With this said, from reading the article, this move seems reminiscent of Netflix's pay structure, in the sense of offering a higher cash portion but lower equity. Some people here already mentioned that this was already sort of the case with a sign on bonus compensating for the backloaded vesting structure. From my experience interacting w/ professionals outside the FANG bubble, equity tends to be a bit confusing, so I wonder if a move towards bigger cash portions is a way to try to lure people who wouldn't otherwise be looking at big tech as a prospective career choice.

What's also curious to me is that bumping up cash comp is in direct opposition to the trends from some other tech giants, where they are frontloading equity vesting. My sample size might just be small, but it feels like cash comp seems to correlate somewhat with bearish stock feeling and that frontloaded equity tends to correlate w/ bullish stock feeling. Would love to hear whether I'm off the mark here or not.

1. They give cash that is generally 20% higher than average market price.

2. If you convert your cash into options, you don't pay the income tax for the forfeited cash. It's your choice on how much cash you'd like to convert. And of course, if you joined company by 2015 or so, and consistently converts, say 40% (or whatever percentage other FAANG companies use) of your cash, you should be have enough money to to retire and focus on angel investing.

3. They give you a discount of the options. It used to be 5X. That is, if you forfeit $1 of income and the strike price of options is $1, you get to have 5 options instead of 1. That is, if the stock price increases by 25% compared to the strike price, you'll make even, roughly speaking.

4. They options expire in 10 years! I mean, 10 years!

5. Options vest every month. The strike price is the the price of stock of that month (not sure if it's average of the month or at the time of vest). Combining this and #4, employees will make money as long as Netflix stock has volatility. The only scenarios that employees will lose money is that the stock price keeps going down for 10 years or there is not enough volatility.

6. They don't give bonus. If you perform really well, you will become more important to the company, and you get a hefty raise. The raise stays.

If this is not fair, I don't know what is.

I personally view this as a strength of Netflix. They have such a wonderful culture that empowers its engineers to focus on building and being autonomous. They don't need people to drive company wide initiatives most of the time.

It was on the day of vesting (1st business day of the month) at the close that day. So we used to root for a huge single day drop on the first trading day of the month (mostly jokingly).

Does this example need another prerequisite "and the current price of NFLX is $1"? Because if the example runs with NFLX at, say $10, then each option already have an intrinsic value of $9.

And combined with #5, those options look like at-the-money call options that expire in 10 years. But in this case it won't make any sense to set the option price (the amount of income to forfeit for each option) according to either strike price or stock price -- shouldn't it be set according to the difference between the two?

Correct.

> But in this case it won't make any sense to set the option price (the amount of income to forfeit for each option) according to either strike price or stock price -- shouldn't it be set according to the difference between the two?

The difference is always $0. The option strike is the same as the current price. The option price is 40% of the current stock price/strike price.

Let's say you make $180K. You opt to put 50% into stock. So each month you will buy $7500 worth of options. On month one, the stock price is $750. The option discount is 60%, so you get your options at $300 each. You buy 25 options at a $750 strike.

So now you're down $7500. But if the stock goes up 40% to $1050, you've broken even. If you exercise your option you buy the shares at $750, sell it at $1050, and make $300 a share.

But the real advantage comes if the stock goes up say 50%. Now you can make a profit of $375 a share, so you just made a 25% gain on your initial investment. It takes a while to break even, but once you do, you have extreme leverage.

People who went stock heavy usually made more from the options than salary, at least in the 2010s.

It would probably be a lot cheaper to change their hiring practices to be less strict and reinvest some of that money in training.

Isn’t that what a boomerang promotion is?

- Bob works at Amazon as a SDE 2

- Bob finds getting promoted to SDE 3 is hard (despite being qualified) because the bar for promotion is too nitpicky/convoluted/whatever

- Bob quits and goes to work somewhere else

- Bob then applies for a job at Amazon again, but for a SDE 3 role. He lands the job, effectively getting a promotion in a really roundabout way.

The premise is that getting hired as a SDE 3 is presumably easier for someone who was already a successful SDE 2 than it is to navigate promotion committee politics internally for that same SDE 3 title.

This "trick" isn't limited to any specific company or role level; rather it's mostly a hypothetical scenario that is used as an insider joke when there's a perception of an overly obtuse promotion criteria.

In the context of this thread, I'm guessing they're saying that lowering the hiring bar would effectively open the floodgates for ex-amazon people to join back at higher paying roles since they were already able to pass the previously harder interviews.

Plus most shops will filter you out a resume screening level itself.

I had a few friends who went 100% stock (which meant that they technically qualified for food stamps and medicare since it was pretax dollars) and some went 70%.

A company so large as to literally run out of humans.

Happened with their warehouse workers too.

https://www.essence.com/news/amazon-burning-through-workers/

It's not the size, its the attrition that's the problem. Everything would be fine if they retained employees, but stackranks for the stackrank god.

I won't read it that way. This is upper threshold, not some number a L5 SDE would hope to get.

Frugality is still frugality.

If they had too many candidates and not enough positions, it makes sense, but in the opposite scenario you just lose our on candidates that hate those tests.

