Option Wealth Trickled Down To Tech Workers
from the what's-the-problem? dept
The San Jose Mercury News has a whole series of stories about a new book coming out about stock options called, In the Company of Owners: The Truth about Stock Options (And Why Every Employee Should Have Them), whose bias appears clear from the title. The book shows the conclusions of a study that show that many tech workers profited from stock options. They also say that new plans to expense stock options aren’t likely to do what they’re supposed to do. The idea was that it would stop excessive executive compensation, but in practice, executives still get the same amount of stock options. It’s the lower level workers who lose their options. The book also points out that companies that do give stock options to employees generally do better than those that don’t. I tend to agree with a lot of these points, though, I’m not sure I trust the methodology used in the studies. I think they may overstate their conclusions somewhat.
Comments on “Option Wealth Trickled Down To Tech Workers”
right place, right time
Options are all about being at the right place at the right time. I’ve worked at a number companies that offered options to employees, and in all cases, the options were useless to me because I was offered them at a time when the company wasn’t doing as well as it had in the past (even if they put on airs that they were). But everyone was hyped about options because some of the people who had been there longer had really cleaned up on them. I say save everyone the trouble, the trouble of trying to figure out (or hide) where you are expensing the options and the trouble of getting part of your pay in a non-liquid and volitile assesst, and just pay the employees in cash.