I get a manager could be told “you have $500k of 4 year grants to give out this year”. He tells an employee “you’re getting a $100k 4 year grant.” Stock is $100 today, so that’s 1,000 shares, or 250 per year.
A year passes. Stock goes to $50. Here’s my big question: Are they still getting 250 shares this year from that grant (now with a value of $12,500) or are they getting $25,000 which is now 500 shares?
The first one is what I mean by it being set in stock and it’s the only thing I’ve seen. I get that it was calculated in dollars at the beginning, for budgeting purposes.
Something in between is what I think Coinbase and Stripe are doing, which is 1 year grants. I think they’re still frozen to number of shares at the beginning of the year (even if it’s calculated in dollars).
Offer letters having dollar values for the share grant at the time is normalish.
My well known company has always granted stocks based on dollar value. Many employees incorrectly thought it was "number of shares", but if anyone actually asked the manager who decided how many shares they would get, the answer was always "We're given a dollar budget in shares to allocate amongst our reports - the system then converts that dollar amount into shares based on the stock price at the time."
So if our company has always done it this way, I suspect many others also do it this way.