Golden Handcuffs

GoldenHandcuffs are some sort of long-term incentive designed to keep you working at a job that you might otherwise leave. The canonical example is giving stock options to a new employee that don't fully vest until some years in the future.

There is often an implication that the work itself isn't rewarding enough on its own (intrinsically motivating) without the possibility of large financial gain somewhere down the road.

I'd rather have golden handcuffs than invisible ones. Golden handcuffs can be rapidly turned into food via a pawn shop and a grocery store.

Or, the work may be highly interesting and motivating, but the pay (not counting stock options) may be low and/or long term employment may be risky: At a venture capital startup, for example, the work may be challenging -- but being short on cash, they may offer stock options instead of high pay. Stock options in a privately held company are worthless until it goes public or is bought out by another company. But if going public / buyout happens, money rains down on your head with no "investment" on your part (...other than what you could have done or could have earned if you had worked somewhere else).

There's also the more general case: Where you start to get some good money at work and you buy into the whole UpperMiddleClass? myth: big house, the Lexus SUV, the Mercedes, the trapping of the rich and indebted. Soon, you find you have to keep the job you hate in order to fund the stuff you thought you wanted. The stuff owns you.

Yes, well, poor planning can bite you any number of ways.

I don't think that this is poor planning; it's awfully hard to predict the gradual onset of persistent greed. I think the point is that anything can become a Golden Handcuff, even if it's not explicitly presented as a reward. Many CEOs can get caught in the GoldenHandcuff? of becoming the perfect CEO, to the point where they become obsessed with it.

Sometimes I think that OverlyBroadIntellectualPropertyAgreements are a kind of GoldenHandcuffs. Companies basically say to you, "Give up that stuff; that's what we're paying you for."

Then there's the situation I found myself in over two and a half years ago: the imminent closure of my employer company, with an eighteen month lead time! Picture, if you will---the time: February 2001; the place: Sydney, Australia; the decision from the parent company: Sydney is too remote for project management from London or New York so we'll close that subsidiary, but we still want them to finish their current project so we'll give them eighteen months! The fiscal incentive to stay in an otherwise dead end job made the wait attractive, especially since they'd budgeted to cover that expense in April, 2001, only to summarily dismiss and escort to the door whole battalions of other staff elsewhere come May, 2001, when the dot.com crash became apparent!