That's all well and good, but there are nontrivial costs to creating a system where you need to have a lawyer vet every line of every contract you sign.
There's been a general consensus about what a "market" employee agreement contains, which lets people make decisions in a relatively uniform way between offers. If it becomes known that any company associated with a certain firm has wacko contracts and that you'll need to pay 20k in legal time to even evaluate their offer compared to others, it becomes an easy no all around.
> There's been a general consensus about what a "market" employee agreement contains, which lets people make decisions in a relatively uniform way between offers.
Is there? What counts as general consensus?
That's meant to be a serious comment. I've seen contracts that have vested stock grants expire after 2 years and some where vested grants stock never expire.
it seems to me that there isn't really any such thing as a general consensus when it comes to stock options.
It's not a question of them expiring. It's that the company issuing them had an opportunity to rebuy them at cost. I.e. your vesting schedule is completely meaningless. It's one of those situations where someone uses a word that has a specific set of associations (i.e. "I vest 25%, that means I get them right?") and then attaches terms that make it mean something else entirely ("yes, you get them, but I can take them away at my option without compensating you").
There's been a general consensus about what a "market" employee agreement contains, which lets people make decisions in a relatively uniform way between offers. If it becomes known that any company associated with a certain firm has wacko contracts and that you'll need to pay 20k in legal time to even evaluate their offer compared to others, it becomes an easy no all around.