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Comment by KeepFlying | Hacker News Reader

Depends on how much of comp is based on stock, and how much of that is based stock awards that don't vest immediately/quickly. Its likely that a lot of employees are selling stock asap and wouldn't get to realize all that growth.

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The employees have a lot of unvested stock most of the time, so they very much get to benefit from the stock price growth.

To counter this, they also suffer lockout periods. Employees typically have a short amount of time to figure out their strategy before being stuck for two months or longer.

Employees only get to plan in the macro. They can go long or short, not respond to real economic events, opportunities, or headwinds.

So do the execs, for what it’s worth, who not only suffer from lockdowns, but also often are legally required to announce their trades in advance.

Frankly, I never found lockdowns to be really onerous at all. You can’t really time the market anyway.

Lockouts apply to every employee, including executives.

Having multiple windows each year to sell your stock/options at fair market prices is a luxury that very, very few people working at startups gets. This is a ridiculous thing to complain about. For the vast majority of people having 4 trading windows per year is more than enough to adjust their portfolio based on their financial strategy.

The lockout periods are quite short. You can buy and sell more than 2/3 of the time. You can also set up an autosale system which sells as soon as you vest regardless of whether you are in a lockout period.

Anything that isn't vesting immediately will be worth more, increasing future compensation (in USD) even if employees sell what they can immediately. https://www.levels.fyi/company/Google/salaries/ says there are 3 and 4 year vesting schedules.

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