As a recently posted article here said[0]: "My hunch with those companies was that it wouldn't have been a major issue if I was video-ing in from the State Penitentiary (due to murder charges) as long as I solved the algorithms correctly"

[0]:https://www.joshcsimmons.com/posts/why-i-quit-shopify

IMO it is an attempt at employee retention as well as attracting new talent.

Purely anecdotal on my part, but I've seen post after post on LinkedIn of senior/tenured Amazonians moving on to other roles after five, ten, and even fifteen years. The stock performance has been pretty flat for the last few years, so the TC growth is lagging behind the gains you could get from being a new hire.

Also a base salary cap of $160,000 is really low. Not everyone joining Amazon wants a large portion of potential comp to fluctuate with the whims of the market. This increases the choices for TC configuration. If you wanna have lots of base and a minimal RSU grant, you now have the option.

When I went through the process, it was pretty confusing to understand but the gist is that they try to hit a total compensation of whatever your target is. And when they quote the total compensation of your salary 3 or 4 years in, they assume that the stock has appreciated by 15% per year. So 15% of your potential gains (compounding per year) of getting RSUs and exposure to Amazon stock is removed.

Maybe, just maybe they can try and get rid of their crazy PIP policies to try and retain talent .

Netflix gives you 100% of your total comp in whatever form you choose: all cash, all stock, or any combination in between. Also, Netflix's stock plan vests immediately-- they don't try to lock you in with 4-year vesting. They view stock compensation as something you've earned, so there are no strings attached.

It's well known that for top roles, Amazon's pay ranges are often well below their peer companies. You can see this on https://levels.fyi. So it makes sense that Amazon is trying to catch up.

So rather than address the problems that are giving rise to this extremely poor reputation and commensurate attrition rates -- the only "fix" that Amazon can think of is to offer people more cash so that the net experience becomes somewhat more palatable.

At the end of the day, it's a job. And jobs that pay the most usually recruits the best.

If they're looking at $350k base salary plus incentives, I may give them another look, especially if I can still do WFH.

Monetary compensation is certainly important and, if driven high enough, can account for extremely poor scores in other areas - but most people will tend to be pretty holistic about their job search. If I posted a job with a 700k compensation that was accompanied by constant 24/7 stress and existential dread you'd be surprised how many senior people would pass on that opportunity.

Amazon have launched more successful non-core businesses than any other big tech company. I suspect there's a belief throughout the company that qualities of the culture that lead to high attrition rates are the same qualities that breed revenue growth and success. In turn, that explains the reluctance to address those issues.

Microsoft, Google, Facebook, etc. Those have always been pure tech plays. Amazon started out competing with Barnes and Noble.

But yes, I get what you mean. Companies are very reluctant to change the secret sauce.

I can hardly imagine earning $350k a year. I've never earned a third of that anually. What I can imagine is a job that places such a demand on my time and attention that I don't have time for a life outside of it.

Most of the reason those big companies can pay software developers so we’ll is that they are worth it, and they can be worth it because they have more leverage: if you do something that causes a small company to be 1% better, and if that same thing would make a small part of a massive company 0.5% better, the latter can be worth a lot more just because the denominator is so much bigger. It feels harder to explain why they must pay so much. The first order argument is that there is lots of demand for software developers and that pushes up the price, but these companies are active in markets where developers are paid less well (e.g. Europe) and they could adjust hiring to favour candidates who are good but less competitive (e.g. because they are bad at a particular kind of interview) so I don’t understand why market forces haven’t lead to things being more balanced.

However in the case of Amazon this isn't based on "imagining" but extremely widespread reports across multiple sources.

If your children hate you or you lose the love of your life -- or you ruin your health -- then what's the point of all that money and free time?

Ultimately it's a decision that you'd have to make depending on what you care about. You could turn your question on it's head; what's the point of having children or a significant other if you are incapable or unwilling when you could be making money for the things you do care about in life?

That's a good point, actually.

Which I will bookmark as the perfect description of the kind of personality profile that is most suited to working at Amazon-- and perhaps the only personality type that can thrive there, actually.

I prefer a bit tougher job that means I'll be financially free in 10 years. It also means my wife doesn't have to work and can really focus on raising our children.

I've worked some long days, but not 16hrs. Plus I really dig the projects I'm on.

You can ruin all that on a 70K job.

There are several companies where the revenue they create per employee is so astronomical that reasonable work-life balance and high pay are on the table.

Especially so if you are single income family.

How on earth can you say that $350k is "not that much"?

Also, I'd be curious to know where you get your numbers from - simply because numbers for total comp (across all companies) seems hard to come by. One can't go by what's posted on levels.fyi of course, because that's skewed heavily towards people who have ... something to brag about.

Yeah it really still is. Living in the bay area as a single 20 something making that kind of money you are approaching 1% status. Rent is a little higher sure, but what really is the difference between $2k/month and $4k/month when you're bringing home $20k+/month? And everything else in California besides housing is the same as anywhere else really in terms of cost of living.

You don't bring 20k+ per months, more like 9k+ after tax/401k contribution. And stock grants are liquid assets, but they are not cash, and most people I know won't exercise them right away, so they are still numbers in certain DB table

That's the point these companies don't get, and never will get.

