Yes, the standard contract is completely opaque to the employee, and they don't have the specialized knowledge required to understand it. And the company sure isn't going to help you. So value the funny-money at 0.
If the industry wants to change this perception, then there should be a widespread standardization on a contract that is fair to the employees and it should be easy for employees to understand any diffs from that standard.
If a contract is opaque to you, you get a lawyer to look it over. End of story. If you sign a contract that is opaque to you, without talking to a lawyer or at least someone knowledgeable (e.g. personal friends that are senior engineers that have talked to lawyers), you only have yourself to blame, not Silicon Valley.
It goes without saying that I've rarely found the contracts I've signed to be opaque.
It's the company who will spend thousand or tens of thousands of dollars having the contract made. It's the company who gets to amortize the costs of a complicated contract over many hiring interactions. It's the company who has the advantage of a strong information and experience asymmetry.
In short, the company has a lot more power. If somebody with power screws somebody without, I save most of my blame for the people who set things up.
Sure. But none of your perfectly valid comment changes the fact that if you are clueless about a contract, you should either talk to a lawyer (or otherwise someone knowledgeable) or decline to sign it.
It goes without saying that employment contracts all use the same language, I have never personally run into a clause I found opaque or confusing.
You are making the argument that whatever the company does is legal. That's fine and I don't disagree with it.
It's not just a matter of not understanding the entire legal contract. Someone could understand every single thing, but not realize, like you said above, "you won't be told about funding rounds if your contract doesn't mention it." They wouldn't even think about that because they aren't experts in that field.
I've negotiated plenty of employment and IP agreements. I've found 100% willingness to, at the least, discuss them. But employee options grants must often be the same for everybody. And for a normal employee (as opposed to some C-level executive hire), once you start negotiating "in case I leave early I want more rights" you are signaling bad things.
Really, all I'm telling people is "if you don't understand something fully, assume it's worthless." Your reaction is that, for some reason, employees should jump into the deep end of the pool and try to outsmart the VCs at the game they play every single day of their lives. And for what purpose? The vast majority of the time the options are going to end up at $0 anyway.
I say no. Assume legalese is written in order to screw you over. Smile and accept the options because you might get lucky, but never ever stay late at the office imagining how they will make you rich.
Yes, 100% agreed. When I'm giving people options, I want them to treat them as valuable. So I work hard to make them valuable, and for people to understand what they're getting.
But at the end of the day, they could well be worthless, and they will never mean as much to an employee as they do to me. I had to just accept that people would value them at zero. For those interactions, I just had to think of the options as something we were doing so that in case we won big, we'd all feel good about the outcome.
