throwawayoldmed

I have "phantom" stock options that "vest" (such that they are actually worth something in the event of an acquisition) but both vested and unvested shares are forfeited if I leave the company under any circumstances. So there's one bit of anecdata for you. These were granted initially to a small handful of us near the beginning of the company and since, about a third of the original group have left, forfeiting their shares.

You get what you negotiate, I guess.

It's a result of two things: The company is big, and the company is legacy.

The fact that the company is big means that there are siloed areas where, for example, the analytics team doesn't talk to the content team. Or the local station management doesn't talk to the CMS developers. These disconnects are present all over such organizations. This means that any changes are likely to be both overdesigned (because everyone has to have their input) and very slow to implement (because everyone has to approve).

The fact that the company is legacy means that they simply view the web as another outlet for their content. They don't believe in optimizing for the web because they have many surfaces for their content, and it's historically more important for, say, the paper newspaper to be laid out correctly than the web version of the same article. These sorts of people don't change their views easily, and they still don't see the web as the primary outlet for the content (they see that as the paper newspaper, or the terrestrial radio broadcast, or the terrestrial TV broadcast). The web is always secondary at best. Overcoming these attitudes is quite difficult.