Rising investment in AI infrastructure has pushed up the shares of Nvidia, Broadcom and AMD, leaving many tech workers sitting on stock awards that have become too valuable to walk away from. The trade-off is simple and brutal: leave the company, and you may also leave behind millions of dollars in equity that has not vested yet.
Rob Waters is one example. In 2025, a day after Google laid him off, another team at the company offered to rehire him for a six-figure AI sales specialist role. He turned it down.
What changed his thinking was the layoff itself. When he left Google, he also lost hundreds of thousands of dollars in unvested equity. Wealth that had built up in company stock over several years was never really his. “All my unvested equity was gone,” he said. “I went from a six-figure income to zero.”
That experience pushed him to run a different calculation. If risk was unavoidable, he decided he would rather take it on himself. Instead of going back to Google, he started AI startup Kanawai AI.
From golden handcuffs to silicon handcuffs
Waters’ decision lines up with a broader shift in Silicon Valley. Stock-based compensation has long been used to keep employees in place. As share prices climb, RSUs become more valuable and the cost of quitting rises with them. In the AI cycle, that mechanism has become heavier, and the companies holding the keys are no longer just software giants.
Surging shares in Nvidia, Broadcom and AMD have multiplied equity wealth for some employees in only a few years. Once a job carries millions of dollars in unvested stock, leaving is no longer just a career move. It becomes a decision to give up money that could reshape a family’s finances.
This is not new in principle. Since the end of 2022, Meta, Alphabet, Amazon, Apple and Microsoft have all seen their shares at least double. That lifted the value of stock awards across big tech and made departures more expensive. What has changed is where the strongest pull now sits.
Levels.fyi, which tracks Silicon Valley compensation data, says Broadcom, Nvidia and AMD have outperformed Google, Amazon and Microsoft since January 2023. Hakeem Shibly, a data analyst at the platform, said, “Other than Meta, even AMD, the worst-performing AI chip company, has outperformed other large tech companies over the past two years.”
Levels.fyi uses the term “silicon handcuffs” to describe that shift. In the earlier version, workers were tied down by stock at Google, Amazon or Microsoft. Now the most expensive equity is increasingly found at AI infrastructure companies.
Nvidia and Broadcom show how fast exit costs can climb
Nvidia is the clearest case. Its share price has risen sharply in recent years, and its market value at one point reached $4.5 trillion. A stock package worth $488,000 when granted to an employee in 2023 is now worth more than $2.2 million.
Levels.fyi data shows that some Nvidia employees have seen the value of their equity grants rise by more than 350% since joining the company in 2023. But the stock has not all vested. If they left now, they could be giving up more than $500,000.
Broadcom has produced similar outcomes. One employee who received $66,000 in RSUs in 2023 said the award is now worth about $265,000. Two other employees said their RSUs are now worth more than $6 million. One Broadcom worker estimated the value of those RSUs at more than six times annual salary.
One Nvidia employee planning to leave after shares vest put it bluntly: “If I wanted to leave right now, I don’t think I could get the same pay anywhere else.”
That is the practical math many tech workers face. If someone receives a four-year stock package worth $1 million and the share price triples, the package becomes worth $3 million. Leave after two years, and the unvested half could still be worth $1.5 million. The cost of leaving rises threefold with the stock.
How vesting schedules keep people in their seats
The mechanics of RSUs are straightforward. Employees receive a set amount of restricted stock when they join. The award typically vests over four years, with a one-year cliff that releases an initial portion at once, followed by gradual vesting until the full grant is earned.
That structure makes timing decisive. A worker who leaves in month 11 of the first year loses 100% of the grant. The cliff creates a switching cost that ordinary salary cannot easily replicate.
By early 2026, the tech sector was dealing with what the report calls a retention paradox. Average tenure at large companies such as Google and Meta sits at about two to four years, but that does not necessarily reflect satisfaction. It reflects vesting cycles. Once stock fully vests after four years, many workers depart in what is often described as “vesting out.” Tenure data can therefore mask deeper issues such as burnout.
Companies have ways to extend the lock-in. One is a vesting refresher, in which a new grant is issued around two and a half years into employment, layering a fresh four-year cycle on top of the old one. Amazon has also used a back-loaded structure, with vesting at 5%, 15%, 40% and 40%, pushing the biggest upside to the end of the contract.
Nvidia, by contrast, has started using a front-loaded approach that has also appeared at Google, Uber, DoorDash and Pinterest. Employees receive the largest piece of equity in the first year, functioning like a signing bonus to attract top talent. Additional awards then depend on performance. Underperform, and the follow-on grants shrink.
In its annual sustainability report, Nvidia said “RSUs drive retention.” The company said attrition fell from 5.3% in 2023 to 2.5% in 2025, a drop of more than half. Chief executive Jensen Huang has said publicly that he made employees rich. Nvidia also said 20% of employees have been at the company for more than 10 years and 40% for more than five years.
Broadcom reported a global voluntary attrition rate of 6.2% last year, “below technology industry benchmarks,” and described equity awards as a “powerful long-term retention incentive.”
The side effects of runaway stock compensation
There is another side to soaring equity values: some employees no longer need to work as hard as they once did.
One Nvidia employee described a “lottery winner syndrome,” saying the stock had appreciated so much that matching the opportunity elsewhere was difficult. In some cases, longtime employees hold RSUs worth far more than newer hires, and that gap is openly discussed inside the company.
Some workers said certain managers who have been around long enough to see their holdings compound are simply “resting and vesting.” Others, faced with unusually valuable equity, become more willing to push harder and less willing to challenge decisions in meetings.
