There's a term that's used "not real money", and the stock-as-compensation is an example. There are plenty of examples of people working their asses off on the hope/promise/gamble that it will be rewarded with a high stock price and then the stock not reaching those soaring heights or worse the company runs out of runway and the stock is worthless. Now those people realize they were making a lot less money than they thought. There's also the larger than 0% chance that the market tanks and everyone's value goes kaput again leaving the employee high and dry. Let's also not discount those companies that require employees to work a minimum time in years before those options vest.

That's fair. But my kids don't have to work a day in their lives because of my stock as compensation, so there's always a counterpoint, I suppose.

It depends on whether you have any meaningful amount of stock - and that meaningfulness varies to some extent by how expensive your city is and what your standards are of course - and whether you're so empowered as to make a meaningful difference in the "stock price."

I'm fairly senior, but since I don't work in sales nor in some strategy aspect of the business, I don't "make the stock go up." I can get more stock as a pat on the head if I'm a good boy, at the end of the year, but generally 95% of the company is waiting for the stock to vest and let the stock go up by itself.

Senior companies at my company think people will work harder if they have stock because they "want to make the stock go up." This is false. Great company, false premise nonetheless.

Like half my comp right now is stock, and I don't want to work more. I don't think anything I do makes a difference. Do you really think anything you do makes a difference? If so, curious how or why? Its a coin flip how the price moves every earnings ime. More profit, more users, stock drops. Its all speculation from investors.

> In our company, stock is 10-40% of our compensation, so it aligns our motives in a way that folks without stock don't have.

Is it a publicly listed company? If not, how do you mitigate or incorporate the risk of being diluted and/or not being able to cash out?

This.

I have a friend who gets part of his compensation as stock, but the company is not publicly traded. There's the vesting part, which he knows upfront, but the worst of it is that the valuation seems somewhat arbitrary, and he can't sell when he likes.

Now I understand they give the same valuation to everyone, as estimated by some third-party, but the issue is that even after the vesting period, he's not able to sell his stocks as he pleases if he needs the money. There's a pretty convoluted process, where he basically can only do this once a year and has to let someone know (don't know the specifics) ahead of time that he's looking to sell.

I've always worked for companies where stock is part of the compensation and people still don't want to work long hours.