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I get that the agreements give the company all the power here. What I am saying is that it is fundamentally immoral for the company to exercise that power when

I get that the agreements give the company all the power here. What I am saying is that it is fundamentally immoral for the company to exercise that power when the very basic meeting of the minds is something along these lines: "Take a risk working for me. I can't pay as much as you could otherwise earn, but I can give you equity instead. Some day, if we do well, it will be worth a lot of money and we'll all be rich". That lawyers and tax men have screwed up these agreements to the point of absurdity does not change the fact that this is basically the promise that is made. It should be kept.

esrauch 15y ago
I agree that it is wrong for a company to claim that they are offering compensation that they aren't, and it is easily possible that that occurred here and Zynga is wrong. I am certainly not going to try to claim that Zynga is a great company that everyone should try to be more like. But I think the core issue here is that this is what stock options and RSUs are. This isn't Zynga exploiting a loophole that only they wrote into their contract and only they do, this is the definition of stock options. I understand that Zynga is awful, I am more trying to make everyone aware that this isn't some insane situation that could never happen to them because they work at a nicer startup. If you are working for RSUs there is a much much higher chance that you are going to get fired a month before your stock vests than a month after, and it seems like everyone on here has been tricked just like the Zynga employees were tricked into thinking that stock options in startup X are just as good as stock.