All of their mouthed pronouncements about "wellness" and "work-life balance" notwithstanding.

Speak for yourself, I guess.

I would strap myself into the torture machine from Clockwork Orange for 8 hours a day if you paid me $350k to do it.

The magic wears off fast and it doesn’t go as far as you imagine.

OTOH, the backloaded vesting system works. It was easy to hire people out of their first year at Amazon, but almost impossible to hire someone after a few years when the bulk of their vesting was right around the corner. I talked to a lot of people who admitted being miserable but felt they couldn’t leave until they got the equity that they had been toiling over for the past few years.

Weird situation all around. We eventually reduced our recruiting out of that particular Amazon office because so many of the people coming out of it were deeply disgruntled with the tech industry in general. Really changed my view of Amazon.

For instance I received an offer that was 160 base, 325 cash bonus and 5% of my RSUs for my first year, putting my TC at ~510k. Second year was a slightly smaller bonus, and 15% of my RSUs.

Is it possible that when folks were voluntarily disclosing comp they were just including base comp and not total comp?

Jeebus man. What is it that you FAANG developers do that is so much more complex than what regular developers do?

For reference: I do Angular and Python development. Is there like some open source project or code samples that give an idea of the complexity of code that 510k developers are writing?

Man you got me day dreaming about that kind of money: I would invest half of it in low risk mutual funds and then take the other half over to my friend Asadulah who works in securities.

I worked at the N in FAANG for four years. It's not that we did anything so much differently, it's the people we did it with. When I worked for non-FAANG, there were some people who I'd have to work with and think, "boy, how does this person get/keep their job?". They just were not great to work with, had a hard time understanding hard concepts, and didn't produce great work.

I never had that at Netflix. Every person I worked with was someone I'd want to work with again and could trust and depend on. When a hard problem presented itself, everyone had a great solution, and we'd discuss the pros and cons, and then someone would implement that solution.

Also, many of our internal tools were best in class. Sure they had their warts, but not like the ones other companies had. Even our corporate directory had cool features and was actively developed.

So that's really the difference. It's the people you get to work with and the tools you get to use.

> Is there like some open source project or code samples that give an idea of the complexity of code that 510k developers are writing?

https://github.com/Netflix is a good place to look. Again, it's not that it's more complex, it's just the way it came about.

Nothing, for nearly all of them. Hell, half the time they're not even particularly impressive at executing on the totally-ordinary things they do. The companies just have firehoses that spit out money so can afford to spend more on developers, and choose to do so for a variety of reasons, most of which have nothing to do with how challenging most of the work actually is.

One reason (of several): insanely high comp means everyone (more or less) wants at least some time in a FAANG(-alike) job to bank some money. The flip side is that their hiring process is hellish. Put those together and you have high motivation for people to apply from one side, and a strong disincentive for anyone who's got any amount of doubt in their ability to pass the interview, any reluctance to put in the time to prep for them, or low bullshit-tolerance, or whatever. The result is that practically their entire candidate pool would be good hires (=good enough at the actual job, and willing to jump through hoops), so they don't have to bother figuring out how to spot good (for their purposes) developers, they just keep comp high and interviews unpleasant and time-consuming, and it all sorts itself out.

Combine that with several companies all in similar situations trying to do the same thing, and you get what you see before you WRT developer compensation in a narrow slice of the industry. Except when they collude to keep wages down, which they have done and (speculation) almost certainly are still doing in less-obvious ways.

[EDIT] Just to be clear, some of the work they do is Actually Hard, but that's not unique to FAANG (though it probably is more common there than, say, at your average Web agency or whatever). More of it's not especially hard but is hard to get experience with outside of FAANG (scale-related and fine-tuning stuff mostly, some of which is hard but much of which isn't more difficult than most other development or ops stuff, just different)

A meager defense follows. I've worked both "midwest design shop" and FAANG-adjacent jobs, from junior to staff to manager.

The main thing is supply and demand. The supply of engineers willing to work at a FAANG, in a region that FAANG is willing & able to support, and are willing and able to go through the technical hazing process called a "hiring panel," is very much short of demand. On the other side, profits per employee are phenomenal at scale, so making hires at these rates still makes sense financially.

But to answer your real question: it's less about the complexity of the code on a day to day basis, and more about the complexity of the system you have to work within, both technical and political, and the expectations of scale. A microservice system has both network and political boundaries to work through, whether making changes or RPC calls.

Then, while a small scale system might see a one-in-a-million event once per year, a large system will see it many times per hour, or even per minute. Managing simple things like changes to a database becomes a multi-step process, involving tools and stakeholders, instead of just a quick 2 minutes of scheduled downtime. Engineers need to be capable of thinking through those sorts of things. Stuff gets real weird at scale.

As a result, of both the above, engineers frequently find themselves doing highly specialized work, which is even harder to hire for. The guy who knows scaling properties of Postgres inside and out hasn't written production web code in a decade; his skills are almost worthless outside of FAANG-scale problems. Amazon has folks working for years on all sorts of niche network optimizations, because microseconds matter to them, but good luck transferring those skills back to fullstack web dev.

