Google Employees Watch In Horror As 60 Percent Of Their Stock Options Drown | Hacker News Reader

Google Employees Watch In Horror As 60 Percent Of Their Stock Options Drown

techcrunch.com

42 pointsnickb29 comments

"The free food and transportation are great perks and all, but let’s get real here. Without the financial upside those stock options represent, Google employees will start looking elsewhere."

Free food and transportation might be even more valuable now.

Anyone that wants to work at a big company won't find better stock options and definitely not a better work environment. Anyone that wants to work in a startup environment was going to leave Google eventually. So no, Googler's won't be running for the door.

I'd be interested to see how the internal market for reselling stock options looks right now.

Forget about food and transportation... having a job will be the most valuable thing of them all.

I doubt many Googlers will 'start looking elsewhere'... where exactly would they look? Dubai? China? Heh.

Recognizing that probably none of us are old enough to have seen a downturn of this scale; the demand for quality talent didn't seem to diminish much in our other recent downturns.

Agreed, but offering free food, transportation, health care, cell phone, etc is an awesome & possibly economical perk.

Most of that stuff can be paid for with pre tax dollars as opposed to having to pay for it yourself with after tax dollars.

The place I used to work paid for my phone, breakfast, daily lunches, insurance and metro card. My only fixed costs each month were groceries, dinner, rent, cable/internet, minor personal items & student loans.

"I doubt many Googlers will 'start looking elsewhere'... where exactly would they look? Dubai? China? Heh."

Its not like Google is best company in the world(those days are gone). Even if, company doesnt matter to me,what matters is only the work(and the smartness of co-workers) what Iam doing. I would any day better compromise on the smartness of co-workers as opposed to compromising the quality of work. By this, there could be a lot of better jobs elsewhere.

Exactly. I am no longer convinced that people actually think before writing TC articles.

TC has basically become part of the mainstream media then? That's a shame, I guess it's back to the Economist for me

Did you ever find TC to be on level with The Economist, or even in the same ballpark? Or hell, even the same sport?

TechCrunch does one thing very well, which is up to the moment headlines (on a rapidly changing industry) with just enough commentary that you can get a feel for what happened. It's one very small notch above a Twitter feed. If you're looking there for in-depth analysis, you're always going to be disappointed.

If you're looking there for in-depth analysis, you're always going to be disappointed.

Quite the contrary; I want TC to report start-up news. That's it. I don't want any editorials, op-eds, or analysis. Why? Because, as many many articles including this one prove, they are nearly always completely ignorant of the situation and say ridiculously stupid shit as a result.

They do that well, as you said, but it's when they go beyond the bare necessities and actual facts into the realm of "analysis" that the writers (and editors and everyone else between an article and my face) fall flat on their asses and cause my blood pressure to rise in the process.

"Shit, I can't swim. I know I can't. So you know what I do? I stay my black ass outta the pool."

I don't think TC even cares if their analysis is sensible.

For them, the value is long comment-threads and inlinks/clickthroughs. And bad analysis often gets more such attention... so bad analysis is what they prefer to provide.

Indeed. I live in a fantasy world where people who "report the news" do so in a manner where only facts are presented and any opinions or analyses are backed up by trustworthy, informed, unbiased sources. I realize that world doesn't exist, but that doesn't mean I won't stop berating those who create "news" for this one.

Sadly, your point is an oft-relevant one so my only recourse is to read TC even less than I do now, which is to say stop reading the articles that show up here.

I dunno... I already wrote TC off as a waste of my time along with things like valleywag quite some time ago, so I could easily be ignorantly biased, but for me I'd describe them as mainly being "good" at link-baity bullshit titles + wild trollish theories about what could happen presented as fact press release style to stir up interest... I'm sure they have some value, but it all comes down to that magical signal-to-noise ratio question... and this article here doesn't appear so bad but also doesn't seem very good either....

Yeah, I don't know. I think TC is pretty good at giving you breaking startup news. I think you could pretty much read nothing but the headlines and get about 95% of full value out of it, while saving yourself about 90% of the time involved.

They have had a few in-depth analysis articles, or at least somewhat close. I was suggesting that it was one direction that they could have gone in instead of being the typical mainstream "report shit as it hits the fan".

I thought they were cutting back on the free food etc.? Remember Sergey's comment about the M&M's and bottled water?

I don't know when their fiscal year ends, but having a drop right before review time means that when annual grant time comes around you're getting them at a lower price. Of course if the market is only going to go down-down-down then this is precious little consolation.

Google moved into our area a couple years ago. When that happened the buzz in the tech job market was full of "I could go apply at Google". I remember, even at that point, having the feeling that the stock grants would probably be small and the potential for a stock price slide was really high.

I would say with most tech companies if your employee number is less than 50 AND you have a high ranking position (manager plus) you might have a chance of having stock with a significant upside. Otherwise you're better off just getting the cash up front, in salary. Obviously Google was quite a bit larger and more successful, but post-IPO grants in technology are generally a joke.

This is generally true, but I was under the impression that Google gave unusually generous grants as a form of compensation.

On the bright side, I suppose, any new Google employees will have a bigger gain to look forward to.

Options don't become worthless when they're out of the money, as long as they haven't expired yet. The probability of the option being valuable at expiry is greater than zero, so the expected present value of the option is greater than zero.

Indeed. If anyone has goog options that they think are "worthless" then I'll be happy to buy them at one cent each.

This could actually be a boon to employees at Google as this may mean they have to start raising salaries.

The same thing happened at Microsoft, Intel, Cisco and Adobe as they transitioned from growth companies to mature companies. Once they couldn't necessarily count on their rising stock price to act as part of their employee's compensation they started to raise salaries to help make up the difference.

Also, restricted stock grants (like Microsoft adopted) look a lot better. Yes, it hurts to see your "potential grant" value decrease - a 50% drop is a 50% drop - but there is still absolute value (unless the stock becomes worthless).

I watch in horror as 60 percent of my 401k drowns.

One problem with options is the rift it may cause between people who joined the company while the stock was going up versus those who joined while the stock was going down. The people with the sinking options start to wonder why the guy next to them is leaving early each week to head out on his yacht, while you're stuck working extra hard to try to earn a 10% boost in your base salary next year. I believe Gates said something once about how offering options in the MS early years was one of his biggest regrets - exactly for this reason.

329 is the magic number (of worthlessness) eh?

328.8 as of right now.

Current Share Price of the Company = 5 x Book value Per Share of the Company.

Current Market Capitalization of the Company = 10 x Quarterly Revenue/Sales of the Company.

Anything beyond this could be irrational or manipulation.

This is happening to people in all sorts of industries.

> Google Employees Watch In Horror

Feels like Digg.

Tagged as propaganda and FUD.

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