Levels.fyi data shows total compensation for a mid-level software engineer at Nvidia rose from about $360,000 in October 2023 to roughly $670,000 now. At Broadcom, engineer pay went from about $343,000 to about $576,000. At AMD, it moved from about $230,000 to about $278,000.
When people stay mainly to wait for equity to vest, dissatisfaction can coexist with immobility. Productivity can fall sharply. The result, the report argues, is a pool of “zombie veterans” occupying senior headcount while contributing the minimum required. That can block younger, more ambitious talent and slow the organization down.
In 2025, senior engineers at high-growth AI companies saw total compensation rise 200% from stock appreciation alone, separate from base salary. Employers get a more predictable labor supply. Employees build large fortunes. The cultural bill, though, keeps growing.
One Nvidia employee framed the choice in family terms: “A lot of them have families and probably think rationally, ‘Why would I leave a job that can make sure my kids never have student loans?’”
That captures the direct effect of stock compensation. It turns work into a long-duration wealth plan. Employees accumulate larger assets. Companies get lower voluntary attrition. The two outcomes are connected, but they are not the same thing.
For some, accumulated stock becomes a way out
Not everyone chooses to stay. Julie Zhu, 29, spent nearly four years at Apple as a product designer. She had wanted to start a business since age 18 and described her relationship with Apple as one of love and resentment: grateful for what she learned, tired of the pressure, and eager for more control.
Zhu never sold any Apple stock, and Apple shares had performed well. Last year, she left to found collectibles company Odd One In. Quitting meant giving up the last quarter of her unvested Apple stock, but the equity she had already built up was enough to fund a three- to five-year runway. In her case, stock was not a cage. It became startup capital.
Yousuf Imran spent about six years at Google and saved $350,000 before leaving, money he planned to use for living costs and a startup. In April this year, he left Google and started an AI sales tools company. He said the rich equity packages offered in recent years by companies such as OpenAI and Anthropic also shaped his thinking.
“If the only way to get real upside in this AI moment is equity,” he said, “at some point you ask yourself whether that equity should be in your own company.”
Dave Lewis worked for more than a decade across Google, Amazon and Microsoft before Microsoft laid him off in October 2025. Years of stock-based pay had given him room to choose. In May this year, he joined AI startup Emberos to lead partnership work.
Those cases show that handcuffs do not always keep people in place forever. Once equity reaches enough scale, it can also finance an exit. Some companies and platforms are now trying to deal with the unvested-equity problem more directly.
In 2026, some “equity swap” platforms emerged, offering workers a way to convert unvested stock from large tech companies into startup equity. Before that, some high-growth startups had already used signing bonuses and similar payments to compensate candidates for walking away from unvested RSUs.
The wall created by four-year vesting schedules is starting to loosen in small but visible ways.
Stock compensation is not job security
The easiest point to miss is that stock-based pay never equals employment protection.
Evan Richardson grew up in Silicon Valley. In his view, tech had long looked like a relatively stable path to wealth: high income, valuable stock and what seemed to be a lower risk of unemployment. In March 2025, at age 43, he was laid off by payments company Square. Block, Square’s parent, later said it would cut 931 jobs, about 8% of its workforce.
Another former Microsoft employee who had spent more than a decade there was also laid off in 2025. She had held a large amount of Microsoft stock and had assumed savings plus equity would be enough for retirement. After Microsoft shares fell, she had to revisit that assumption.
That is where the handcuffs become most complicated. When both work and wealth are tied to the same company stock, a rising share price can build wealth quickly, but a falling share price can hit income, assets and retirement plans at the same time.
From January through March 2025, US tech companies announced 37,097 job cuts, down 13% year over year but still substantial. In the same period of 2023, the number was 102,391. In California alone, the tech sector disclosed 17,874 layoffs in the first quarter of that year. Meta, Google, Autodesk and Workday all announced cuts, and Intel also reduced headcount sharply.
At Autodesk, about 1,350 roles were affected, roughly 9% of the workforce. Maria Jose Calero, a project manager who had been there six years, began looking at jobs in healthcare and hospitality, but worried a new salary would not cover her mortgage and her daughter’s daycare. “It’s hard to leave tech,” she said. “It’s like golden handcuffs. Where do you find something that matches what you used to make?”
Adam Espinoza, a software engineer laid off by Meta, said he had met every requirement and was even discussing a promotion with his manager when he was told he would be cut. He believes engineers who fail to keep exceeding expectations could be replaced by AI, or by lower-paid hires. Even so, he does not plan to leave tech.
One financial adviser described the problem in practical terms: many clients have millions of dollars in company stock on paper but cannot easily use it. Some want a second home. Others need to pay college tuition for their children. They are not poor, but they are illiquid. If compensation, retirement savings, college funding and lifestyle are all tied to the same stock, one bad earnings call can threaten both a job and a retirement plan.
Retention tools also reshape internal power
A study published in October 2025 in the International Review of Economics & Finance found that executive equity incentive plans reduced turnover among targeted employees by about 16%, while increasing turnover among non-target executives by 43%.
That suggests these plans do more than retain core staff. They also alter power inside the company. People outside the incentive pool are more likely to leave. People inside it are more likely to stay, even when staying may not be in their own interest.
Forbes has described golden handcuffs as “benefits and salary that become a prison.” A psychologist quoted in the report pointed to an identity trap underneath it: fear that leaving means no longer being seen as successful. The labor market does not care how long someone stayed loyal. It cares what they can do next. Convincing yourself to leave may be the easy part. Staying in the wrong place for money can be its own kind of failure.
This article was sourced from the Tencent Technology WeChat account. Author: Zhou Xiaoyan. Editor: Xu Qingyang.