I mean it mostly theoretically: In my case I work at a company with a multiple billion dollar market cap, several thousand employees, and I have 4-digits in sto

I mean it mostly theoretically: In my case I work at a company with a multiple billion dollar market cap, several thousand employees, and I have 4-digits in stock/options (and lately that's been a generous estimate). I was the ~100th employee, so to some extent I feel allegiance, but I'm also salaried well below market rate for my skillset (part of that going to work early for a company thing). Also, regarding per-hour: The salaried people are often the ones "getting screwed"! I grabbed my work-life balance by the horns, but some of my coworkers were not as fortunate, and they rightly make the argument that if they were paid by the hour they'd be making 50-100% more per year than their salaried rate. One of the sweetest stories I know in this regard is a guy who went from helpdesk to system administration -- he refused to take the official title change so that he could stay salaried. He'd have to take a 30-40% pay cut to switch. As it goes, I'd prefer to have even _more_ fine grained control over my destiny: If I could work 80% as much and make 70-80% of the salary, I'd think long and hard about it. A lot of other people might not want to make that choice. A coworker of mine would rather be on a half-time program with reduced or no benefits (and is brilliant enough to merit the inconvenience to the organization). We can't do that because of the inflexibility of the business world, but collectivism would play directly against that goal.