You've completely misunderstood vesting. It's not to keep you there for extra time. You can consider your base salary in terms of dollars per day, week, pay per

You've completely misunderstood vesting. It's not to keep you there for extra time. You can consider your base salary in terms of dollars per day, week, pay period, month, quarter, year, or FOUR YEARS. Any time span you like. Your RSU grant is simply scaled to four years instead of 1 year, or 1 month for that matter. The point of the RSUs vesting, instead of just being granted all at once, is that you are incentivized to put in a real effort. If your efforts help result in the company doing well, you get to share in the profit -- your $1 award today becomes $5 by the time it vests. The value of your RSU increased in direct correlation to the value that YOU ADD to the company. It gives you skin in the game and keeps people working hard. In fact, management is not incentivized to be stingy with some small "finite" number of RSUs. They are incentivized to hand them out liberally, giving everyone lots of reasons ($$$) to work hard hard hard.