
Ask HN: How common are stock bonuses/grants at publicly-traded firms? - thefastlane
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&#x2F;silicon valley thing?
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patio11
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.

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pixeloution
A large portion of Apple employees get them, to some extent:
[http://9to5mac.com/2015/10/14/tim-cook-memo-apple-
launches-r...](http://9to5mac.com/2015/10/14/tim-cook-memo-apple-launches-rsu-
shares-program-for-all-employees-to-retain-talent/)

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arebop
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.

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cityofdelusion
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.

