> If you get fired, unless it qualifies under some due cause, the options should immediately vest.

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.

> 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.

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?

> (he was on a 10/20/30/40% schedule).

That's a terrible vesting schedule, but he still made millions on the 60% he vested?

Only if you are an executive. Rank and file tend to get the short end, which means you lose RSUs whether you leave voluntarily (took another job) or involuntarily (fired for cause, fired for no cause, or laid off).

This is not true in most contracts - you can negotiate for it if you're high enough level or early enough, but otherwise it's rarely the case.

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.

> options should immediately vest.

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.

Interesting how all coments on this one interpreted it as if “qeternity” describes how things are now, instead of how the poster thinks it ought to be. Whereas to me it reads as the second kind. Wonder why is that?

Did you just make that up?

Literally how my options are written.