Analyzing stock-based compensation for Twitter and Facebook employees

Additionally, it's not like 100% of their MAU problems can be solved from engineering -- there are significant gains to be made from Marketing, and they can certainly leverage their current engineering talent (which is substantial) to work on product feature tweaks which will generate more stickiness.

For example, what are the demographics of FB's marketing/sales team vs. Twitter's? I'd be willing to bet on average that younger sales and marketing employees are willing to accept more SBC vs. salary because they have a higher risk tolerance and might be a bit less skeptical. Senior sales and marketing people have more expenses, families, etc. and I'd be surprised if many of them are willing to accept a lottery ticket and its associated tax burden in lieu of guaranteed cash and simplified taxes.

Additionally, without comparing the commission/bonus structure, I think there's a big missing piece of this picture. When you are a market leader and have an easy product to sell, you have less incentive to offer massive commissions than if market sentiment shows you to be on your way out and you need to be aggressive to court strong candidates away from "an easy sell."

Lastly, I'd be curious as to the average tenure of these various functional groups. If equity comes with vesting periods, cliffs, etc., do people stick around long enough to capture all of that SBC? If data says no, that might be an incentive to offer more to groups that are statistically more likely to leave a lot of it on the table.