Does the stock grant someone can get on joining a company vary based on stock price?

Yes. However, the grant doesn't vary in dollars but in the # of shares.

For these big public companies, they have a target comp in mind for every employee. Let's say they have chosen $200k target comp for a Google L3 like yourself and your base salary is $150k. That means they want to give you $50k worth of Google stock every year:

• Current price: As of 3/22/25, Google is trading at ~$166/share, which means that they need to award 300 shares per year to get $50k. For an offer (let's just assume they use $166 for simplicity's sake), they will give a 4-year grant of 1,200 shares with 300 vesting each year.
• Surge: Now let's say Google has surged back to all-time high levels and returned to $200/share. This means they only need to award 250 shares per year or 1,000 shares across a 4-year grant to reach the target comp.

Tactically, this means you want to join the company when the stock is low so that it rises during your time at the company. Since the grant is locked to # of shares (it doesn't dynamically go up or down based on price), this scenario means you are getting a raise without having done anything.

On the flip side, if the company's stock drops while you're there, you have functionally gotten a pay cut due to your RSU grant losing value.

Many companies don't like this comp volatility, so they are shortening the grant duration from 4 years down to 2 or even 1 year. My former company Robinhood is on 1-year grants now. This caps both upside and downside so your floor and ceiling are closer to one another.

I recommend watching our comp masterclass as well: [Masterclass] Understanding And Optimizing Your Pay In Tech

I talk about the dynamics of the stock price here: Rahul's Compensation Journey To $800K (and behind-the-scenes)

tl;dr The company will fulfill the promise of the dollar value of its offer. But once you start at the company, this dollar value gets translated into a certain number of shares, the value of which will go up or down based on the market.

This leads to some weird incentives, as you call out. For example:

• Snapchat had a policy where the # of shares you'd get was based on the price of the stock the day before your start date.
• Facebook had a policy where the # of shares you'd get was based on the avg of the prior 1 month stock price.

In both cases, and especially in the case of Snap, you weridly hoping that the stock crashes right before you join. And then you hope that the stock recovers after the translation happens between $$ and # of shares.

The other interesting consequence of this model is around the vesting period. If a company does a standard 4-year cliff, you've "locked in" the price from your start date. So if the company goes up 5x in value, you are being dramatically overpaid in the latter years.

To combat this (on both the upside and downside), some companies have started to give out 1 year stock grants, so you are guaranteed a certain dollar value each year based on the company share price at that time.