Last, a not insignificant number of engineers at FAANG are doing fantastically easy work on the same pay scale. Someone has to manage the wordpress (or whatever) installation for the docs site, or some backend process written in Django just for six important people. They often still get an engineer title and pay scale. So, it frequently is harder, but certainly not always.

So in a word, Amazon pays L6 engineers to sort out ambiguities and to shepherd teams. This may not be more complex than your work, mind you. It's just Amazon or companies large enough to have a tech ladder value this kind of role.

You can easily be in a team or circumstance that is more demanding, inspiring on your engineering journey, or even toxic. But you can just as easily coast.

The compensation is supposed to make it worthwhile not to do your own startup or project. So expect comp to continue rising.

Or another way, the revenue per employee at FANG-like companies is higher than non-fang-like companies, so the company can afford to pay them more.

Oh you sweet, sweet child.

I think the best analogy here is sports... there's a sharp pay cut when you go from playing in an NFL team, to not playing in an NFL team. NFL teams have N slots and they want the best players. That means that the N-th best football player modulo measurement noise is going to be paid much more than the N+1-th.

FAANG/etc. job count is not fixed and measurement noise is probably much higher (i.e. we can't actually determine which developers are best with that much confidence, and so I think a lot of developers could make it into a FAANG and do fine work there), but the same principle applies.

reference didn't go unnoticed. nice one.

They quit when the numbers don't match what they feel they are worth. You see the same thing in finance. One bad year can send 20-30% of your workforce walking out the door in a matter of a few months post bonuses.

Another thing to keep in mind is that Amazon values their stock grants as if it grows 15% every year. Obviously this is pretty optimistic and makes their offers not directly comparable to other companies that value their stock using current prices.

They're easily comparable because current prices incorporate all publicly available information (and even some non-public). If you accept the 15% assumption, you're letting them hoodwink you.

Or, are you saying, they justify small grants by telling you the stock will grow?

Then Amazon recruiter wants to "match" that, so 300 * 4=1200k over 4 years.

Base pay is maxed at 160 (until today's announcement), so 1200k-(160 * 4) = 560k to come up with with stocks and cash bonus.

Let's say Amazon 30 day moving average share price during negotiation is $1200 a share

So now recruiter must make math such that:

- TC stays relatively flat. On year 3 & 4 you get 40% of award, but only 5% year 1 and 15% year. (so a cash bonus to offset year 1 is ~35% of grant amount, and cash bonus offset year 2 is ~25% of grant amount)

- TC assuming 15% growth of stock

So, they'll offer you 220 units:

Year 1:

with only 5% * 220 * 1200=$13k from RSU, you need (300-160-13)=127k cash bonus , now your TC year 1 is 300k.

Year 2:

15% * 220 * 1200 * 1.15=46k from RSU So cash bonus of 94k.

Year 3:

40% * 220 * 1200 * 1.15^2=140k RSU that's 300k of TC

Year 4:

40% * 220 * 1200 * 1.15^3=160k RSU That's even more, 320k TC \o/

So all the math here is done using fictional share price that grew 1.15^n for each year. But in concrete, your offer says 220 units. If Amazon grew much more than 15% a year, on year 3 you're still making 40% * 220 units, no matter what the share price is.

But the final offer is:

160k / year base, 220 units over 4 year with 5%/15%/40%/40% vesting, and 127k cash bonus year 1 + 94k cash bonus year 2.

Amazon is one of rare FAANG where the RSU offer is given in share count in offer itself, not in $.

From your example, they offer you 220 units, valued at 13+46+140+160 = $359k.

However, if the stock stays perfectly flat, the actual value is $264k (220 * 1200).

I went back to look at the AWS offer I turned down. There was no mention of a 15% assumption anywhere, but it did spell out total RSU, base salary, and first two year bonuses, which ends up making year 1 about 8% more than year 4 for the same stock price.

This seems at odds with what you've presented.

Yes, exactly (less with compounding, about $370k -- see sibling thread).

Of course you only get that number if your new target compensation is in line with that number.

So other companies have locked you in to your performance at interview time, while Amazon can give you a 15% paycut each year if your performance isn't high enough to at your offer level.

I don't understand the appeal of cash signing bonuses. This just seems to me like another way of saying you got hired for a $485k annual salary while giving Amazon the freedom to cut your salary a year from now by up to ~67%. Why give your future self that risk instead of looking for a higher base salary that is stickier over the long term?

The employee is likely to underperform for the first few comp cycles after being hired, due to the new role, new context, etc. So the employer is willing to guarantee an "optimistic" salary up front for the first year (or, with equity vests, perhaps longer).

But the employer is unwilling to guarantee this indefinitely; after a year or two, they want to see you performing at level--and thus qualifying for merit increases--or else you'll revert to the lower salary.

Viewed this way, a rational employer will offer you a lower total comp for the first year if it's all salary; taking more of your first year's comp as bonus represents a bet on your own impact (and the fairness of the merit-based comp modeling).

The employment contract is "x per year and an extra y year one" not "x per year and y year one under the right conditions".

It gives them the freedom to not increase your salary or give you more stock, but you should still have a guaranteed known rate for 4 years.

