A friend of mine when he graduated got a base developer salary of $90k in 2011, shares & benefits (whatever that works out to), and I think $10k bonus for every year he stayed with Amazon. He worked in the Seattle, WA, area.
Ask HN: How much do you make at Amazon? Here is how much I make at Amazon
141–150 of 717 posts
Re: Ask HN: How much do you make at Amazon? Here is how much I make at Amazon
#142Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah that helps, but then the question is do you really want to work somewhere that directly ties your compensation to the company's share price? If Amazon has a few bad quarters and you lose 20% of your yearly income that's a major deal. In Seattle you probably want to be making around $120-160k/yr to live a solid middle class life, afford a house, etc. I would still look around at MS, Google, etc. where they give y…
I find tying my income to stock highly motivating :)
Maybe in a small company, where your efforts can have a direct, meaningful impact on the company's net worth. For a company as large as Amazon, though... there's so much going on, and so much of it completely unrelated to your personal work, that I feel like it'd be kind of meaningless unless you were in a really high-level management position.
Re: Ask HN: How much do you make at Amazon? Here is how much I make at Amazon
#143If you really want to do this, start a Google spreadsheet.
A spreadsheet about Amazon salaries in Google Docs, or a spreadsheet about salaries at Google? (Or both?!)
Re: Ask HN: How much do you make at Amazon? Here is how much I make at Amazon
#144Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 m…
How do you respond when they ask you for your salary information? Would it be perceuved as rude to say "I decline to state"?
Re: Ask HN: How much do you make at Amazon? Here is how much I make at Amazon
#145Ex amazonian here, but in Ireland, I left (thankfully) at the end of 2015. I was a systems engineer in Dublin and the only significant payraise I got was after I left the company for 4 months to then rejoin, my salary was bumped up 12k euros, for a total of 62k/yr, with 150 shares over 4 years (sorry I do not remember the vesting scheme). The HR department in AMZN has the tendency to screw internal employees upon pro…
Admittedly I'm American and I've never worked for Amazon, so my situation might be different than yours.
But what? Returning to the employer you quit from seems like a terrible idea. If it was years later, maybe you could explain it away with interview BS like "changing direction" or "finding your place."
But months later makes you not much better than the guy who shows his boss an offer from another company to negotiate a raise. It might work in the short term, but then you're branded as a flight risk. The next time they need to lay someone off (or if you slip up and they have a legitimate reason to fire you) you'd be high up on their list of disposable employees, perhaps moreso because you're more expensive than you were before.
Re: Ask HN: How much do you make at Amazon? Here is how much I make at Amazon
#146I'm genuinely curious, this post has over 208 points and is only 3 hours old.. why is it falling off the front page already?
And now just suddenly it's back to near the top of the front page. What's going on HN mods?
Not a HN mod, but been around long enough to take a guess:
HN penalizes entries (topics? articles? discussions? whatever) that gain a lot of comments really quickly. I think I've seen dang refer to this as the "flamewar penalty". The penalty was probably removed manually, because it was a false positive.
Re: Ask HN: How much do you make at Amazon? Here is how much I make at Amazon
#147If you really want to do this, start a Google spreadsheet.
Didn't a Google employee catch heat for doing this at Google a year or two ago?
Re: Ask HN: How much do you make at Amazon? Here is how much I make at Amazon
#148I was working in one of the Indian offices and was recently offered a move to Seattle. I had 1 year experience(was still an SDE-1 but my manager was considering me for a SDE-2 promotion) - they offered 110K base pay with 25k signing bonus which vested over 4 years + around 86k worth of shares which again vested over four years.
I chose to not take the offer but went to join a different company.
I just want to say that if you're quitting for reasons other than compensation, then don't ever listen to competing offers from your current team/company. That way you save yourself a ton of regret if your new job doesn't go well. #lesson-learnt-for-me
Re: Ask HN: How much do you make at Amazon? Here is how much I make at Amazon
#149Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 m…
Perhaps one strategy would be to give them a baseline salary (higher than your current salary, of course). You could tell them that in general based on the kind of work you are doing, responsibilities, etc. you would expect more, but under no circumstances would you consider any offer less than that.
Re: Ask HN: How much do you make at Amazon? Here is how much I make at Amazon
#150I work at a podunk Santa Clara, CA startup
20+ years experience. Working remote from southeast U.S.A.
Tenure so far: 2.5 years
Salary: $150K
Stock: purportedly .75% of company 4 years 1-year cliff, with small follow-on grant later, don't know what recent dilution is, though I think more recent funding has been "debt" at low interest with preference
Not a regular VC situation, company funded through other means.
Outlook -- real uncertain, market has definite need, execution so far has been very mixed, company willing to re-do things the right way