My sister's a french trained chef and I've been writing software most of my life. She works probably 3X harder than any geek I know including me. It's brutal. She arrives 8am to prep and leaves 11pm after service, 6 days a week when she was working for someone else. 7 now that she's opening her own place. She's on her feet all day. The job is both time critical and requires constant teamwork. If you or anyone else drops the ball the angry customer is right there, including the angry wait staff and angry team mates. It's very high pressure.

She's now busy opening her own restaurant and it's a far cry from writing software once and kicking back while each incremental copy sold costs you zero effort or money. Every incremental product a chef sells is hand-made and has to have its raw ingredients bought without any certainty it'll actually get sold. What's worse is many ingredients have a shelf life of mere days.

Every product is hand made to a customer's specifications and delivered in real-time with immediate feedback. If a product is rejected, it's expected to be replaced immediately without interrupting the flow of products heading out to new customers. And of course the tools of the trade are not a keyboard, but sharp knives and open flames.

So yeah, the "google chef scenario" comment bugged me too.

It's ludicrous that it's even necessary to paint the archetypical "Google chef" as someone who daringly sacrifices for their scrappy company for them to be worthy of windfall profits. If you compensate employees with options, they deserve whatever they end up being worth. Period. That's the whole point of options. If there were an asterisk attached that said, "...but only if people agree in retrospect that you deserve the money," nobody would accept them as payment.

"Charlie didn't make $20M for cooking, he made $20M for taking the risk that the company he was joining would fail"

Maybe. Or how about this:

Charlie didn't make $20M for cooking. He effectively made a normal chef's salary, some of which he effectively invested into Google shares.

What's the issue? That a chef (unlike a banker or programmer) helps fund a company, and gets shares for it?

Yeah. I find it humourous that they say they are clawing them back so they "could attract more top talent with the promise of stock." What? By demonstrating how they'll screw them out of that stock when the time comes?

What Zynga is doing is pretty repulsive, as I previously commented in a related thread (https://hackertimes.com/item?id=3219437), but it is not accurate to say that "[t]hey have to fire you for cause for you to lose your options."

The overwhelming majority of employees at startups sign documentation acknowledging that their employment is at will and can be terminated at any time by either party for any reason, with or without cause. In relatively rare cases involving founders or high-placed executives, the company will sign contracts stating that, though the employment is at-will (i.e., can be terminated at any time for any reason without liability), the employee will get accelerated vesting of one sort or another in the event of a termination "without cause" or a resignation for "good reason." "Cause" is usually defined as willful failure or refusal to perform duties that continues after notice and an opportunity to cure, misappropriation or misuse of company trade secrets, commission of a felony or other action involving moral turpitude, etc. and "good reason" is typically defined as material reduction in compensation or duties, relocation to a remote area, etc. If you have an employment agreement that provides for such acceleration, then you are clearly protected against the Zynga-style threats described in this piece. If you do not, then you generally are not on firm legal footing but still may have some fighting chances.

What are those? If you can argue that an otherwise permissible at-will firing becomes impermissible because it is animated by discriminatory animus (race, sex, age, etc.), and you belong to a protected class, you could argue that the threatened firing is illegal and would subject the company to damages (which, of course, would include the value of the unvested stock that would otherwise have vested had the company not acted illegally to terminate your employment).

If you can argue that the ground of termination violates public policy, this might be a separate basis for claiming that the firing is illegal, notwithstanding that the employment relationship is at-will.

If you can argue that the company has given you implied promises that your employment would be for a certain duration, this also might take it out of the at-will category and give you fighting chances.

If you can argue that you were induced by fraudulent misrepresentations, e.g., to leave an existing employment based on the promise of equity compensation, or if the at-will language in your agreement is defectively implemented, or if any other ground might exist by which you can legally claim you got cheated or had some promise made to you breached, all this too can take this out of the pure at-will category as well and give you a basis for leverage.

To sum up, "cause" is not usually needed by an employer to terminate employment and recapture unvested equity. But you also by no means automatically lose just because your employment is at will. This is a complex area. With a lot at stake, it pays to get good legal advice to see if you can find a good angle by which to protect yourself.

A good legal case depends on legal rules that support it and, even more important, on good facts that motivate judges, juries, and anyone else looking at the case to want to go in a certain direction. Here, Zynga is providing all the good facts an employee needs to motivate people to want to slap them upside the head. That by itself is not enough. But if you find even one legal hook that gives you a sound basis upon which to attack what they are doing, then you can stand and fight. It is not easy, but sometimes you have no choice.

Its not about chef or a Janitor or whatever. Why are these people acting as though only a few have the right to be rich?

Why can't a Janitor be rich? Why can't a chef be rich? What really is so wrong with it? This attitude is so despicable! So anybody who doesn't go to a big Ivy league, or some one who doesn't have an MBA next to his name or hasn't worked at a investment bank can't be rich?

Which in case, what this really turns out to be is alternate form of slavery where a selected few have to resign themselves to a lesser standard of life to serve the remaining self chosen elite and act in every way such that the elite are benefiting.

If you want some job to be done and you are ready to pay for it, money/stock or whatever. And you promise and the contract so. You just need to pay up. That's it, it ends there.

You don't get the work done, squeeze the juice out of the employees. Then one fine day realize that what you promised is now worth a lot of money. So you suddenly dump them, loot all the money yourself and say that they don't deserve it.

You had promised that it was worth paying something for some one from some work. So now when it is time to pay up. Just pay.

Personally I found it a bit snarky. By the same token I find that UI wars are the most vitriolic, after all they are the way you talk to the machine day in and day out. Screwing with that, screws with everything.

I have found Ubuntu's strategy interesting because it seemed clear that while KDE was following general guidelines around Microsoft OSes to be more accessible, and Gnome was following general guidelines around Apple OSes for similar reasons, Canonical sort of 'turned left' and drove off the road to a new place.

I remember distinctly when I left Sun and had to give up my Suntools interface for what became Windows98 at the time. And it was hokey and painful and it crashed a lot, except that over the weeks and months it crashed less and less, all without a software update :-). And I realized it was not so subtley training me not to use features that failed. Of course if you use something long enough you become reasonably facile with it. When I switched my desktop to Linux I was always more comfortable with KDE for that reason, the whole 'start' menu on the lower left, the control panel abstraction, the way things laid out on the screen.

When I went to Google I got a Macbook as my laptop choice, it was different, and I struggled at first, but once I became reasonably good at navigating around I found that I was also less annoyed with Gnome.

I think the Unity strategy at Canonical will pay them big dividends. Mostly because the Linux desktop market has been such a small part of the whole desktop market as to barely merit a full pixel width in a pie chart of desktop OSes. I believe that part of the reason for that is that the strategy of being 'kinda like' MacOS or Windows in the GUI has failed Linux badly when it comes to non-technical users. It failed them because there was neither the cohesion of implementation, nor the quality of testing, in either KDE or Gnome which would ever cause a non-technical user to think the GUI was 'better' than the one they left behind. Unity breaks that cycle because it doesn't work like the GUI you used to use. and so I think users cut it some slack, they realize they are in a 'new' place and learn how to do the things that they want to do in the way that this gui does them. And there isn't a mental comparison to their previous gui because it wasn't like this at all.

Assuming, and its a big assumption, that Canonical can execute on the Unity strategy well, it will continue to be the dominant Linux distro. Further it will increasingly leave behind every other distro, because while others may trade off market share amongst the technical users, where programmers slosh from one to the next, Unity will be gaining non-technical users who won't go anywhere else in the Linux space. Ever.