The companies that are changing this are the ones whose stock tanked, and they are worried that employees will leave because of it. Companies whose stock did not tank are retaining their normal compensation programs.
When public companies give stock to their employees, they dilute the stock as much as if they issued stock and sold it. So the cost of that compensation is the same as if it were in cash.
If everyone knows that say, Netflix's stock price is guaranteed to go up 20% a year for the next 5 years, then the market price of that stock would suddenly jump up to the point where it no longer makes excess returns. So the market price of the stock reflects the company's (risk-adjusted) growth potential already. This also applies to non-public companies with any amount of maturity - the marginal investor has a good sense of what the company is worth and does not want to lose out by issuing stock below that.
Put these two together and giving employees stock is economically not very different to giving them money and they choosing to invest it in mutual funds. The main difference is that you make your employees' lives slightly harder - with taxation and with the fact that they need to sell stock to get cash for what they want to buy or invest in.
The reason that stock options are preferred, especially for private companies, are none of them very good. Firstly employees have an inflated perception of what their company will be worth in the future. They assume that it's going to be AirBnB, not WeWork, not Palantir, and not the failed start-up that you've never heard of. Secondly employees also don't correctly discount uncertainty. Would you rather have the cash to buy your dream home/pay off your mortgage, or take a 10% chance of 10 times that amount of money? To most of us the second option is worth considerably less. Thirdly companies sometimes feel better about giving out pieces of paper that they have an unlimited supply of than giving out their own cash, even though it's a wash financially. And lastly there used to be some tax advantages to firms paying with stock options - those were loopholes which have largely been closed.
Making your employees into investors (by giving them stock options) only made economic sense when venture capital money was scarce and expensive. This has not been the case for a long time.
That's my point. There are times at which people think this is what it's going to do, and after it's done it lots of people believe it to have been clear in hindsight. But the situation where people know in advance for sure that there will be huge excess returns never occurs.
Netflix is a great example. Would you have been keen to take a large amount of income deferred and in stock at the point when streaming was just a weird perk bundled with the DVD mailing subscription?
Companies DO prefer to grant RSU instead of cash bonus, because it'll provide liquidity to their stock and make employees engaged with the company's performance. One of Netflix's benefit is they're cash heavy in their compensation, which SWE do prefer.
The dilution is not a problem, since they'll buyback stocks anyway.
Of course, the stock price might have gone down, but also it might not. Companies don't usually time buybacks right to buy stock cheaply.
This is exactly why companies are doing it.
If you're compensated in units of stock and the stock price goes down, you are incentivized to switch to another company to restart the whole process.
It's a negative feedback loop. Company struggles -> stock price declines -> employees leave -> company struggles more -> repeat.
I know employees want the best of both worlds (stock appreciation when it goes up, refreshers when it goes down) but realistically I expect more companies to move toward defined cash payouts now that we're out of the unusual bull market of the past decade.
Many of the companies that are doing this are near-IPO or post-IPO trying to make their finances better. With GAAP, IIUC RSUs are recorded as expenses/count against shareholder equity at the vested price. So if you are a company trying to become GAAP profitable, even if you don’t claw back old appreciated grants, you can prevent the problem going forward/appease shareholders concerned about the impact on GAAP profitability by preventing appreciation. A long-dated RSU is a liability that can become expensive.
Also personally I think getting highly appreciated RSU comp can introduce incentives like employees staying at a company longer than they should or want to (ie because they are burnt out or disengaged) since it may not be possible to find another job that compensates you nearly as much. And, it creates very large pay gaps - an entry level employee who joined 2 years ago may be making more than a staff level employee hired recently.
I think RSUs are amazing for employees and the vesting/expected refresher details are a very important thing I look at when evaluating working somewhere. But many other people probably just look at the Year1 TC which doesn’t include appreciation or refreshers at all. I think enough people are like me that traditional RSUs won’t disappear any time soon, but I expect more companies to try to see what they can get away with in reducing equity comp.
If there was collusion going on, compensation never would have skyrocketed over the past decade.
It's a combination of corruption, collusion, widespread inefficiencies that limits high salaries at the margins (meaning that the marginal company available to each employee is never desperate), very high pre-payroll hidden taxation. Also, importantly I think, a lack of competition between multiple globally dominant tech companies with huge profits per employee and a very obvious pathway to monetizing each additional employee's labor.
So, complex answer. But I'd stake money that collusion, often silently government-sanctioned, is significantly more common than in the US.
An example of this is very common in Norway, where practically all education is state-funded and the number of students for each profession is directly decided by the state. Private-sector interest groups have almost direct control over some of these processes, disguised as a public debate in the newspapers leading up to quota decisions. This leads to an almost planned economy of the availability of professionals.