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Amazon walking back raises after internal bug miscalculated compensation

businessinsider.com

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Re: Amazon walking back raises after internal bug miscalculated compensation

#141

Post by innocentoldguy »

f1shy wrote: post #127
innocentoldguy wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This was my experience at Amazon as well. It was the most stingy and toxic company I've ever worked for.

Have you worked in any big company afterward (or before) that was not toxic? The reason of my question: I work in a very big company, and I found it very toxic. I wonder if all big companies are the same. I need to know if I would switch. But I do not want to go to smaller company.

I prefer small start-ups to big companies but I have worked at a fair number of the latter. I enjoyed my time at Microsoft, Intel, Sun Microsystems, and Epson. I did not care much for Novell, Corel, Amazon, Rakuten, and WordPerfect.

Re: Amazon walking back raises after internal bug miscalculated compensation

#142

Post by pyuser583 »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #45

Two things going on here: 1. First, I'm a bit baffled by some of the responses along the lines of "Amazon should just own their mistake". Sorry, but in the real world, "finders keepers" rarely applies (unless you're talking about crypto, but I digress...). I would certainly want a bug corrected if it were in my favor, and if a bug went the other way, I might need to re-evaluate my company satisfaction based on my new…

Amazon recently added “being the best place to work” as one of their core values.

If the “best place to work” made an error like this, they would figure out a way to let the employee keep it.

Most places wouldn’t. But if I was in charge of a FAANG, an error like this happened, and I was committed to making the FAANG the “best place to work”, I’d cough up the change.

Does Amazon want to be the best place to work, or not?

Re: Amazon walking back raises after internal bug miscalculated compensation

#143

Post by sk5t »

WalterBright wrote: post #97
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #45

Two things going on here: 1. First, I'm a bit baffled by some of the responses along the lines of "Amazon should just own their mistake". Sorry, but in the real world, "finders keepers" rarely applies (unless you're talking about crypto, but I digress...). I would certainly want a bug corrected if it were in my favor, and if a bug went the other way, I might need to re-evaluate my company satisfaction based on my new…

The proof is if, due to a bug, a person was undercompensated or money disappeared from their bank account, the person would absolutely expect to be made whole. BTW, I've had stock options that were never above water.

> stock options that were never above water

That'd be most stock options in private companies, though.

Re: Amazon walking back raises after internal bug miscalculated compensation

#144

Post by TomSwirly »

tomatocracy wrote: post #106
michaelt wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Sorry, but in the real world, "finders keepers" rarely applies If Bob signs a contract for Alice to paint a fence for $800 and a copy-paste error transfers her $1000 instead, yes. But if the copy-paste error happened before the contract was signed? Leading to Bob promising Alice $1000 and signing a contract promising it? Then in all probability, Bob will end up paying the contract amount.

This area of law is usually a bit more nuanced than "what you wrote is the contract". If both parties thought the contract said $800 when it was signed (and if that could be proven...) then that might well be enough for a court to either read the contract as if it said $800, or to void it entirely.

> If both parties thought the contract said

This has zero to do with the actual matter at hand, given that the people getting the raises 100% believed they were getting raises.

Re: Amazon walking back raises after internal bug miscalculated compensation

#145

Post by ajross »

pyuser583 wrote: post #140
puffoflogic wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is nonsense, possibly triggered by a misunderstanding of what the word "contract" denotes. An at-will employee and their employer contract that for each hour of work (or each ~week salaried) performed by employee on instructions from employer, employer will pay to employee $X. Just because such a contract doesn't contain any term indicating the length of time an employee will work doesn't make it less of a contr…

Yeah … employer handbooks are considered contracts. Every raise I’ve ever received has been accompanied by a “contract” hr puts in my folder.

So frustrating to see this interpretation repeated here. No, that's not correct, because it if were correct these Amazon folks would have an open and shut case to keep their raises, and they don't. That's not the way compensation works. It might be the way one side or the other wants it to work in some situation, but it's not. You get paid what your employer offers. Your employer gets to keep the employees that want to stay. Period.

