RSUs switch out
People say I wish I worked at Nvidia (or whatever other company) because Nvidia RSUs went up a lot. But if you think about it the only difference is stock performance before your RSU vest (e.g. twice a year, sometimes 4 times a year or monthly). After that it's your investment decision. You can sell all at vest and immediately buy any other stock that you believe in. There will be no financial (tax or fees) difference compared to you getting the same amount of RSUs in dollars of the stock you want if you were to work somewhere else. Am I missing something?
The look back provides a good perk being locked in at 118 for 2 years
What's the look back?
@Amazon look back usually means your ESPP lets you buy stocks at the historical price some time in the past.
Remember when you get your shares they lock in the price over the next 4 years. Let's take a scenario: NVIDIA employee gets 400k in stock in 2020 at say $90 a share. When his last year is vesting it will have 10x. They have 1 million they can use to buy any other share If you got 400k over 4 years and your stock price stayed flat like SQ you'd basically just have 100k to buy whatever stock you wanted.
Saying "I wish I worked at XXX" after stock grew 10x over 4 years is the same as saying "I wish I bought stock XXX" 4 years ago and held untill now. Easy to say looking at past performance, but nobody knows what stock price would be in 4 years. You could've worked for one of those companies who's stock dropped 95% untill it vested.
I worked for a couple of those: one was a startup (all stock options became 0) another had its stock go from 20 to under a dollar There is a small difference: you can buy any stock, but you can't work at any company (at least most of us mere mortals)
You're missing that many people don't sell all at vest and immediately buy other stocks (even though that's what you're supposed to do).
Should Nvidia folks have done that?
In hindsight, obviously not, but the purpose of selling stocks immediately is that we don't have foresight.