Cooling Stock Market Has Some Tech Giant Employees Exploring Their Options

Stock-based compensation is less exciting when the stock goes down.

It hasn’t been a pleasant year for the tech giants so far, who’ve lost billions in market cap in 2022. Meta’s share price is down 6% this year, Alphabet is down 8%, while Apple, Amazon, and Microsoft are all down approximately 10%. More losses may be coming as the Federal Reserve prepares to raise interest rates, and the declines already have some tech giant employees considering what’s next.

The tech giants pay via a combination of stock and cash, and when the stock doesn’t go up, it exposes them to retention and recruitment issues. Employees can more easily overlook bad managers or subpar compensation packages when times are good — as they have been over the past two years — but it’s harder to do that in a sluggish market. When share prices tank, people start looking around.

“This is the first time, at least in modern Amazon history, that the stock has had challenges for a prolonged period of time,” Jake Singer, an ex-Amazon employee, told me. “Is it just my LinkedIn,” he wrote recently on the social network, “or is everyone I worked with at Amazon quitting?