Ask HN: How common are stock bonuses/grants at publicly-traded firms?
This practice is very common at GOOG, FB, and AMZN, but what about publicly traded companies in general? Does this happen at banks, and other more traditional firms, etc.? Or is this more of a tech/silicon valley thing?
4 comments
This is much more a tech thing than it is a BigCo thing.
Finance is a funny duck; they historically allocate a huge percentage of revenue to variable employee compensation, but it is not generally issued as stock. Note that "finance" is a bit bigger than "banks" -- the Banking Associates or whatever they call them at Bank of America are not receiving either huge stock awards or huge bonuses.
Elsewhere in the economy, many companies have employee stock-ownership plans where they will facilitate employees purchasing the stock at market or at a slight discount to market (which is, effectively, compensation if the plan allows you to sell shares immediately), but rather few issue meaningful amounts of compensation in shares.
Finance is a funny duck; they historically allocate a huge percentage of revenue to variable employee compensation, but it is not generally issued as stock. Note that "finance" is a bit bigger than "banks" -- the Banking Associates or whatever they call them at Bank of America are not receiving either huge stock awards or huge bonuses.
Elsewhere in the economy, many companies have employee stock-ownership plans where they will facilitate employees purchasing the stock at market or at a slight discount to market (which is, effectively, compensation if the plan allows you to sell shares immediately), but rather few issue meaningful amounts of compensation in shares.
A large portion of Apple employees get them, to some extent:
http://9to5mac.com/2015/10/14/tim-cook-memo-apple-launches-r...
It happens for managers and executives. Equity sharing with individual contributors is very much a Silicon Valley innovation, although over the years options/rsus have filtered down from senior management and become a standard part of the middle-management and even line management comp packages at old-school public companies.
I'm in finance. As a developer, I get hugely variable company performance dependent bonuses (10-30% of salary). Executives get a similar deal, but the percent bonus doubled or higher.