Sure it's a risk, but it's gotta stuck for someone who took an Amazon offer for $150k total comp 2 years ago when $70k of that comes from RSUs this year, that person's take home pay is taking a big hit for no fault of their own and at lower Corp pay ranges that's a painful drop

There's a super cringrey article out there about Amazon hiring missionaries not mercenaries, meaning they want believers who want to do the work rather than someone chasing large paychecks. This came back to bite Amazon as their VP cash base was capped at 165k like all other roles, and they were losing good VPs to competors who were paying larger cash salaries and not having to wait 2 years for stock to vest. This is part of why the highly publicized base raise to 350k happened last year.

It's a problem with paying your workers in RSUs. If you run the business to optimize stock price and the line always goes up then your workers always make more year over year without increasing their cash base. Of course the market doesn't always go up, so you have this situation where workers perform great, but stock went down so they effectively make less than last year because a significant portion of their total comp comes from stock vests.

Even worse for newer workers who are just now vesting shares they got 2 years ago when the stock was worth twice as much. They've put up with a lot of shit to make it to vesting and the stock and that payday is half as much as was calculated two years back