Many people advise staying put during economic downturns for stability, but I actually think switching jobs is quite advantageous because you can get more shares per dollar in your initial equity grant. My shares at the new company were granted at a price ~25% down from peak. I'm optimistic the market will turn around in the next 12-24 months, leaving me with some handsome appreciation I would not have otherwise seen.
I wouldn't be surprised if we're flat or down further 12-24 months from now.
According to a quick Google search, bull markets also last four to six years on average. The current bull market has been going on for about thirteen years now.
I think our conventional wisdom is failing here because we have not considered that the voting preferences will rapidly change over the next 8 years. Of course, the massive buffer there to my theory is Millennials will be the ones inheriting the bulk of these assets over the same time frame. Perhaps they will decide generational wealth isn't so bad once it is in their accounts.
Where and how?
Gen Zs political lean has not softened as they age into their late 20s, as it did with Millennials and older.
Minus their elders, Gen X is not a powerful enough political force in another decade to avoid capitulating on new new deal type government. Gen X is pre Information Age, no where near as savvy and aware of how technological society works, raised by a still very God-headed society (the US recently just crossed a threshold of <50% believing in higher powers; was >80% around 2000).
Urban growth has seen fewer teens get a license. Pee wee leagues participation was down before covid, as parents worried about future health, and cratered due to covid. Some unis have ended early education programs due to low enrollment. Essential workers are not staying in essential jobs as long, as they’ve seen they’re just a target for abuse by people who can’t feed themselves. 80% of nurses are considering leaving the field as they’ve just seen Americans rely on them like a mother rather than care for themselves.
There are a lot of trends that are really interesting to see, and the big gorilla is a bunch of senile leaders like Feinstein who apparently forgets peoples names minutes after introductions, and others who can’t understand ideas that aren’t presented in folksy slang. American agency is a lot like her memory; giving way to something else.
The Democrats have now lost the Presidency twice in the last thirty years while winning the popular votes and are underrepresented in congress in comparison to the popular vote.
Most Americans disapprove of the recent Supreme Court ruling on abortion - even Republicans.
I'm Gen X, and went to public school in flyover country 30+ years ago. I've never been in a classroom that didn't have a computer, or to a school that wasn't connected to the internet. I've still got a folder of old elementary school grade reports and standardized test outputs that are just dot matrix printouts from a server in the state capital.
When my older siblings were teenagers (35-40 years ago), a lot of the popular teen movies included scenes in which the protagonists connected to the internet from their home computer, usually in their own bedroom.
When my father was in college 50 years ago, he used networked computers to write statistics programs and submit them to a central server on campus for his psychology homework.
60+ years ago, my grandfather had a tech job in Silicon Valley. Houses were expensive back then, too.
Us old folks are perfectly at home in the Information Age. It's the Disinformation Age we're having trouble with. But I have a feeling that your generation is having a worse time of it; you just don't realize it yet.
I'll also note that what used to be "As Seen on TV" products are now marketed with Instagram-chic, so the shifting target of marketing is clear. I can't help but wonder if every generation hasn't seen the same since at least radio.
A quick search for generational boundaries put the consensus at around 1997, which would make the oldest 25 years old. I don't think there is any data to analyze about how their leanings will change. They've barely left college and during the most significant global crisis of most living people's lifetimes.
As for inheritance, you can almost make a certain bet that once the scope of transference starts to reach substantial proportions that the worlds governments will find novel and pervasive ways of garnishing taxes from such movements of wealth.
There was a bear market during the 2020 recession.
"Bear markets: what they are, how long they last, and how to invest during them"
Exactly right. If you look at Yahoo news, you'll find several articles from 'experts' daily that predict either imminent doom or a sudden rise in stock prices. On the same day.
The great John Bogle said "Nobody knows nothing", meaning that nobody can predict where the market is going in the short term. (Long term, it's an up-and-right trend.) Your guess is absolutely as good as anyone else's.
The market as a whole might bounce back, but that doesn't mean that a specific stock will.
Since you can only have one employer at a time, everyone from number 2 down is cut.
I’m working on some interesting stuff in a fairly specialized niche inside a well resourced part of the company. So I’m consciously making a trade off of falling behind on total comp but working on something I enjoy and hopefully staying employed through a downturn.
Why on earth would they? If the stock price had 10x'ed would you have returned the money to the company?
Now we found the root of the problem. Stay and complain is just a longer way of saying you wont leave over this.
Leaving any time you are dissatisfied about something without first asking if it could be improved doesn’t seem like the best strategy.
Nah, if you like your current work it's worth trying to get more by complaining. It doesn't mean leaving is off the table.
I mean, it's an investment, like any other.
I have also happen to believe that fewer hours, less stress, more flexibility are worth a lot of the money that is given up by not moving to a better-paying but more stress-inducing company. That's also the choice I made. But if I can get 1.5X, 2X etc. at my current company, you bet I am taking it big time.
The company plans for a target comp and hope to make some of it due to stock growth, and pretends it will offer additional RSUs in case it doesn't. Generally, this works very well, because stocks were going up and up, but now they're being tested and seem to be choosing not to match the predicted comp.
If you want protection from the company on the downside would you accept the company setting a maximum on the upside?
That's to say, I don't depend that much on stocks, but they are the critical path to getting a house in this market, which is also the critical path to lowering most of my expenses.
Your coffee shop also won't accept the cash in your bank account. You have to transfer it to them somehow. There's very little different between that and selling shares, followed by a payment.
You might but the IRS doesn't since RSUs show up in your W-2.
In real life, the potential value of a stock grant is not something I have any control over, so I disregard it. Recruiters want to offer me "total compensation" consisting of this and that and the other, but all I hear is "salary", because that's the number I can count on when making other life decisions.
