I don’t really have a problem with this. I’ve never been an executive, but I have seen first hand what happens when a company is in distress.
I worked for a small company that was on its last legs and had been through rounds of layoffs. Our investors wanted to keep the company afloat long enough to get someone to buy us out.
They made all of us one promise - for every hour we worked, we would get paid and on time.
They made some key employees an offer of a retention bonus to stick around for 6 months or until the company was sold. I happen to be one of those employees because I took over development of a key piece of software after the founder was kicked out. (It was an obscure proprietary system written in C++/MFC with a little bit of assembly and I was the only graybeard that knew enough to maintain it.)
The last thing you want is key employees jumping ship at the time you are trying to either save a sinking ship or at least get some type of salvage value from it.
No one wants to work at a bankrupt low-morale company, so the only way to keep key people was to offer special bonuses for retention to keep things together through the bankruptcy process
If you think about it, it's literally the only way to do it. These folks have usually lost a ton of money on their company stock options. The only way to keep them around is to pay them more in the short term.
I call BS. It's not as if there's a shortage of employees or execs to go around right now. When a company is taking its lumps, the execs should too. That should be part of the deal. If the people who actually do the work are getting laid off or asked to double their efforts to compensate for people laid off, then the execs ought to be content to ride out a period without bonuses and work to make those stocks rise in value again.
As usual, when things are good - execs see the profits, the vast majority of workers don't. When things are shit, the execs hand themselves bonuses while they cry crocodile tears about laying people off to please shareholders. Fuck them.
> "ought to be content"
Well, maybe they "ought to", but would they in practice? Unlike the typical employee, executives would generally have enough "fuck you money" to ride out the difficult period from the comfort of their vacation homes. And I'd say most of them would have done enough networking and schmoozing to not worry too much about their next role.
> "It's not as if there's a shortage of employees or execs to go around right now"
I don't think that there not being a shortage of execs would help the company significantly, since the company wouldn't have much to offer to attract experienced people, and in any case doesn't have the time to wait for the new people to ramp up.
I call BS. It's not as if there's a shortage of employees or execs to go around right now
Again in my case, how many “other employees” are they going to find from the outside who have built a relationship with their largest client [1], built internal relationships with other employees to get things done, know they business domain, and have two years of experience at the company to know how to maintain the codebase? If I were that valuable and hard to replace as an IC, can you imagine trying to replace the customer service managers, salespeople and CxO’s?
[1] I was valuable enough that our largest client made a deal with the company that finally did acquire us for scraps signed a special contract that allowed them to hire me as a contractor and get access to all of the source code of the company while I was contracting.
I worked for a small company that was on its last legs and had been through rounds of layoffs. Our investors wanted to keep the company afloat long enough to get someone to buy us out.
They made all of us one promise - for every hour we worked, we would get paid and on time.
They made some key employees an offer of a retention bonus to stick around for 6 months or until the company was sold. I happen to be one of those employees because I took over development of a key piece of software after the founder was kicked out. (It was an obscure proprietary system written in C++/MFC with a little bit of assembly and I was the only graybeard that knew enough to maintain it.)
The last thing you want is key employees jumping ship at the time you are trying to either save a sinking ship or at least get some type of salvage value from it.