$1500 is certainly exciting for a lot of people! Really, if someone gave you $1500 off the street, would you be like, "is this exciting?"

Applaud him for doing something good. $14m is a lot of money for any individual to shell out and $1500 is "exciting" to most normal people.

I think you've missed my point a bit here -

I'd be excited if someone arbitrarily gave me $10 off the street.

My employer giving me a bonus of that amount would be different though, because the nature of the relationship there is very different - I give up a large part of my life to work there.

I'm mostly just asking whether $1500 is significant at LinkedIn - you seem to think I'm making the claim that it's not. Whether it'd be useful for the average person is not that relevant (because it's not applying to them).

Does it come with the catch that I have to join his professional network? Do people working at LinkedIn have to use LinkedIn? I always wondered the same about Facebook, some awesome engineering challenges but many techies I know, including myself, have zero desire to have a facebook profile

I imagine they check but I also imagine you won't be disqualified because you don't have a profile.

Why does the YC application ask for your HN username?

A $1,500 bonus would be huge to thousands of people working at LinkedIn. For every highly paid software engineer there are dozens of people working in HR / Accounting / Administration / Facilities / Sales earning a fraction of the pay that developers are earning -- with largely the same costs of living.

Are you sure there employment ratio are so skewed away from developers?

Dozens may be a bit of an exaggeration, but they give a big picture breakdown of their employment ratios in their annual report;

    As of December 31, 2014, we had 6,897 employees,
    consisting of 2,838 employees in engineering, product
    development and customer operations, 2,989
    employees in sales and marketing, and 1,070
    employees in general and administrative functions.

So even broadly, 60% of the company is definitely non-engineering. From a quick glance at their 10k, it looks like about 1,700 people are in the product development group, so at minimum 75% of the company is non-engineering. Whether it's 1/5 engineers or somewhere closer to 1/10, it's hard to say but it takes a lot of people to run a company, and the majority don't make 'engineer' salaries.

Thanks for doing the legwork to my throwaway remark!

Instead of a symbolic gesture, perhaps let your employees work remote and save a real amount of money (compared to token income)?

That'd be far bigger news.

And it's far bigger work, with far bigger implications and potential unintended consequences. Telling America to just get off of its collective fat asses and walk around more than once in awhile would do more than an infusion into Medicare, but Medicare money isn't nothing for the people who need it.

Ideally, the CEO could/would do more. But just passing it off as a symbolic gesture raises the question: well, if it's so symbolic -- and thus, of no real sacrifice to the CEO, then why don't all the other rich (and far richer) CEOs do it, such that this CEO's offering doesn't make news?

Inflation hasn't been 5% in about two decades. 2015 was about 1%, most 2016 estimates are around 2%.

And the $14 million goes into the grant pool, so it's only accessible by those with grants in the first place.

They make as much as any Software Engineer in the Bay Area, working for names like Google, Facebook and Apple. So yes, if it is distributed evenly across all employees, it will be negligible.