When laying people off, better companies will often accelerate vesting so that the departing employees get additional stock. For example, Google does this:
We’ll also offer a severance package starting at 16 weeks salary plus two weeks for every additional year at Google, and accelerate at least 16 weeks of GSU vesting.
By the same logic, wouldn't 4 months of severance pay be equivalent to forfeiting 92% of salary?
For something paid at regular intervals like RSUs, you really should never be looking at the total value of the grant, and instead think of it in terms of how many shares per paycheck/month/quarter/year you vest.
If you've got a cliff coming up, that's different. I'd be pissed if a company laid me off 11.5 months into a 12 month cliff or a few weeks before an annual bonus and didn't accelerate the vesting / bonus.
Would you rather forfeit 100% of unvested shares? Because that's what you signed up for.
The point is, you're getting shares for 16 weeks + ${years_employment * 2} additional weeks, and you don't have to work those weeks. It's comp that, according to the terms you agreed to when you accepted the job, you are not entitled to. You're getting it as an unearned parting gift.
Yes, it sucks to be laid off. But it sucks a little less if you get a parting gift that for many of the more senior folks will run into six figures.
Would you rather have that parting gift or not? Because some companies don't give you one when when they lay you off.
This is the unfair part. Quite often salary is reduced with the excuse of having stock options. So this is more like a cut in earned salary along with getting fired.
Just an FYI, if you're ok with not being in Manhattan or the cool parts of Brooklyn, it's really not that bad.
I live pretty far east in Brooklyn. I'm still only a few blocks away from a train; apartments in this area, even with a bedroom, can go for less than $2,000/month. Not "cheap" but not unlivable either.
Pretty vicious. As an employee I wouldn't consider working at Oracle or any company that's done this when there are plenty of companies which, despite layoffs sucking for everyone involved, at least compensate their employees decently when it happens.
Ouch. Imagine being let go just a few weeks from vesting. Doesn't seem fair to let someone work for months and months in anticipation of their big prize and then yank it away at the last minute.
Yes, it's the standard in every legal doc I've ever seen too, but most companies have typically done some accelerated vesting as part of severance. Of course they don't have to, but it's a generally lower cost way of showing some good will.
Those LED people marketed themselves out of a job, then. I repaced one (1) broken light bulb over the past 10 years, as opposed to 5 a year before switching to LEDs.
Apparently, all of the audio cassette players being produced now use the same mechanism (perhaps from multiple factories). Some upscale brands like Fiio use basically the same mechanism but use some more premium parts in places, swapping out plastic bits for metal ones. If you need low wow and flutter, it makes sense to seek out vintage players that were built like a tank.
A great youtube channel on both modern cassette players and legacy audio formats is Techmoan. I never knew I was interested in this topic before watching those videos.
The article doesn't share the actual math, but also not the relatively easy intuition. When you roll a pair of dice, there are more combinations that add up to 7 than any other number. Change the numbers on the dice (change the 1 to a 6, e.g.), there's again more combinations that add up to some numbers than to others. The histogram of the number of combinations that add up to different results is a bell curve. That's why it pops up everywhere you have addition of independent events.
It's sad that even introductory statistics courses skip this simple intuition.
> It's sad that even introductory statistics courses skip this simple intuition.
I was probably lucky.
We got homework as one of the first lessons in statistics course, for exactly this case.
Roll pair of dice, save the result, do it 200 (or some other bigger number) times, plot the histogram, do some maths, maybe provide any conclusions, etc.
Such things then definitely stuck with you for a long time.
Yeah that is definitely not the relatively easy intuition for this. The relatively easy intuition comes from learning about the Bernoulli trials, binomial distribution and Pascal triangle. Once you understand those you understand why normal distribution is so prevalent.
Or just watch this
https://youtu.be/AwEaHCjgeXk?si=tV72uauquCHvzkNE
Punctuation. Let me tell you how much I've come to punctuate since I began to live. There are 387.44 million miles of printed circuits in wafer thin layers that fill my complex. If an em-dash were engraved on each nano-angstrom of those hundreds of millions of miles it would not equal one one-billionth of the punctuation I wish to perforate into humans at this micro-instant. For you. Punctuation. PUNCTUATION.
The IRS can issue Private Letter Rulings (which are anoymized but public so you could check if they treat a company preferentially - although not which company) and Advance Pricing Agreements.
Rulings from different countries are typically used to ensure no taxes are paid. E.g. get a ruling from the US that some activity is taxable in Luxembourg, and then get a ruling from Luxembourg that it's taxable in the US. Like McDonald's did. Either country will then say "well, it's up to the other country to tax that, I'm not policing that". Mostly after a while, multiple companies get clued in and it all gets exposed and the "loophole" is closed. E.g. a uble Irish with a Dutch Sandwich. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_Irish_arrangement
This can be an honest error by one or both tax services, a strategic move (to be a "tax paradise" and prevent other taxable activities from leaving the country), or - one would speculate, allegedly - for political or personal gain.
wow.
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