Work done for contract is a real thing, it's just not applicable here. When you hire a plumber or a caterer or a security consultancy, you write up a contract ahead of time describing exactly the work to be done and the bill to be paid, and then get the courts to enforce that when needed. That is simply not the way that salaried employment works in the USA. It's not.

Re: Amazon walking back raises after internal bug miscalculated compensation

#146

Post by idunno246 »

alistairSH wrote: post #139
idunno246 wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, like the company raised bands for new hires but didn’t raise current employees commensurately, that is in line with needing to job hop, and tracks with the other comment of a couple thousand. But the difference in pay now is so drastic now basically everyone with 1+ years is looking or left

And even without raising the bands, employees' salaries ends up lagging over time. A lateral job hop comes with a >10% raise, while an annual raise is 3-6%.

i know thats the common refrain, im sure its true most of the time, but aside from this last year or so ive gotten more increases from promos/equity than from job hopping(which have mostly been flat)

Re: Amazon walking back raises after internal bug miscalculated compensation

#147

Post by woobar »

imwillofficial wrote: post #89
staticautomatic wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To add a data point to this, I recently interviewed at a large tech company. As part of investigating the comp, I ran a linear regression on data from levels and the results indicated that you should deduct a few grand for every year of tenure.

Levels is garbage data. How is this not obvious?

This is not obvious to me. I had access to comp data at two different companies and Levels data was pretty accurate across the board.

Re: Amazon walking back raises after internal bug miscalculated compensation

#148

Post by yrgulation »

throwaway812935 wrote: post #138
throwayxx123 wrote: post #121

Resigned some time back. After joining I realized what a sh*thole I fell into and decided to brave it out for some time to get the FAANG stamp. I usually journal interesting work instances and my thoughts on them. Here are some from Amazon: 1. Teammates are out for blood. They go out of the way to ruin their teammates metrics. So much so that manager has to intervene because overall team metrics are declining due to…

It sounds like you had a bad manager and possibly team, and you made the right decision for yourself. I'd like to offer a few counterpoints from having landed on what I consider to be a good team/manager. The first point is that things are manager and team dependent. Amazon is a lot more hierarchical than other companies when it comes to SDE levels, so I'd assume this also happens with managerial levels. There's prob…

I dont know why but from outside a lot of it looks like managers own you. Glad i took the path of contracting instead of slaving away at “faang”.

Re: Amazon walking back raises after internal bug miscalculated compensation

#149

Post by NaturalPhallacy »

ozzythecat wrote: post #93

None of this surprises me. I was at that company for over 10 years. Quitting was the best thing I did for myself, and I should have left long ago. Amazon’s real innovation isn’t a cloud service company or a logistics business. The innovation is on how to squeeze every once of labor and value out of a human being, and how to do this legally, without damaging customers’ or public opinion of the company, at massive scal…

>Amazon’s real innovation isn’t a cloud service company or a logistics business. The innovation is on how to squeeze every once of labor and value out of a human being, and how to do this legally, without damaging customers’ or public opinion of the company, at massive scale.

I think this is bang on. Their hiring process for engineers every single time I've been contacted by them is an immediate (before you could possibly have a clue if you want the job or not) is a tech challenge.

It's industrialized hiring that puts 100% of the burden immediately on the candidate at virtually no cost to amazon.

This is a huge red flag and I halt the process with any employer that uses it.

Re: Amazon walking back raises after internal bug miscalculated compensation

#150

Post by shostack »

staticautomatic wrote: post #66
alistairSH wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

a new hire at my current level would get literally double my current comp as a person at the company for five years That's not unusual. Well, 2x salary might be, but it's well established that job hopping is the only way to guarantee your salary stays close to market.

To add a data point to this, I recently interviewed at a large tech company. As part of investigating the comp, I ran a linear regression on data from levels and the results indicated that you should deduct a few grand for every year of tenure.

I wish it were easier to compare that against other considerations. Comp isn't everything (though not judging those for whom it is) and it can be challenging to weigh the benefits of being somewhere for multiple years. Especially for places with steep learning curves and very large orgs where getting established is a very different day to day type of stress than continuing on and growing in something familiar.
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