TORONTO — The federal budget is being met with disdain from Canada's innovation industry, including tech darling Shopify, which called the capital gains measures in the fiscal plan a potential cause of "irreparable harm.
This could be great for tech workers. Options are actually the worst form of compensation, and companies use them to lure employees into jobs in the tech industry that pay far lower than the same job in the US while it costs the company virtually nothing.
The real reason these guys running “innovation” companies are seething is that to compete it will mean they have to increase the base pay to tech workers (which is better for the employee) or they can issue stock instead of stock options (the issued and vested stock is taxed as income.) But they don’t want to do this because they’re greedy.
This tarnishes the allure of stock options, which is great.
That was my initial thought, before I read it again and realized it’s 250K capital gains. This isn’t triggered by having say 500K RSUs vesting. It’s triggered when your shares’ value growsby >250K in a year. 🥹
So while I agree with you on RSUs, this isn’t even touching that for almost all people but perhaps some execs.
This could be great for tech workers. Options are actually the worst form of compensation, and companies use them to lure employees into jobs in the tech industry that pay far lower than the same job in the US while it costs the company virtually nothing.
The real reason these guys running “innovation” companies are seething is that to compete it will mean they have to increase the base pay to tech workers (which is better for the employee) or they can issue stock instead of stock options (the issued and vested stock is taxed as income.) But they don’t want to do this because they’re greedy.
This tarnishes the allure of stock options, which is great.
That was my initial thought, before I read it again and realized it’s 250K capital gains. This isn’t triggered by having say 500K RSUs vesting. It’s triggered when your shares’ value grows by >250K in a year. 🥹
So while I agree with you on RSUs, this isn’t even touching that for almost all people but perhaps some execs.