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Ask HN: How much do you make at Amazon? Here is how much I make at Amazon

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Re: Ask HN: How much do you make at Amazon? Here is how much I make at Amazon

#121
post #6

Staying anonymous is probably best but fwiw, policies which prohibit sharing one's own compensation violate federal law. http://www.npr.org/2014/04/13/301989789/pay-secrecy-policies...

Also FWIW most states are at-will employment, and can fire you for no reason

But not any reason.

Re: Ask HN: How much do you make at Amazon? Here is how much I make at Amazon

#122
post #6

Staying anonymous is probably best but fwiw, policies which prohibit sharing one's own compensation violate federal law. http://www.npr.org/2014/04/13/301989789/pay-secrecy-policies...

Also FWIW most states are at-will employment, and can fire you for no reason

I don't think employees in (most?) at-will states can be terminated for violating pay secrecy rules.

(I think the only state with a meaningful divergence from at-will is Montana).

Re: Ask HN: How much do you make at Amazon? Here is how much I make at Amazon

#123

Ieee FML this has been a depressing read. Is anyone else realizing they are severely underpaid? Passes the virtual whiskey

Question is, do you work in the same geographic area? Pay ranges are extremely regionally-based, because cost of living varies wildly.

Re: Ask HN: How much do you make at Amazon? Here is how much I make at Amazon

#124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really enjoy when the voice actors do different voices for different characters. I've always wondered how they do the recording for that. Do they read all of the dialogue for one character in a big chunk, then move on to the dialogue of the next character? Or do they read through the book naturally and switch voices? I would think that the latter would be very difficult.

Great question! :) Narrators actually do switch all character voices in real-time. This does not commonly cause issues that require recording to stop, as the narrators are usually very experienced professionals that come from the Broadway stage or from other voice acting professions (cartoons and the like.) I've also recorded and edited my fair share of bad voice actors (for instance, former Labor Secretary Robert Re…

Simple question on a similar topic: how "real-time" is the source audio that you work with? I always imagined that voice actors would have arbitrary pauses between the delivery of every line, and it'd be the editor's job to tighten all of those up.

Re: Ask HN: How much do you make at Amazon? Here is how much I make at Amazon

#125

After reading some of these comments... Holy shit, I am under paid.

Which is why companies treat salaries like state secrets. If you don't have a reliable baseline you can't use "I'm underpaid" to your advantage in negotiations. You may not even know you are underpaid! Information asymmetry.

Re: Ask HN: How much do you make at Amazon? Here is how much I make at Amazon

#126
post #97

You're not getting "ripped off" by having a base salary of 125K USD (with benefits and equity) fresh out of college. Tell you what, with a Bachelor's in Chemistry (in my year 176 people started, only 42 finished the degree so it's not a free lunch) I can expect to make between 40K and 60K CAD out of college and pay higher taxes than in the US. With a master's that I'm working towards, I'd be on the upper end of that…

And if you making 30k you would feel ripped off even though some guy who works at Walmart for 20k would feel jealous.

That said, amazon pays new grads pretty okay, and if you get a promotion between 2 and 3 years your new salary should be pretty competitive.

Re: Ask HN: How much do you make at Amazon? Here is how much I make at Amazon

#127
Facebook Offer:

iOS Developer

Base Salary: 140k Signon Bonus: 25k Stock / 4 yrs: 200k Annual Bonus: 10%

The job I took this year:

iOS/Android dev Base: 190k Stock / 4 yrs: 3% Bonuses: tied to company revenue

Work History: 4 years over 4 different companies (startups and one big co)

Gender: M

Native English Speaker: Yes

Re: Ask HN: How much do you make at Amazon? Here is how much I make at Amazon

#128
post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm interested in what your negotiation principles are. I've always heard that a candidate should never share salary information and require the company to provide the first concrete number in the form of their initial offer. However, I've repeatedly used all of the "business-professional" and "HR approved" sorts of conversational techniques to enact this advice, and the only result that has ever occurred is either (…

One of my negotiation principles is "Don't disclose your current or desired salary" during the negotiation. With persistence, the recruiter or hiring manager will usually just move on. Another principle is that you should always counter. So I'm _extremely_ surprised to hear that 95% of the time, people have refused to continue talking with you. I can't refute your experience, but I can say this has never happened to…

In the handful of cases where the company was OK with my non-answer about salary, and I went on to get all the way to a job offer, the salary ended up being entirely miscalibrated to a candidate of my skill and experience, and the overall interview process (which usually included some technical screens, programming tests, take-home tests, and long on-site technical interviews) was a massive waste of my time, not to mention extremely stressful.

Places where I experienced this gross miscalibration: a large U.S. food retailer's digital analytics team; a small pharmaceutical research software company; a 25-year-old multinational scientific computing and supercomputing consulting firm; and an FFRDC research lab attached to a university.

In one of these places they even went on at length about how much the hiring manager liked me, how I fit all the skills they were seeking, and many team members remarked that I would "mesh instantly" with the team, and so forth. I had walked away from those interviews knowing that I had done a good job and feeling very confident.

Then they made a job offer than was around 75% of what I had been making before in a similar job in a similar cost of living area, and the new job's other benefits were far worse.

When I told them what I was making before, they just said, "it just looks like there's a bit of a gap here that we are unable to make up, but we think you'll be very happy on this team so we hope you'll consider our offer despite that." The people interviewing me in that company had even gone on at length about how successful their business unit had been recently, signing a new important contract, and how their biggest challenge was recruiting good people and staffing up to support some projects that had important deadlines looming towards the end of 2016.

I still continue to avoid sharing salary info, because I'm not convinced that sharing it would be better.

But I think what you might not be accounting for is that almost every single candidate in the tech world does share salary, freely and openly, from the very first minute they are asked, without even realizing it might have any side effects.

A lot of corporate recruiters are conditioned to expect this, and the minute someone fails to share salary, they flag them as "not a dope, can't hire them cheaply" and they just move on. Constraint number one, above any and all talent requirements, is that they must be cheap to hire ... for a lot of firms.

Re: Ask HN: How much do you make at Amazon? Here is how much I make at Amazon

#129

Seattle Googler here (throwaway account). Position: Senior Software Engineer (level 5) Tenure: 4 years, no prior experience Comp: $300K (160 salary, 40 bonus, 100 stock) Male, native English speaker P.S. We're hiring.

Just adding not all Googlers make that much. I have 7 years in industry, L4, and make 117 base with 40k of stock a year in San Francisco (was 30k at grant time). If you can convince Google you're worth more they will pay it but not all Googlers are making crazy cash (btw wish I was in Seattle given CoL difference).
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