If you found yourself getting a similar TC excluding the signing bonus at another company, and have reason to believe that's actually a fair price for your labor, the cash signing bonus will still more than offset your switching costs. It's also, simply put, an absurdly high bonus. Nothing stopping you from collecting another one of those in a couple years at another company.

You're exactly right. Signing bonuses - and even equity compensation - are designed to lower your TC over time. The idea is that companies offer a high TC to entice you through the door, with the understanding that at the end of your 4 years your TC will drop precipitously but at that point you'd be too invested/too afraid to interview/etc to leave.

This is why in nearly all companies equity refreshers are always significantly smaller than what would be necessary to keep your TC level. The point is to over several years converge you to a lower TC that is middle of the pack rather than the top-of-band packages FAANGs have to offer to recruit candidates.

It does seem ass backwards - and if you're an engineer who cares a lot about TC (IMO rightly so) and interview well, you will consistently cliff out every 4 years as a result.

TC is "Total Compensation" right? As in salary + equity and other benefits and etc? Or does it usually refer to just cash salary?

Ahh interesting, I assumed it included things like bonuses and equity, but am surprised to learn 401k contributions are not considered TC. Is this the case even for matched contributions made by the employer?

Meaning if I contribute x (money I was compensated already as a portion of salary), and employer contributes %/x (money the company effectively "gives" me), is that percentage not considered part of the "TC" terminology? OR am I exhibiting an unfortunate misunderstanding of 401k matches?

The rubric for all of these complicated and indirect forms of compensation is "benefits". These benefits are significantly limited in terms of practical cash value and rules around their use by regulation, whereas there is no bound on TC.

For example, an employer who does a 1:1 match up to the IRS limit would be contributing at most ~$20K to your total comp, but when you're dealing with the rest of the package being in the $500K-1M range it tends to get glossed over.

I don't see what downside there is?

The way Amazon does vesting is a scam for any engineer willing to work there, IMO. Big shiny number that they can dangle in front of engineers, and everybody thinks "Oh, sure I can do 4 years for that..."

More correct:

Of the big tech companies, only Amazon structures its RSU so it's heavily backloaded.

Since initial grants are larger (roughly 2x) than refresher grants, the equal vesting of the initial grant (old behavior) could cause a significant drop in compensation for new hires after 4 years at the company (the dreaded equity cliff). This would only happen for relatively "flat" performers, as if you're on an upwards trajectory the larger size of later grants would eventually catch up to your initial equity grant.

Let's say the sign on equity was 200 shares, and refreshers were 100. With equal vesting it would look like:

Year 1: 50 shares

Year 2: 50 + 1 x 25 = 75 shares total

Year 3: 50 + 2 x 25 = 100 shares total

Year 4: 50 + 3 x 25 = 125 shares total

Years 5+: 4 x 25 = 100 shares total (20% drop!)

The problem has actually been worse, because grants are actually in dollars and the stock has been growing consistently year over year. Which means earlier grants are worth more in dollars in later years than new grants, despite having the same dollar value at the time of issue. Let's say 20% yoy, which is not far off from average over the last 10 years. We'll work in dollars and say the initial grant was worth $200K at sign-on time and later grants worth $100K.

Year 1: $50K = $50K

Year 2: $50K * 1.2 + $25K = $85K

Year 3: $50K * 1.2^2 + $25K * 1.2 + $25K = $127K

Year 4: $50K * 1.2^3 + $25K * 1.2^2 + $25K * 1.2 + $25K = $177.4K

Years 5+: $25K * 1.2^3 + $25K * 1.2^2 + $25K * 1.2 + $25K = $134.2K (23% drop!)

With the frontloading this becomes:

Year 1: 66 shares

Year 2: 66 + 1 x 25 = 91 shares

Year 3: 44 + 2 x 25 = 94 shares

Year 4: 12 + 3 x 25 = 87 shares (7% drop)

Years 5+: 4 x 25 = 100 shares

With stock appreciation this becomes:

Year 1: $66K

Year 2: $66K * 1.2 + $25K = $104K

Year 3: $44K * 1.2^2 + $25K * 1.2 + $25K = $118.4K

Year 4: $24k * 1.2^3 + $25K * 1.2^2 + $25K * 1.2 + $25K = $132.5K

Years 5+: $25K * 1.2^3 + $25K * 1.2^2 + $25K * 1.2 + $25K = $134.2K

So the dip is entirely smoothed over. Add in natural increases do to career growth and you no longer notice it.

So lets' say I start in January with 5% vesting after 1year, 15% after 2 years, and 20% every 6mo for the next 2 years. The signing bonus starts large and then shrinks proportionally to keep the TC constant. In my mind the only change is that my salary gets more "lumpy" at the end because I'm getting paid every 6mo instead of every 2wks.

So right before a vest I'm thinking "it's worth it to stay for 1 more week for 20% of my stock" but right after a vest the question is "is it worth it to stay 6months for 20% of my stock and 6 months of base pay?". That latter question seems the same whether my TC is cash or stock.

So you'll get people who can't walk away because they can't get TC of $500K somewhere else.

