Yes but you do still need to think about vesting schedules. If you are at a company that doesn't do uniform vesting, then e.g. $400k stock/ 4 years might be more like $50k this year, $100k next two years, $150k the last year. Not sure how levels.fyi handles this but I would say that is not really the same as +$100k/year TC during your first year, given that people can change companies often, get promotions and refreshers, etc. To me it's more like an automatic raise.
In addition to that, RSUs are taxed at around 50% before you receive them and another 20% of the value it gained from when you received it to when you sold it. So the numbers in your bank account look less impressive than the ones on paper.
Yes, but to be fair to RSUs, this is no worse than having some additional ordinary income.
The 50% on receipt number comes from your marginal federal tax bracket plus state -- same as if the dollar value were additional gross (pre-tax) income.
The 20% on growth number (potentially 25-30% including state) is what you'd pay on capital gains -- same as if you'd taken this extra income as cash and invested it in anything.
Just as an FYI, my understanding is that Google, FB, and MS all offer 25% annual vesting with no cliff, the exact vesting schedule depends (for Google, for example, it depends on the exact grant, but a 400K grant would vest monthly). Amazon offers a 5/15/40/40 backloaded vesting schedule, but cash bonuses in years 1 and 2 to compensate (sort of).
Maybe I don't know exactly what cliff vesting is, but while Microsoft doesn't backload vesting, it does do vesting in chunks (like once a year iirc). And as another commenter pointed out it doesn't kick in until 6 months. But at places like google the vesting is monthly and starts after the first month.
Also one quirk of microsoft is since they have a half-title promotion system, as I understand it, it's normal to get refreshers on years 1-3 through a 4 year vest after a half-title/one-level promotion.
