The way RSUs are calculated (dollar amount to shares at time of hiring) he'll be able to convince new joiners just fine. Holding onto current employees would be the challenge - assuming he wants to hold onto them in the first place.

Only if they think the stock won't continue the decline.

Why would new employees (at current quality or better) would join his mission of self-destruction?

I suspect that many, many software developers would happily help Zuckerberg to implode. Getting paid well is just a bonus.

I made it through the on-site only to hit the hiring freeze. It’s a well paying remote job even factoring in stock depreciation, moderately interesting work, and I’d happily spend zuck’s money on VR goggles no one needs until it all implodes.

The pay is still good, if not great. My salary is approximately the same as total comp at my previous job. Even with the stock down around $104, my total comp is still some significant chunk better than previous comp (20-30%). (I'm an IC5 SWE.)

It will eventually be a problem (in the sense that switching to GOOG or AMZN will be a much better prospect) if the stock continues to go down, of course. And a new hire evaluating their stock package should probably be a little concerned about the trend.

The infrastructure to support you getting your work done is great. There are reasonably interesting software problems to solve. There are smart people to work with. There are some good benefits.

Right now, anyone who joined Facebook in the last 5 years is underwater on their options.

RSUs, and yes.

I doubt they get options, RSUs most likely.

This is pedantically correct, but in practical terms, if you got RSUs at any price in the last five years, they're still worth less than you were offered.

There is a huge difference between stock price being 20% lower than RSU grant price vs. 20% below option strike price. With options. If options are way out of the money, then they're worth a lot less than the RSUs.

Far from being pedantic: having underwater on options is very different from having RSUs worth less than they were in the past. If an individual were to liquidate one of each; the underwater option would have negative monetary value, whereas the RSUs will always have a positive value.

Never mind the convoluted tax implications of exercising options that are nominally not underwater, but whose stock has a lower value that at the time of granting.

Actually, everyone is underwater on RSUs. We do 4 year vesting so even people who started 5 years ago are vesting their stock from 4 years ago.

Technically you can't be "underwater" on RSUs, you just get less dollar value in shares than you were expecting. (Acknowledged that this kind of sucks but when FMV on your options is below your strike price they are literally completely worthless, which is what it means to be underwater, and this is a much worse scenario than taking a haircut on your RSUs!)

You can be underwater on RSUs if you have a lockout or blackout period for when you can sell. Uber had this problem [0] after their IPO.

If you factor in taxes, you could end up owing more in taxes than the shares are worth (ex: vest price is $10/ea, taxes are $3/ea, current price you can sell at is less than $3 == underwater).

I think Aurora employees were locked out for 180 days, but force to exercise options at IPO price.

[0] - https://www.cnbc.com/2020/08/28/nearly-200-uber-employees-su...

[1] - https://www.google.com/finance/quote/AUR:NASDAQ

Underwater is being used in this context to mean that the shares are currently vesting below their grant price.

The dilution will be much higher if the share price stays lower.

Think about it this way: Giving 20 billion in new equity per year when the market cap is a trillion dilutes everyone 2%. When the market cap is 500 billion you are now diluting everyone 4%.

When the company is growing you don’t see the dilution as the increase in stock price is much higher. When it’s static this drags your shares down over time.

How much were the shares "undiluted" by buybacks? I suspect more is spent on buybacks than on RSUs.

In what world does meta not have an indefinite line of applicants for every position? Social media being kinda icky is the least of engineers worries. Don't forget some of them are making careers coming up with the next new killing-majig to sell to the public and seem to have no issues sleeping.

It’s all relative though, big tech gets hit all at the same time.