> Big tech companies like Apple are more meritocratic and generally offer smart people much better deals.

It’s mindblowing how big of a gap this is for these non-tech companies. I work for a company that sold to PE. The owners walked away with the vast majority of a 1.5 billion deal.

I asked if employees were given anything. “Sure. Some got as much as 50k!” I was told.

Using some standard equity math for early engineers, I back of napkined that the 25 year tenure engineers, if they were at big tech, should have gotten low 7 figures. Nope. They got 50k out of 1.5 billion.

(No, PE had no say on how that 1.5 billion was divided up for those of you quick to blame PE.)