Developers who went to tier C schools, 3.X GPA, 2-sigma IQs instead of 3, they have a shot at getting into Amazon and actually making way more and getting much better equity than they would working in IT at their local HR company (<$100K salary, negligible to 0 equity)

Again though, if you are capable of getting into any other FAANG, of course do it.

I don't think I've ever heard of this? I started at a bank in Q4 and got a pro-rated bonus.

And to put it another way, if you're moving jobs in financial services without negotiating a make whole, you're not getting the best deal.

"I'm very interested, but unfortunately I can't make any moves until February, when I get my bonus. Sucks, but what can you do?"

Often but not always. I worked as a senior exec in a near-FAANG, large public corp and at one point the board changed the equity comp of my level and up execs to a pretty complex formula that was significantly back-ended but also had possible multipliers in the event our stock metrics exceeded the avg stock metrics of a composite of several similar firms in similar markets. At the time it was started, a lot of us assumed we might get about the same at the end of the day and maybe a little more but have to wait longer for it.

After four years, we actually maxed all the multipliers and ended up making >200% what we would have under the previous standard vesting. I heard that HR and the board comp committee felt they'd made a 'mistake' because we'd ended up getting so much more than the 'intended' range - however, we also worked our asses off and the companies stock was soaring, so they couldn't really complain. BTW, the net-effect of the back-loaded vesting and soaring stock was that we all ended up holding for longer than we otherwise might have which ended up adding nearly another 100%. Since we're already talking about pretty hefty comp numbers, post-multipliers plus a ~doubling of the stock price, it ended up being life-changing money. Good times, indeed.

So, not every 'non-standard' equity vesting schedule is necessarily a bad thing. Sometimes they are structured as a set of trade-offs, where the downsides are balanced by upsides tied to certain things and need to be assessed on that basis.

+1. Every amazonian i know who stayed at the company a while had crazy good equity because of the holding and stock growth. The historically stable growth really encouraged people to stay longer, and internally people always talked about how much the stock was when they joined. I know plenty of people who cashed out their equity and got houses in seattle area, in cash. Hearing these stories as a young engineer, and old alike really makes you feel compelled to stay and see where it goes for you. If you're young, you want to get in for when it goes up (FOMO), and if you've been there, you want to stay because you've been so well rewarded, and waiting a little longer will get you a bit more money because of refreshes and growth.

That does change the math if Amazon is giving $100k bonuses each year for the first two years.

> While the stock vests in year 3 and 4, you get an equivalent amount of cash in year 1 and 2. It’s not uncommon for that cash to be 6 figures, almost doubling your salary for the first two years. I wouldn’t call that a pittance.

This was my experience ~8 years ago. There was an initial signing bonus, a retention bonus after a year, and then the RSUs start kicking in. The bonuses were prorated monthly. It was a little different than what other companies do, but it didn't feel unfair.

Get people feeling that they can't leave because of sunk cost and it's all going to be worth it soon, even though they're actively miserable.

A lot of FAANG down level you while hiring, that way they ensure you are basically at the same level even after a promotion(the next 4 - 5) years. Mandatory firing quotas, brutal performance standards(stack ranking included) and delayed vesting schedules effectively mean most won't make it to the big paydays.

OTOH, those who are there for a few years, have survived through years of political darwinism inside the company have to an extent figured out the 'secret sauce', and are gradually climbing their way up.

In these set ups, attrition is a feature for the long term employees, people who leave basically free up spaces in the ladder for others to take. No matter where you go you write software, so it doesn't really make much difference where you work at. On the other hand positions in the hierarchy no matter what the company are effectively pay grades and one must actively work on grabbing promotions.

If you observe carefully job hoppers don't really make much in life. Quitting saps energy due to context switching, by the time you arrive at a good pay day you have already hopped to the next company. For the people who quit often, good days are always in the future. And real cheddar lies in grabbing assets and looking after your health as you age. Both demand relative stability to raise debt and spend time working on your body.

That being the case the real winners are people who are doing long terms at companies, investing time learning political, investment and fitness skills.

Delayed vesting is a terrible practice. Perhaps we'll see more companies offer immediate vesting of equity comp as a way to compete for talent. This is what Netflix does.

And there are a lot of us who don't even get into FAANG and can't even dream of $160k, let alone $360k.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Tech#FANG,_FAANG,_and_MAMA...

At the same time, Amazon has had to pay very high for new hires. Hiring managers used to need to get L10 approval to go out of bands on offers outside bands, but starting late 2021, they could go out of bands up to ~20% higher with no approvals.

To top all of this, Amazon has a 6% internal URA (non-regretted attrition) target: something that has been in place for close to a decade. The Amazon Music group revolted late 2021 as reported by the Big Technology publication in-depth [1] as they didn't have 6% of people to fire, at the very time when they could not hire. Yet they were forced to hit this URA target, just like all other orgs in Amazon. Apparently this “rebellion email” leaked across the company and is sparking Amazon-wide outrage, and adds fuel to the fire.

Amazon has been extremely frugal for the skillset they hire for, very demanding and have created a stressful workplace. They still force 6% of engineers to be fired, even when their own leadership opposes this (Amazon Music).

I wonder why they can’t hire. Also, why is Amazon still part of the FANG abbreviation when they have this culture across many of their organisations?

