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Comment by ProfessorLayton | Hacker News Reader

Anyone have experience commenting on how total compensation and employee retention is handled when a company's stock becomes volatile? $NFLX has gone from ~679 > ~260 in the span of about 6mo. Anyone who got their RSUs last fall has seen their TC vastly cut, but Netflix is known for paying very well.

My limited experience working at a public company has seen tons of employee turnover, especially in this extremely hot job market. I'm considering shopping around as well, but my TC has been going up through promotions, which relieve the pressure to look around a bit.

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Netflix is an outlier because they pay mostly cash. But I'm currently at a different company that had a huge stock dip, and during the perf review they gave top performers a huge stock refresher (enough to get them back to their original TC, sometimes more). And well, if you didn't get one, that's like the company saying you're worth X% less now.

Netflix employee sharing public info. Comp is set in cash and you can take as much as you want (down to minimum wage) in 10-year options. They're granted monthly, have the strike price set monthly and vest instantly. This won't cause a drop in comp for people going forward, but is a hit for anyone holding options.

https://jobs.netflix.com/work-life-philosophy (See Finances section)

https://graystoneadvisor.com/blog/netflix-supplemental-stock...

My understanding is Netflix does not pay in RSU's, they pay all cash. This has been one of their main draws.

To answer your question, using Meta as an example, nothing happens. The employees are exposed to both the upside and the downside of RSUs.

Actually some companies whose stock drops significantly have felt the need to issue more stock to employees to retain them. Doordash is a notable recent example.

Netflix pays cash. I believe employees can buy options at a discount, but RSUs are not part of their comp.

If Netflix is like most companies, they’ll start reining in spending. In fact, that’s exactly what was reported a couple weeks ago: https://www.protocol.com/bulletins/netflix-executives-hiring...

Netflix doesn't generally do RSUs for engineers (they might for execs, I don't know), so total comp for engineers is not impacted.

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