Its just one part of a companies toolbox to increase retention.
If you would tell me that i get my current additional bonus as it is without splitting it up to 3 years, i would of course take it but i assume that internally they were able to form/create this type of program and the 3 years was an internal bargain chip.
> [Golden Handcuffs are] one part of a companies toolbox to increase retention.
Not in any way that's good for the company, though. That'd be a classic application of optimizing for the metric, not in what you really want optimized.
Usually if an employee is staying solely or mostly because of the handcuffs, they're not producing their best work, and aren't fully engaged or focused. Do you really want to keep an employee like that around? Wouldn't you rather they left, voluntarily?
On the flip side, as an employee, I like the idea of golden handcuffs. In a hypothetical situation where I didn't like where I worked, I could drop down to doing the minimal amount of work that wouldn't get me fired, and coast along while collecting the money. Sure, it's not a particularly fulfilling life, and probably wouldn't be sustainable for the long term, but maybe it's not that bad for a while.
> Usually if an employee is staying solely or mostly because of the handcuffs, they're not producing their best work
I know plenty of people with handcuffs, including me, and this doesn't apply to any of them. I think that claim is common but is in fact not justified in the real world. Your top performers are basically top performers for personality reasons.
Sure, if your company spends 10+ years getting to liquidity, which became popular in the mid-201x because not a single one of them was even remotely financially sound and the markets weren't ready to bite that off yet, you had people staying years longer than they should have, but it is not nearly as big a problem as people claim and was, mostly, because the real value was being captured by early/founder insiders in late stage super-sized PE rounds instead of going public.
I'm not aware of this schema in big companies or smaller ones. Getting a head count is hard, hiring is a lot of effort.
For everything else you have service providers. If you wanna be independent and work per task, thats a totally different story all together.
You have to do acquisition yourself, you have to do training yourself but you earn a lot more money faster.
I still prefer the jobs where i hire/control an external person while having my career in a stable work environment. Which also means i'm the expert and while you can get experts from external, as a company you still need your experts who keep all the business experience with them.
i would not subscripe to saying a year or 6 month is frequently.
At least for me frequently is 1-3 years while i do wanna know why you left your company after a year.
But it is easy to come up with a reason why you switched early and in this market, i take one person who swtiched early but feels like a good candidate over one who feels like a bad one.
The market in germany was empty the last 5 years, we were happy to get what we could.
My parents don't know how to do this and would call me and stop trying to 'solve it'
Chrome and Firefox are quite visual in this regard.