Take the Gardening Leave
Also Peloton, Anthony Levandowski, Silvio Gesell and Patrick Byrne.
Big hedge fund D.E. Shaw & Co. is offering its employees a sweet deal in which, when they quit the firm, it will give them between three months and a year of fully paid vacation. Wait, no, not just fully paid; they’ll be paid 150% of their salary for this farewell vacation, and keep their health insurance. They’ll get paid more for not working there than for working there.1 The only catch, and it is hardly worth calling a catch, is that during these months of well-compensated idleness, they can’t go work for another hedge fund. Well but why would they? It seems to me that getting paid 150% of a hedge fund salary to not work at a hedge fund is obviously strictly better than getting paid 100% of a hedge fund salary to work at a hedge fund.
Amazingly, not everyone at D.E. Shaw sees it that way: