty shitty) San Francisco when they could be a comfortable upper class person in almost everywhere else in the world?

Imagine running Facebook, and 50% of your 3200 employees suddenly earns $2M (for perhaps 2 years of work). How will your company suffer if even 10% of those immediately quit their jobs?

That looks like a possible catastrophe to me. A simple solution would be to make the kicker pool a bonus pool that just pays out the due amount linearly over 5 years. No one will be thinking of leaving if they're going to be paid a bonus that's 3 times their salary for the next 5 years.

[pacaro]

A friend who worked at MS from the mid '90s when it was at least apocryphally common for employees to “call in rich” claims that this is a good thing.

The assholes leave, the people that you want to work with stay.

When the compensation model at MS shifted away from equity (because of an essentially flat share price) in the '00s, then it became correspondingly more valuable to game the promotion system, and so the assholes become political and the rest is history...

[aceperry]

Sounds like not enough assholes left.

[yid]

> If I were a 4th level worker at your company...and suddenly the kicker pool rewards me with a couple of million, I might seriously consider quitting.

This is precisely why equity vests over time instead of being awarded as a one-time event, and generally why the best employees are given regular equity refreshers.

You could quit when you hit that $1m mark, but on the other hand, if you stay for another N years, you might make even more. That's the thinking they're trying out here.

If you're really worthwhile to the company, your progressive equity refreshers might even be superlinear -- so you stand to make significantly more than what you've already made as an incentive to stay.

[twblalock]

There are tons of people in SF and the valley who work even though they have enough money to retire right now. If this was a big problem, we would have found out about it years ago.