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To: Lizzie Tudor who wrote (5990)	6/10/2002 10:24:47 PM
From: Hardly B. Solipsist	Respond to of 6974

There are certainly a lot of stories about the number of millionaire employees from MSFT, too. I know people that have worked there for a few years, and they said that when they started anyone who had worked there for some period (5 years, maybe -- I can't recall the period they said) were either rich, or they had sold their shares too early. The way this story was told, it was something that was true of every programmer, not just the elite. And it was still true for my friends that went to MSFT a few years ago that they have made quite a lot of money (at least it seems like a lot to me). These people were really outstanding engineers, but they made the money for engineering, not managing...

To: Lizzie Tudor who wrote (5990)	6/10/2002 10:50:13 PM
From: hueyone	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 6974

I worked at Apple in 1984 while a high school student and this wasn't true- there. Please let me rephrase my point. In the 1980s, especially the early 1980s, the yearly value of stock option grants relative to a company's size as measured by earnings, revenues, capitalization or practically any other metric you want to use, was much less significant than it is today. To prove this point we would need to go back and read the proxies from this bygone era, but perhaps we can dispose of the point with some relevant clues instead: One is that the average CEO's pay, which is made up primarily of stock options, has exploded from 40 times the average worker's pay in 1980 to 515 times the average worker's today. (I just read this statistic in the article Steve Wall posted below.) So we can agree that CEO's are getting options to a much greater extent than they were 15 or 20 years ago. The second clue is that there appear to be thousands of retired forty something engineers around who have nothing to do but post on Silicon Investor and painstaking share their technical knowledge with technologically challenged folks like me<g>. This forty something retirement class didn't exist in the eighties. So we can assume that this group are getting stock options to a much greater extent than they were 15 or 20 years ago. Third, according to recent research by Sanford Bernstein, we find that the overall value of options grants has expanded 12 fold since 1993, whereas basic common sense tells us there has been no equivalent (12x) increase in the aggregate capitalization of companies. marketwatch.com Nevertheless, you made a good point that stock options encourage innovation among engineers. I am not trying to do away with stock options, but rather just want to see that they are accounted for on the financial reports to shareholders. Obviously accounting for stock options would have the side effect of reducing the level of options grants that you have grown accustomed to in recent years, but I expect there would still be plenty of opportunity for outstanding performers. And hopefully the CEOs would be the first to cut their level of stock options rather than the rank and file. Best, Huey