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Comment by spike021 | Hacker News Reader

I guess RSUs aren't really "real wages" but mine vested over four years to the extent that by the time I left they were worth barely 25% of what they had been when I signed the offer. Happened over time, too, so quarterly vests took a decent hit in that timeframe.

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RSUs are great for workers because if the value dips 75% you can just leave and get a new job and get new RSUs at a reasonable price. Of course it's not trivial to switch jobs but at a 75% cut it's surely worth at least looking around. I don't think you can really consider it a fault of the economy if you didn't.

I did that once. The company doubled rsus the next quarter (still didn't make up for it), then the stock price 5xed over the next 3 years. By the end of it, if I had stayed, I would have cleared 1.2M per year.

Although I heard they also fired some of those people with high rsus! So it goes both ways.

I'm sure you know this but RSUs are such a fraction of a percent of real world compensation that they might as well round to zero.

This was not my experience working at FAANG. RSU's started out as 30% of my comp and ended up well over 60% by the time I left.

Either way, definitely not "might as well round to zero". I have never worked anywhere where that was the case.

They’re saying that few workers get RSUs

Which I worried was so obvious it wasn't worth remarking... but here we are.

Well, with all due respect you could've worded that better. It sounded as if you were making a blanket statement over all individual jobs that involve RSUs, as opposed to a statement over all jobs as an aggregated statistic.

For jobs with high compensation, RSUs are such a high part of the compensation that it's often more than the base salary.

That isn't true outside of tech? Finance/big law/consulting/healthcare etc... all primarily work on cash bonuses.

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