I work at a smaller company, and here we convert the $ price to a number of shares by taking the 100 day VWAP of the stock from the date of the board meeting where your grant is approved.

I had to google it...

VWAP == Volume Weighted Average Price

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/v/vwap.asp

Either we work at the same place or that’s very common.

When I joined I got a random email that said “your rsu $ to shares conversion was X shares and here’s your schedule” and my schedule is all in # of shares not $

This is very common. It's basically the point of paying in RSUs and not in fixed dollars, to give employees incentive to care about the company/stock performance.

Yes, but then they take that calculation to grant you a set number of shares (ISOs, RSUs, etc.) that doesn't change. The value of your award grows with the growth of the company.

ESPP-like programs, on the other hand, are always dollar denominated and exchanged at a set rate at the end of the offering period.

GP is correct in that some companies (Stripe, MS, others) convert the dollars to shares at vest time, while others do so at grant time.

The first way makes employees lose out on an average of 2 years of stock growth.

I stand corrected, however, shares are fixed at time of grant is my point.

Because that 50k isn't necessarily exercised immediately and means that you are potentially going to benefit from a rising stock price.

all of my friends at google say the grant is in dollars and stays in dollars at google. at the end of the quarter you get a variable number of shares based on current stock price. While this reduces upside, it also reduces downside.

Wasn't true when I was (re-)hired a year ago. Grant is in dollars, it's converted to shares based on the share price when you start, and then you that fixed number of shares divided by the number of vesting periods over the term of the grant. The vesting period depends on how big the grant is; low-level employees will likely vest quarterly, mid/high-level monthly. No cliff; they removed it a couple years ago.

I've been at Google fairly recently, that's not how it works.

Your offer states that you will get $X of shares, vesting over 4 years. The $X is converted to a number of shares shortly after joining, based on market price, and is locked in from that point forward.

Your friends are mistaken.

This is correct. I believe the share-price they pick is something like the average daily share price for the next full month after you join. So if you join Jan 28, the $$ value of your stock grant will be evaluated around March 1 to determine your grant-price, and then you'll get your first vested shares monthly (around the 25th, I think?).

I believe they used to due quarterly vesting for folks who didn't get much equity, but now that you can have vesting of fractional shares, ~everybody should be on a monthly vesting schedule.

Googler here. dabfiend19 is correct, around ~2019 I believe new L3 hires were switched to this new grant schedule. Prior to that, it was based on a fixed number of shares.

Fwiw, I asked around and couldn't find a hire where this was the case. The schedules are different but the conversion to shares happens once just after your are hired.

This is a bit of a change from e.x. when I was hired and my offer letter said N shares, and so when I joined 6 months later my grant had increased in value significantly. But it's still not the situation in these other companies, where you vest 6.25% of the dollar value each quarter, converted to shares or whatever.

Actually that wouldn't really be compatible with googles vesting schedule, now that I think about it.

you have misunderstood your friends, or your friends have misunderstood their grants

Your friends might be getting mixed up with annual refresher grants. Except for some rounding of fractional shares, your initial grant will vest the same # of shares every month for 48 months

Well if the stock tanks you’ll probably be laid off. I don’t see any upside with this model for the employee.