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Upper management pay, oof. I am at a company that went public. I was a very early employee working on the core product as a developer for the better part of a decade. I got a very nice payout (a bit over 1 million before taxes). The head of HR joined several months prior to our IPO and made over 8x what I did in equity. Like, wtf.... I can't complain as I won some start up lotto money, but, man, this head of HR _really_ lucked the f*ck out.

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Any more details (that you're willing to share) on this? You mentioned they're only the "Head of HR", but you say you were a core product dev (senior by the timeline you give). Did you accept underpay because you were early? I'm having a hard time wrapping my head around an 8-month "Head of HR" making out significantly better than a (first 20?) Sr Product dev (not questioning your story though).

I'm thinking the number of options just weren't there.

Yes, what about vesting?

many companies have instant acceleration on change of control, with regard to the vesting point.

never ever heard of this for IPO

This is at least pretty common in Canada, options are set to vest on a schedule but all future agreed upon options will vest if the company is sold/goes public/what have you.

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