Be Excellent To Each Other

We were discussing this at work the other day. Out of a bunch of techies who had worked at various start-ups, we knew one person between us who had ever got more than a couple of grand from them. I don't think they're worth much at all, to be honest, unless you're actually a founder of the company yourself.

If the companies had both executed according to their respective business plans, I would have been about £85k better off. "If". However, in both cases, the founders also got nothing (in fact, in the restructuring that just happened at my current employer, the founders lost millions.)

I had stock options that at one point were worth over £30k.
When the time came around that I could actually sell them, paying for a 10 minute conversation on the phone with a broker would have put me at a loss on the deal...

There's yur problem, right there.

(You couldn't pay me to get on a ryanair flight)

That's a bit silly. If you want to go from London to Shannon, it's the cheapest and easiest way to do so.

And with a flight time of just over an hour, it hardly matters.

I have my reasons.

Their attitude towards safety being probably the first.

Guess who got just over 500,000 stock options this very day!

who?

it is 37c where I am sitting

Are you in your oven?

Sitting in a bath of human blood from a very recent victim?

Me.
How does one get fucked over? From what I've read it's the deal is too simple for them to do anything. Grim... buys shares at 1p, Grim... sells shares for £10 (hoho).

Also - why is it such a strange number of shares? I've got 5%, but that's 501,402 shares or something weird.

I like an Idiot Abroad quite a lot.

One gets fucked over by either:

1) The company collapsing because it was a shit idea
2) The company having to issue a fuckton more stock to raise the capital they need, diluting your holding to the point of worthlessness.

Am I correct in thinking stock options are not shares?

Stock options are, as I understand, an offer to purchase shares at a set price. One can possible buy and sell options but I'm not too sure.

Stock options are an offer to let you buy an amount of stock (sometimes in 3 or 5 years time, as a retention incentive) usually at a very low price.

So I'll say to you, here is an option that in 3 years' time, if you still work here, you can buy 500 shares at £1 each. Obviously a great deal if they're worth a tenner each in 3 years' time, not so good if they are 50p each - but in that case you just don't exercise your option to buy them.

Ahhh... I get it. My dad did this years ago and managed to pay off the mortgage with the money he made.

okay, I have those at work, but I was confused by the comment, "The company having to issue a fuckton more stock to raise the capital they need, diluting your holding to the point of worthlessness." when against 1p shares, but I see what you mean now.

I once had stock options.1000 shares per year for 5 years, initial price of around £5 each. At one point (after 18 months) they were up to £25 each. When the 5 years was up, they were worth about £2 each.
Bugger.

I'm in love with the enormously dilapidated Odeon right in the centre of town.

Speaking of which...You guys remember the 80s right?*


Roxy, Sheffield

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O2_Academy_Sheffield isn't the same, you certainly wouldn't see cozzehs revving at the lights to impress lasses with bleached poodle hair and white stilettos.

*not a huge topic leap, it's right next to the old Sheffield Odeon.

I used to go there.

1p shares aren't the lowest they can go though. Even your 1p share will get diluted if the company issues more shares, especially if they dilute by x100...

The main reason stock options are a rip-off is because they are often offered in place of cash, be it bonuses or raises. So instead of "you've done a great job, here is some extra cash" it becomes "you've done a great job, to reward that we are going to give you the option to maybe get some money in 3 years if you are still here."

I fail to see why MrsA is mocking me as I thought we were near Cheshire.

I've had one of each happen to me. Although actually in both cases I didn't have stock options but actual shares issued under a restrictive covenant.

@Trooper: they're not a rip-off, necessarily. They are a calculated risk. The odds are small, but the payoffs potentiay far greater than any cash bonus would ever amount to.

I have saye thing, which I think is regulated. also the company is not a new company, so the shares should be more stable. max I can invest is 250 per month.

True, but the reward part of the risk/reward equation is always played up to be much more likely than it actually turns out to be...
Byproduct of the optimism of human nature and all that, but actual experience shows that the payout chance is much lower than people actually believe, regardless of what the figures tell them.

See also, the lottery

I hate share schemes. Largely because I have to do the tax on the fuckers.

They have you down as an Oxomoron.

Those can be fine, as long as you are aware that you are buying shares in the company you work for. All eggs in the same basket etc...

I worked with a guy in his late 50s, who bought shares in the company as his pension, as it was a stable company and was performing well.
Company went down the toilet, his shares were pretty much worthless, then diluted by 1000 on top of that, then he got made redundant.