If the stock ends up being worth something, it's always nice to get a bonus! But if the company never goes public, or the market crashes, or some weird merger happens, or I end up moving on before the RSUs vest, or whatever - then I can shrug off the imaginary loss, so long as I never count on the stock as if it were income.
In that case, valuing the stock is very important because the TC difference between companies depends on it. This is also talking about stock which is liquid when it vests (E.g. public companies).
I got fired once, shortly before my first round of RSUs vested; that left an impression. None of my examples were hypothetical, actually; another time I watched the value of my stock rise, rise, rise - right up to instant-retirement, fuck-you-money level - then crash back down, before any of it vested, and stay there. Total compensation at that job ended up being total salary. Both of these companies were publicly traded.
In reality, if both of the hypothetical employers in your scenario offered a reasonable salary, I'd go for whichever had more interesting work, friendlier people, a shorter commute - whatever would make my life better. If somehow, inexplicably, I felt thoroughly inspired by both options, happy to go work in either place, and it really did come down to nothing more than the money - I'd still probably pick higher salary over higher TC. Unless it was, like, double, and then I'd be tempted. But I don't think I'm going to get any such offer.
The short answer is no.
So if your salary is 100k, and they want to pay you 200k, and they see you've got 35 RSU vesting during the year and they predict that will net you 80k, then they'll top it off with an additional 20k worth of RSUs.
Basically the stock increase is accounted for. Those 20k worth of RSUs will vest say next year, and if next year they're now worth 60k, they'll just give you less RSUs again, because now they'll repeat the same math, and see you're probably going to make 160k.
I asked whether they planned to make up for this, and the response from HR was essentially that it's tough luck.
I totally understand, that's how the stock market works, but it has definitely accelerated my plans to start looking around elsewhere (which would probably have happened anyway, it's not quite the right place for me). That said, I don't know what the actual refresher amount will be so it might be that it balances out somewhat.
It's perhaps easier to see when you compare this with a discretionary bonus paid in cash.
The company can decide on the bonus depending on how well you did and how much money the company has to spare. The implied deal with employees is that they'll leave if the bonus is too low for their liking for too long. Overall a pretty decent deal for people with enough base to make ends meet and a deal with lots of flexibility for the employer.
An established company like Google might have seen its share price fall recently, but still have plenty of money to spare and, importantly!, its competitors might also still have lots of money to spare.
For historical and institutional reasons Google like to give out a lot of stock as part of its compensation, cash bonuses play a smaller role. So if the value of stock goes down and they want to / have to keep the value of total compensation high, they would want to make up for the recent drop in stock prices by giving employees more shares.
Does that make sense?
> That's kind of the point of stock being part of TC isn't it?
In comparison, for a cash-strapped startup, you are exactly right, and for them the drop in total comp that comes with a drop in share price is exactly the point.
There's usually the offer of cash vs stock, and the employee gambles accordingly. If they're going to get compensated for the drop in stock too, why even ask for more cash?
There was never any option to ask for proportionally more cash or more stock.
The stock vested over time and the grant was typically renewed every year. So that you basically could plan to receive a relatively fixed proportion of your total comp in newly vested stock every year.
From a financial point of view the newly vested stock was basically as good as cash: you could sell it straight away.
> In this case, most of the competitors have lost stock value too, so it's a "fair" pay cut when things are going poorly for the economy as a whole.
Look at the qualifiers in my previous comment. It doesn't matter what's 'fair', what matters is what the competition is up. If Facebook is still sitting on piles of cash and eager to spend it on employees, Google can't let their total comp drop too much, even if both companies have lost total market value.
If Facebook (and other competitors) spend less, Google will also have to spend less. That's not the same as the state of the economy as a whole, but it's related to it.
> If they're going to get compensated for the drop in stock too, why even ask for more cash?
As said earlier, at Google (at least back then) asking for more cash wasn't an option.
My compensation is hot garbage compared to a top tech company, but the work is really fun, so there's that! Like seriously, there are some top tech companies doing some really cool side projects, but the vast majority of their jobs aren't as cool. And the base salary is.. surprisingly comparable.
If you look at your yearly grants + cash, then I expect it to stay the same for most people. Many equity plans grant a percentage of your cash compensation as stock.
Personally, I am somewhat dismayed when I see smaller numbers, but I am also looking forward to an opportunity to get many more shares at a good price.
I started working at my current company in mid 2020. Most of my compensation for the first two years were cash (base + prorated signing bonus) and I didn’t get any real amount of stock until earlier this month and for the next two years.
Yes I know, how do you say which BigTech company you work for without saying which company you work for
If they're not doing so already, I imagine other employers will start offering RSUs as well.
Employer isn’t doing anything to correct it.
Actively interviewing as I wait for RSU cliff,
They did try to make it right: I got a merit base salary increase of about 9%, and the company gave a top up RSU grant when they usually do stock refreshers once annually. I appreciated that, but this wasn't enough to make up for the stock crashing hard. I'm pushing hard for a promotion to try and somewhat make up for it.
When I started working here I thought of RSUs as a casino and never counted on them for living expenses, but they've become such a huge part of my total comp that it still stings mentally a bit. I'm still very well paid, but we have some big expenses coming up around trying for kids. With inflation we're trying to budget a little tighter to ensure that our plans go smoothly.
I haven't heard anything about an adjustment or the possibility of additional grants. For now I'm more concerned that we're approaching break-even on my ISO valuation from 2+ years ago, after a 52-week high (during trade blackout) that would've given me Dos Commas status.
The company I left tanked recently (more than the market).
Thank goodness I did what I did lol.
My 401k has lost 25% of its value this year though, so it's hard to feel happy about the gain from my bonus.
High growth company with stock down 90% since the high end of 2021