Plunging stock prices pressure compensation strategies of Amazon, Roku

A pandemic-fueled hiring frenzy, followed by a dramatic stock-market collapse, is piling pressure on the compensation strategies of public tech companies such as Roku, Uber, Pinterest, and even Amazon.Engineers and other workers have been wooed in recent years with generous chunks of equity, known as restricted stock units, or RSUs. The awards are often valued based on the market price on the day they're granted.That worked great when tech stocks were rising. In the first quarter of this year, the company granted 1.4 million RSUs, more than double in the same period of 2021, according to an Insider analysis of regulatory filings. Neil Campling, the head of technology, media, and telecom research at Mirabaud Securities, said large companies like Facebook and Google are "using their size and scale as a weapon — to retain talent rather than lose them with many recent hires underwater on their stock-based compensation plans." Facebook, already generous with RSUs, went from granting 41 million in the first quarter of 2021 to 66 million a year later, a 62% increase.