I buy shares in my work but they have made a deal which makes it harder for us to lose. The first scheme is for every two shares you buy, you recieve one free. After either five years you can sell them without paying tax on them and the shares are purchased from your pre tax salary. I contribute to that each month.
The next scheme opens yearly and is a saving scheme. In September on a specific date, they take the current share price and reduce it by 20%. This becomes the option price. They then tell us the option price and we elect how much (if anything) we want to contribute a month and either a three or five year plan. This total comes from our after tax salary and is put into a saving account. After the three or five years, you get the option to purchase shares at the option price (as long as the shares haven't decreased by 20% you make money) or simply recieve the contents of the saving plan back if you would lose out on the shares.
I have my first annual saving scheme coming out the month before my 30th birthday

My current place does that as well, Gilly. We contribute X pounds per month, and then get to use that money to buy the shares at today's price less 20% in 3 years time. If the price has gone down at that point, we can either buy the shares and hold onto them, or we can take the money back but with a few percent interest.

I haven't bothered as I will be leaving in three months and have only been there 9... .

Goshdurned double posting.

When I worked for Marsh we had a good share scheme. You could enter (I think) a 1,2,5 or 10 year scheme, and at the end of the scheme you could buy either at the price at the start of the scheme, or current price - 10%, whichever was lower.

Some of the guys hitting the end of the ten year period were making a frankly ridiculous amount of money. Heck, I even made a profit on my poxy few shares, which I promptly sold about two weeks before they plummetted when the company were found guilty of fixing prices in the market!

We had a share scheme at my current employer, but then we got bought out, so we just got some cash for 'em. Which was nice, as I wasn't allowed to sell them for 3 years otherwise, and since I'm leaving the company at the end of next week I'd never have seen a penny of it otherwise!

Temperature check 99f/37c (this room is very small, the window is tiny, it contains three people, a small dog, and a PC+ 4 external HDs + laptop, plus the boy is obsessive about keeping the door closed)

There is plenty of reasons to call Eireoflot a bunch of twunts, but their attitude to safety ain't one of them.

Somehow, for reasons I don't understand, and, it seems SKY don't either, apart from "It isn't fully active" I can make outgoing calls on my land line, but if you try and call it, it chucks back a 'number unobtainable'. It's the equivalent of designing a submarine that only sinks and sitting back and saying "Yeah, we'll sort the rest out later". Hang on, the Navy did that already with the K-Class (steam powered submarines, they were, terrible idea, most of them sank or drove into each other, sad story, interesting history but that's for another day). Naval engineering aside, it isn't that tricky to press another button on the exchange. I suspect they spend their time talking about how Boba Fett was the greatest bounty hunter in the universe (He wasn't) and rolling D12s for initiative whilst levelling their elven paladin or somesuch. Quite afuckingstounding.

Maybe Dave likes to live on the edge and they won't let him...

I know he gets results, goddamnnit, but I've got City Hall on my back and some of us have to play by the rules. Its a job, not a goddamn crusade, but if he wants to make it personal, then I'll want his badge and his gun.

You would be surprised, there are so many layers of bullshit sky have to wade through to get even the simplest things done, this is entirely down to BT owning everything and doing everything in their power to lose other companies business.

You would not believe the shit I went through with BT when I switched to Sky. Please note: experiences may differ from area to area as will who owns what, I'm normally under the Nottingham catchment area for everything.

My line was so fucked that in the end Sky forced BT to replace the overhead telephone cables running to my house as all the problems had been to do with them screwing up the first replacement they did just after I switched and not testing it properly because I didn't have a BT number, even though BT themselves own the line and sky is just renting from them.
It took them over 6 months to sort it and it was all because BT did everything possible to stall and deny it was a line issue, the support people at sky were really good, they outright said there was a line issue right at the start because (no shit Sherlock) every line and router test was screaming line fault and that BT had been informed and it was in their hands - apparently non-BT numbers are "low priority" and there is sweet Fanny Adams Sky can do about that if they complete it within a certain window, so say there are 5 things BT has to test and fix and they have up to 5 days to test and then up to 5 days to fix then they will do it right at the last second each time (again, depending on who you get, I'm sure there are plenty of nice BT people out there, unfortunately none of them were assigned to me). That's not counting all those requests that get "lost" in the system.

Going from a bt line to a sky line takes the same amount of time (as maliA was quoted) but Sky do some sort of voodoo to make sure that your phone stays BT till the second they switch. BT will call you every day asking if you are sure/is there anything that would change your mind/would you like to take a customer satisfaction survey/we have new internet offers. Every. Single. Day. Internet switch over from BT internet is 3 days.

I'm much newer than my post count suggests so never have a clue who that is.

You roll a D20 for initiative. At least in AD&D 2nd Ed.

<grins>

I really don't understand what is wrong with the wireless connection on my desktop computer. It can see the network, with a good signal strength, but will get as far as 'connecting to wireless network' then not be able to. If you leave it alone for a while, on your return it will be connected ( although this morning it was at 1 meg). All other devices ( iPhone, iPod Touch, laptop) can connect all through the house with no problems, leading me to believe it is the wireless card is at fault. Should I get a USB dongle to use instead of the PCI card, they are about £10?

I used to have that trouble. Never could understand it.

Yeah, your wireless card is shagged.

Thank you. I'll pick up a replacement.