Depends on the company. I joined Twitter in 2016. The stock, which was circa 1/3rd of my total comp, had a one year cliff. 7 months in, one executive got the upper hand in a power struggle, pushing out my boss and laying off the people he hired, me included. I don't think they did it because of the stock. But I'm sure it didn't hurt. I'm still mad about it.

Disclaimer: Ex-Amazonian, so discount as you see fit based on whatever brainwashing you might assume I’ve been subjected to ;)

The rear weighted AMZN approach made sense to me in terms of both optimising retention and some proxy for reward to contribution. I say this also as someone who left after 2 years and as a result left most of their stock unvested. It definitely made the choice to leave much harder so I’d expect it to skew more heavily toward retention benefits than a typical schedule. A typical schedule has a linear growth of what you’ve vested. I’d expect the value of contribution of a person to grow over time though. More context, more experience, more everything. Hopefully that means the you 3 years from now is making a more significant contribution than the you they hired. Typical schedules hope that the increase in valuation accounts for that compounding return. AMZN have shifted it to the vesting schedule.

That said they always talk about “total compensation”. So for the stock you’re not getting in the first two years you typically get as cash via a “hiring bonus” anyway. You could always just use that cash to go buy the equivalent amount in stock, no vesting required.

If you are joining an early enough startup then your cash salary is very likely to be below-market, at least when compared to FAANG etc.

I feel like amazon-style vesting helps remove some perverse incentives.

It makes "stay 53 weeks and cash out" less appealing, it makes "stay 6 more months to hit the next cliff" less appealing, and it rewards long-haulers (who are underpaid almost everywhere else in tech).

It’s happened multiple times for me, all with extremely well known VC backed companies. Once at later stage, but applying for a very senior role, and another at an early stage, where there was a good fit.

It can be a tough sell, and recruiters are trained to just say no, but persistence pays off. Same thing applies to getting jobs in general. If you aren’t persistent in your application process and aggressive in your negotiation process, you simply won’t have the best outcomes. It just becomes easy to turn you down.