Hacker News Reader

Comment by manuelabeledo | Hacker News Reader

> Schnierer expressed frustration at specific HR policies, like one that pauses all pay increases and stock vesting while employees are on parental or medical leave.

Why do they offer parental or medical leave, then?

This is akin to cutting someone's wages when they are on PTO. It's not "paid" time off anymore.

View on HN

I am coming to this post kind of late, so not sure if others will see this, but actually this is something that Amazon policy has JUST changed on, effective as of Dec 31, 2021.

A few RSU related quality of life improvements:

- Before, the vesting policy only allowed for 2 weeks of gracetime if you took any form of leave of absence (and leaves being a wholly legally separate category from vacation or sick days); since parental leave was 6 weeks, that means that your vest schedule would delay by 4 weeks (which I can confirm, my vest dates went from May to June because of this)... From 2022 onwards, the gracetime has been extended to match the parental leave time, so there is no longer this weird 6-2=4 mismatch

- In the rare case an employee dies, their next 2 years worth of unvested RSUs, will automatically accelerate and vest immediately. These accelerated RSUs will vest to the deceased's estate, and the heirs of the estate will get them via the probate process (having a will massively simplifies this). The accelerated vesting cannot be transferred directly to a beneficiary, it has to go to the estate first.

- RSU vesting allows for a sell-to-cover option for tax withholding, but previously only whole numbers of shares could be sold (and the leftover after taxes, is paid to your paycheck direct deposit). Now going forward, you can sell fractional shares to cover tax withholding.

- (couple other minor QoL improvements, but those were the ones I could recall off the top of my head)

I doubt these policy changes were in any way tied to the reporting of these stories or the experiences of these employees, but the timing is somewhat ironic.

I think you might be misunderstanding. They’re still getting paid. They’re just frozen in time and not getting stock vests or raises.

That’s still a drop in OTE over a year, especially for a company that pushes the “total compensation” message.

It is a weird nickel-and-dime-ey policy to have though. Like, why specifically those two types of leave? Where does it end?! Why not pause vesting and raises while someone is on vacation? Why not pause raises and vesting on the weekends? I'd better stop before I give them any more ideas.

(Perhaps literally) playing Devil's Advocate:

Could it be that employees that take maternal or paternal (parental) leave are significantly and disproportionately more likely to exit a short time after returning from leave? Or else see some other significant pattern of attrition after parental leave - controlling for the absence and costs of the leave over its duration?

Not commenting on the ethics or legality of this sort of HR accounting...

Stock vests are a significant part of many tech workers' comp, including Amazon workers.

Idk how things work at Amazon (from what I've heard their vesting schedule is already kinda whack), but where I work freezing stock vesting is basically a 50% pay cut for the duration.

> It's not "paid" time off anymore.

huh? i don't know anyone who gets paid purely in stock.

It's part of their compensation.

Their yearly bonuses are not predicated on how many days off they have taken, why would it be any different with stocks?

That's only true for vacation and normal sick leave. Most extended leaves (medical and parental) do affect your bonus. This is certainly true at Microsoft and Google and likely many other companies. The exact formula varies - at some places, if you take 3 months of parental leave, you'd get 75% of your target bonus (since you worked 75% of the year). At others there are more complicated formulas that give partial credit or assume that the portion of the year you spent on leave you got an average rating or whatever. Similarly, at most places I've worked if you take unpaid leave (including long-term sick leave) those dates aren't bonus eligible.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com