[1] https://bigtechnology.substack.com/?utm_source=substack&utm_...

This one is interesting to me, as my anecdata is the opposite. People tell me not to go to Amazon, but if I do choose to go, refuse any job with AWS on the basis that they refuse to staff it properly.

So that's where all the Microsoft stack-ranking hawks went!

https://bigtechnology.substack.com/p/standing-up-for-us-pleb...

Nut sure where you're getting this from, but IMO this is not true at all.

More 'hardcore engineering' is going on, on average, over Amazon Retail/CDO. But I would not say _at all_ that AWS is a better place to work.

From the datapoints I've gathered, it's the opposite. Oncall for an AWS product generally sucks balls, and the re:invent death march is a real thing.

But this is just like, my opinion, man.

Because the term had nothing to do with work culture. The term was coined by Jim Cramer, the television host of CNBC's Mad Money, in 2013, who praised these companies for being “totally dominant in their markets”. The original definition still holds true.

> The move promises to bring Amazon’s base pay more in line with other big tech companies, including Google, Facebook, Apple and Microsoft.

As a ~62/63 (almost senior or senior) at Microsoft my peers at Facebook, Google, and Amazon can easily make literally twice as much compensation a year in salary, stock, and cash bonuses.

Microsoft isn't even in the ballpark. If I didn't absolutely love my job there would be zero reason to stay at Microsoft.

Whereas the more "fun" companies like Google/Facebook/Amazon will chew you up and spit you out, and you just have to make as much money as possible in your 20s/early 30s before you burn out.

This could be a slightly unfair stereotyping of these companies, but from the people I've spoken to it rings true.

That obviously wasn't true in the 90s (see the famous Microserfs book), but might be true today, so I would argue against the "always" for those of us around then.

What the commenter is saying is true though, Microsoft is a place where you can have an actual career and great work-life balance. It's been that way for at least a decade now.

[1] Depending on your department and logistics, the definition of 'everyone' occasionally varied.

You're still working on pretty complex codebases and tough technical problems though, so while you usually do not need to pull extra hours outside of business, you really do need to concentrate intently while working.

But my org got disbanded, and I got rolled into Mobile (circa 2008/2009 when Ballmer was using the economic conditions as an excuse to shutdown orgs). I was there building the first Windows phone. I hated that org. It was all schedule chicken and politics (you could have an iPhone, but you couldn't use it during meetings in front of GM or higher). I had code reviews rejected for "You aren't going to need that". I'd point them at what was coming in the next cycle and got lectured about "you should be focused on your current tasks not future tasks" in writing. But in person (i.e. no written record), I was told to write the code how the reviewer wanted (a 64 or 65 as I recall) and just keep the changes stashed for when the real work showed up. I hated working that way. So I got blackballed for a shitty attitude (and rightfully so. My attitude was shit).

With that said, I'm still friends with some people at Microsoft. And they love it. Just gotta find the right org (just like Amazon, Google, etc.)

Source: Done both AWS L8 and MSFT Partner roles. Have hired and led teams with Principal+ in both places.

Not a spokesperson, but anecdotally, I’m part of a core Windows Development team and there is a healthy respect for work-life balance. Both immediate level and upper-level management regularly emphasizes the need for that.

It’s been quite a nice change from previous employers.

But then again the market data that Google uses isn't public (and certainly isn't levels.fyi) so there could be discrepancies.

Seems like Amazon was blown through most of the labor supply and now can't find workers, not because they don't exist but because they don't want to work for Amazon. Doubt more money is going to fix this though perhaps pushing for more visas will let them get some workers who haven't been burnt by Amazon yet. Amazon simply has a bad culture which must be fixed. Even then, it'll take time to repair their reputation.

I got approached by an Amazon recruiter, and instead of just ignoring him, I decided to see "what's out there". I'm a staff SWE level at a decent company, so not exactly desperate to leave.

He proposed a hard time for a phone call later that week. I replied saying that I have conflicts at that time, how about we do it next week? Didn't hear back from him for a couple of days, and then he replied saying he's too busy next week. OK then, can you let me know when you're free?

Never heard from him again.

Sounded very unprofessional to me.

You didn't meet that criteria otherwise you would have bent over backwards to adjust your schedule to make the proposed time, so "obviously" you don't really want this job enough.

I've been at Amazon for like 4-5 years now. Recruiting quality and practices are widely bemoaned. It sucks on both sides of the fence. We'll sit through brutal interviews because recruiting just throws everything at the wall in hopes something will stick. It's demoralizing for everyone involved.

Even the little things drive me insane. I get emails from lazy, zero-effort recruiters asking if I'd like to join Amazon because "they saw my profile on Linkedin and it looked like a great fit!" Like, holy shit, can you not put in even a little bit of effort? You're just shotgunning canned emails all over the place making us all look like spammy dopes?

Sigh...

This happened to me. I got the exact same recruiting email from the exact same recruiter a week after I had already responded by declining.

Wlb is amazing. Did 5-6 hour days on last team. Coworkers were chill. Now I work more (6-7 hour days) cause I'm on a systems team, but I get to learn a lot about how EC2 servers are run. My manager cares about my learning and I get basically an hour a week with the tech lead where I can ask them questions.

