That’s how I think of RSUs: they aren’t yours until they vest: they’re just like future pay, so you’re not really giving anything up if you leave “early”.
I would gladly wear these handcuffs :D
Your mental health?
Your physical health?
Watching your kids grow up?
Your marriage?
Etc. As other folks have alluded to it can sound relatively trivial (and sometimes it is, but often not) until you're actually staring into the abyss. The flip side is that quarterly RSU vesting is highly effective as a retention tool. I've known brilliant people pushed to their absolute breaking point before they finally leave (Amazon, I'm looking at you).
Source: Work for a non publicly traded company and have RSUs not options, previously worked for a publicly-traded company that issued RSUs and options as part of comp
That definitely didn't happen at my company. We had a round of layoffs and the package offered to people who signed an agreement not to sue only included a couple weeks of accelerated vesting. There was no performance management system in place either, so the people fired were basically just the bottom of the stack rank their managers were asked to turn in, which was often based more on personal like or dislike than performance.
There was one engineer entering his fourth year, who had saved the company 30 million dollars during his term with infrastructure efficiency improvements, who was laid off and lost millions in the RSUs that would have vested that last year (he was on a 10/20/30/40% schedule). All the ICs speculated he was fired so the company wouldn't have to pay.
And that differs from the result of a performance management system how? Maybe that rank and file didn't have to spend as much time writing reviews?
That's a terrible vesting schedule, but he still made millions on the 60% he vested?
Besides, if you get fired from a startup and it's not for cause, then it's probably because there are layoffs, so it might be a bad choice to exercise your options anyway.
Well, I agree with you that they should, but they don't. I got laid off from a job a few years ago when my department was made redundant, and I only had 25% of my shares vested - they let me keep the 25% that was vested, but that was it.