To be fair to them, they do a pretty decent profit share every year. It is compensation based, so it's nothing life-changing (only say, 5-10% of your total compensation) but it was nice!
First and only place I've ever participated in profit sharing.
I don't know what qualifies as "massive base salaries" but most folks in Support (the team I worked on) were on around $70k+ USD base compensation.
Profit sharing happened twice a year, but I don't remember it ever going above 10% of your six-monthly compensation rate (so effectively, you got 20% at most).
It's a remote first company so i don't think most people in the support team live in San Francisco.
I don't think 70k for a support position is that bad.
I've always thought profit sharing was more fair overall than shares/options for most employees. I'm really glad to hear that this happens at relatively larger companies too.
Strongly disagree for tech companies. At tech companies there is almost always significant lag between when value is created and when profits on that value are realized. The employees who worked for Amazon for the first 10 years generated incredible value but little profit. The value of equity takes into account all of the future profits of the company, not just what is left over in any particular year. The engineers who created Windows are still being compensated for it today if they held their shares, even if they stopped working for Microsoft 20 years ago. That is fairness. The company benefits from your work even after you leave, you benefit from the company's growth due to your work.
First and only place I've ever participated in profit sharing.