Tell HN: Splunk Forces Managers to Withhold RSUs

[thisisntright]

I’m a manager at Splunk and I’m livid. This has been happening for years, but I honestly can’t take it anymore.

Splunk forces us managers to choose people from our team to not get a focal refresh, regardless of if it’s deserved, based on some internal figure they’ve generated.

If they decide 80% of employees get their RSU refresh, and I have 10 people on my team, I must choose 2 to not get it. Even if everyone is stellar. No, we’re not allowed to spread the RSUs lighter across all employees. Someone MUST GET ZERO.

I’ve pretty much had it with this company, and now I’m worried we’re going to lose some valuable employees as a result of this psychotic philosophy. I just had to give a $0 refresh to a fantastic employee that I had to choose at random because I felt everyone deserved more incentive to keep doing a great job.

That’s it. End of rant. This account is new and anonymous for obvious reasons.

[gadders]

Email Gergely Orosz at https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/ He loves stuff like this.

[tacostakohashi]

Welcome to BigCo, where not everyone is allowed to be stellar, and it's you job to figure out who goes into which bucket.

[account-5]

Splunk are making you complicit in this situation.

Personally I would be open with you reports, tell them the company policy, be upfront about it and the fact you have no choice. Then I would propose a rota so everyone who deserved it would get it equally at some point.

Anyone unhappy with the situation can then leave. But everyone would know the that not getting it means fuck all and is just some cooperate bullshit.

Or you could quit.

[schoubey]

Big corporations can force random policies down to employees, while this obviously is bad, it could be worse(push 5-10% of the employees out of the company each year).

[FeistySkink → schoubey]

This seems like the exact intention to me.

[1letterunixname]

Well there's a choice and you've made it: you chose to follow orders.

There's another choice: collective action.

[justinclift]

Sounds like you need to hire 2 more people, with the understanding they don't need to do anything other than "take the fall" for things like this. ;)