Indeed, pay me $1m a day and I'll stare at a wall for you.

Probably wouldn't do it for long, the first day would be amazing - that buys a great house. The rest of the week and I'm set for a very comfortable retirement.

This is part of why stock options are so valuable to organizations as an incentive: the retention power of high pay without the calculus of “do I have enough?” from liquid compensation

Huh? Everyone I've ever known who had significant options knew exactly what they were worth.

I knew someone who changed their bash prompt to (price * unvested count / days left). He said at the time it was the only thing that kept him from quitting or punching his manager.

Long ago companies only bothered issuing options when the stock was illiquid; certainly my startup share options never had a meaningful market value from founding to acquisition.

Publicly-quoted companies issuing options is just a weird form of deferred bonus with a favourable tax treatment.

Well, they also come with the hope that they'll increase in value prior to vesting. But, yes, RSUs in public companies are certainly more like getting bonuses that vest over time than a stock market lottery ticket.

How do they know the price unless the company has IPO'd already?

The particular case I mentioned with the bash prompt happened at Netscape, his tenure straddled the IPO.

For a few days. My experience is that high pay will A) keep bad people around for much, much longer and B) keep good people around until they get too fed up with the bad people.

I guess that's where high bonus low pay comes into it - if you are a "good person" you get the high bonus so you stay, if you are a "bad person" you don't, so you leave.

The problem then comes down to defining good person vs bad person, which in the real world is very tricky.

It's still a balance between compensation, interesting challenges, and good work environment. You can provide less of one if you provide more of the others, or less of two if you provide much more of the other.

Only for a limited amount of time.

This is true, but it's a temporary solution. Eventually intellectuals get bored.

^ this