So if they have a meeting every 3 months, what is the rest of their time spent doing? Sounds like a pretty cushy job.
And when you realize that it's these sorts of bozos who made the plans to acquire your company, lied to the shareholders about their intentions, and then raped and pillaged it, and sold it all off for parts, and ruined what was an awesome place to work, and you get bitter about this particular societal inequality. ;-)
As far as I can tell from ones I have seen, they make more than a Senior Engineer makes mostly by RSUs.
You can find proxy statement for public companies(Amazon, Google,, they publish it before the annual shareholder meeting which most of the time includes compensation for board members.
For example, here is the one Alphabet published recently for 2020: https://abc.xyz/investor/static/pdf/2020_alphabet_proxy_stat...
In 2019, we awarded our standard ongoing compensation to each of our non-employee directors, including an annual $75,000 cash retainer payable in arrears and an annual $350,000 GSU grant. We paid an additional $25,000 annual cash retainer and an additional $150,000 annual GSU grant to John L. Hennessy, our non-executive Chairman of the Board of Directors, given his additional duties in the role. We also paid an additional $25,000 annual cash retainer to Ann for her role as the Audit Committee chairperson.We awarded the above-mentioned cash retainers and GSU grants to our non-employee directors on July 3, 2019, the first Wednesday of the month following our 2019 Annual Meeting of Stockholders. The exact number of GSUs comprising the equity awards wascalculated by dividing the target dollar value of the award by the closing price of Alphabet’s Class C capital stock on the day prior to grant and rounding up to the nearest whole share. All annual GSU grants made to our non-employee directors vest at the rate of 1/48th monthly, beginning on the 25th day of the month following the grant date until fully vested, subject to continued service on our Board of Directors through the applicable vesting dates.
And then they have a table with concrete values for each director, on page 38. The median for 2019 is $428,298.
From posts further down:
> For example, here is the one Alphabet published recently for 2020: https://abc.xyz/investor/static/pdf/2020_alphabet_proxy_stat....
and then a follow-up to that post where they pull out data from that link:
> And then they have a table with concrete values for each director, on page 38. The median for 2019 is $428,298.
"We have 300K - shall we spend it improving our product or hiring an NED who happens to be VP at a big target enterprise customer?"
Within the economy itself board seats are given by the shareholders. Typically to tie investments together. If a fund is investing in company A and B they certainly want cooperation between A and B and place board members with such relations in there. This comes problematic if a strong shareholder uses this to shuffle revenue away from other shareholders into another company where they have a stronger majority (say investment fund F owns 50% of A and 90% of B and then fills A's board in a way to encourage the A company to buy as much consulting from B as possible) There (similar to democracy) minority rights and supervision by authorities like SEC is important. (While there is a school of thought, which argues that the minority shareholders simply should leave and the free market will handle this as an overpaying A won't survive in the market)