>>60589352>>60589455MSFT employee here. It's different for every company. For MSFT, after your annual evaluation you get a cash bonus (that's deposited immediately) and a stock bonus which is some amount of dollars converted into shares at today's price. You don't get these shares immediately. You get a chunk of them every 3 months for 5 years, so a total of 20 payments (they "vest" at this rate). If you resign/get fired, you lose all future vests. Just to get a sense for it my last cash bonus was ~20k and the stock bonus ~30k. Since the stock keeps going up this works really nicely. If it goes down you kinda get screwed but that's they way it is.