Golden Handcuffs Don’t Feel Super Golden Anymore Right Now

There’s a specific kind of tired that keeps showing up on Blind, office chatter, and in tech Slack channels lately. Not burnout exactly. More like the tired of someone who wants to leave and has done the math and the math says not yet. There has been a feeling in the air for a while now, but it was really hard to pinpoint. Here is what I think.

Golden handcuffs used to be a pretty simple trade. You stay, your equity vests, eventually you have real money and a real choice about whether to keep staying. The deal held up fine as long as the stock kept climbing and the job itself was tolerable. Neither of those things is a safe bet right now in Tech, and that’s what’s really started to change.

The Math Got Worse, Not the Concept

The mechanics of the concept of “golden handcuffs” haven’t changed. Most tech RSU grants still vest over four years with a one-year cliff. You’re still forfeiting the unvested chunk if you walk, and that chunk is still bigger the more senior you are. A junior engineer with $50,000 unvested has an easier decision than someone sitting on $400,000. None of that is new.

What’s new is the layoff timing. There’s a well-worn joke in layoff threads by now about getting cut a few weeks before a vesting date, and it keeps not being a joke. Companies aren’t required to accelerate unvested equity for someone they’re letting go, and most don’t. So the handcuffs that were supposed to reward loyalty now sometimes just evaporate anyway, on a schedule the employee didn’t control and often didn’t see coming.

That’s the part that’s actually souring people on the whole arrangement. It was never a fully fair trade, staying for money you don’t have yet in exchange for money you might get later. But at least it used to be a trade you were making. A lot of people now feel like they made the trade, held up their end, and got the deal changed on them anyway.

Staying Anyway, Just Differently

Here’s the other odd part. People aren’t necessarily leaving more because of this. If anything, a rough hiring market makes the handcuffs tighter, not looser. Nobody wants to walk away from a vesting cliff into a job search that might take eight months if not more which seems to be the trend right now in this environment. So the money is still doing its job, technically. So….People are staying.

What’s changed is what staying looks like from the inside. I’ve heard the phrase “coasting until my cliff” enough times now that it doesn’t even sound cynical anymore, just descriptive. There’s a real difference between someone who stays because they believe in the work and someone who stays because leaving costs six figures. The second kind of retention holds a team together on paper. It does not particularly help the work as we know.

Managers mostly know this, by the way. Anyone running a team through the last couple of years has had the conversation with themselves about which of their strongest people are actually engaged and which ones are just waiting out a vesting schedule with a good attitude on top. Those two things can look identical in a one-on-one for a surprisingly long time.

Why This Round Feels Different

Golden handcuffs have existed since the stock option boom of the nineties. What’s specific to this moment is the stacking of three things at once: layoffs that hit without warning, hiring that’s slow enough to make quitting feel reckless, and equity grants that, for a lot of companies, aren’t climbing the way they used to. Take away any one of those and the handcuffs are just handcuffs, mildly annoying but tolerable. Stack all three and staying starts to feel less like a choice and more like the only move on the board.

There’s also a trust piece to this that doesn’t show up in the compensation spreadsheets. A four-year vesting schedule is, functionally, a bet that the company will still want you in four years and that you’ll still want it. When people watch colleagues get cut a month before a cliff, that bet starts to look less like a retention tool and more like a countdown you have no real control over. You can’t blame someone for adjusting how hard they lean in once they’ve watched that happen to someone next to them.

So for now for many the handcuffs stay on, mostly because taking them off costs more than keeping them, and everyone involved seems to know it. The people wearing them have just gotten a lot more honest, at least to each other, about how it actually feels.

Golden Handcuffs Don’t Feel Super Golden Anymore Right Now was originally published in Bootcamp on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.