Have been able to meet a couple principal engineers and they've even reviewed some of my work.

I have nothing bad to shared about my experience so far.

Did I mention I don't have deadlines?

The big issue is the developers Amazon wants to hire are not the same as the developers who want to work there, so Amazon is basically paying a huge premium to attract people. That said let's not kid ourselves, the majority of people at Amazon are happy to be there, get paid very well, and are reasonably competent.

I do also think FAANG built up a reputation for inaccessibility to intermediate devs which gives them an air of prestige but also significantly impairs their hiring ability.

A doubling of base pay means that they realize they have been way off the mark.

I have probably about a dozen emails from AWS even though I've been doing mobile apps for the past >10 years and that's readily evident if you even bothered looking at my CV.

I can't think of another major company whose recruiters spend so little effort pitching a relevant role to the candidate. At this point I don't even open the emails any more - which seems like it's long-term detrimental to their recruitment efforts overall.

What's even worse is that it permeates throughout the entire company, every division, every org.

You have this article written nearly 7-years ago:

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/16/technology/inside-amazon-...

Money quote:

> “You walk out of a conference room and you’ll see a grown man covering his face,” he said. “Nearly every person I worked with, I saw cry at their desk.”

The culture only seems to have gotten worse.

Another person posted elsewhere but Amazon seems to be doing anything they can but actually fixing their toxic culture.

I've worked one bad job and there's no amount of money I would accept to mitigate the loss in quality of sleep, becoming depressed when going to work, and dreading when I had to communicate with anyone.

I'd consider going back for a fully remote job with like a 35% pay bump though. Although if I'm just going for the money, I'd probably switch to one of the trading firms that have been hounding me. Got one email recently for a fully remote job with compensation wide open (anywhere from 275k-650k+).

There's certainly some amount of money that would get me to work for them in the short term. But only if there wasn't a clawback clause that made me lose money if I found the experience unhealthy.

There's probably some engineer out there who's always wanted to live in Ireland. That said, I imagine if you're in the "hire to fire" bucket it would suck extra to be in anouther country with no job.

- Joined early early 2017 as an L5 hire (no previous FANG experience, but 10+ elsewhere) with an an offer of base $145K, sign on of $50K year 1, $38K year 2, 150 RSUs (AMZN worth ~$850 = 127500). Vesting schedule: 5% @ 1y, 15% @ 2y, 20% @ 2.5y, 20% @ 3y, 20% @ 3.5y, 20% @ 4y.

- Negotiated without competing offers a bump to $150K base, $60K / $45K cash, 162 RSUs.

- A breakdown based on Amazon's 15% stock aprecciation YOY gives you Amazon's Total Compensation Target. This is Amazon's projection assuming that you perform at the middle of the expectation of your cohort in the yearly performance review (OLR, not forte as the article states)

  - year 1 (8 RSUs): $150K base + $60K cash + 8 * $850 * 1.15 = $218K

  - year 2 (24 RSUs): $150K base + $46K cash + 24 * $850 * 1.15^2 = $223K

  - year 3 (32 + 33 RSUs): $150K base + (32 * $850 * 1.15^2.5) + (33 * $850 * 1.15^3) = $231K

  - year 4 (32 + 33 RSUs): $150K base + (32 * $850 * 1.15^3.5) + (33 * $850 * 1.15^4) = $243K
 

  - year 1 (AMZN @ $1430) = $221K. OLR bumped base salary for next year to $157K

  - year 2 (AMZN @ $1844) = $247K. OLR bumped base salary for next year to $160K. No stock grant as projected salary > comp target

  - year 3 (AMZN @ $1767, $2307) = $292K. Granted 18 RSUs to vest at year 4.5 and year 5

  - year 4 (AMZN @ $3338, $3379) = $378K

  - year 5 (AMZN @ $3409, $3400?) = $221K

  - due to manager / life reasons, didn't progress beyond L5. If I were to pursue this this year, my comp adjustment would have come about a year after starting at that level (but only to the lower end of the L6 band ~ $250K). $30K for a tonne more work seems rather stupid.

  - note the golden handcuffs as well as that huge cliff

  - some of the above is intentionally inaccurate (but not by a huge amount)

Before last year they were seriously lagging behind in terms of comp. Even in EMEA I hear they couldn't hire due to low comp compared to other companies. Even non-FAANG were beating them easily.

What I hear from friends at Amazon (joined prior to 2020) is that their comp is well below market rates.

They probably were testing new paybands to see what stuck.

The bleeding has to be pretty bad for them to make an announcement like this though, otherwise they'd quietly bump up pay/bonuses for their top performers.

Yeah, I’d probably work more than 40 hours a week at Amazon, which is why I didn’t take the offer (I accepted another offer with similar comp and my WLB is pretty good).

I got better offers from Bloomberg, Reddit, Stripe, and Facebook. Amazon also backloads the equity. You get barely anything if you leave after 2 years.

After finally deciding to switch jobs I got twice the salary of previous employer when I hoped Ill get 20-30%.

Market is not catching up to goverments pomping out new taxes and inflation.