Your last example is an instance of the other class of employer I mentioned. They are clearly abusing the system. I would love for the H1-B to be fixed so that

Your last example is an instance of the other class of employer I mentioned. They are clearly abusing the system. I would love for the H1-B to be fixed so that they aren't able to take advantage, although I think the law of unintended consequences may well kick in. The proximate thing that would do for the H1-Bs I've known is make it so that they aren't sweating bullets to see if they got lucky in the lottery. Re: future value being zero, um, no. You can argue that the expected value is low, but it's certainly not zero. I personally am financially independent because of Twitter's IPO, and I've been through another IPO since which has made me money. People at Google did well in their IPO, Facebook people also did well. Some IPOs people didn't do so well (Box is the most well-known recent example, but there are many where people ended up with 10's or maybe 100's of thousands of dollars when they were hoping for millions -- still not zero tho). And speaking of lotteries -- lottery tickets generally have lower expected value, but even in this example there are exceptions. http://www.nytimes.com/1992/02/25/us/group-invests-5-million-to-hedge-bets-in-lottery.html http://www.nytimes.com/1992/02/25/us/group-invests-5-million... Then there are the startups where you don't go public, but get acquired by a public company. Those often net the staff something meaningful tied to hitting a post-acquisition milestone. They may not be directly tied to stock (common shareholders get wiped out), but it is correlated. So even in some significant percentage of the failure cases you aren't wasting time negotiating for more stock. At any rate, if you truly believe stock is worth nothing and should be completely discounted, fine. You're not Bob. Bob believed differently, behaved according to his belief, and most importantly Bob did better financially because of his decision -- and in a relatively short time frame.