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Amazon more than doubles max base pay to $350k

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Re: Amazon more than doubles max base pay to $350k

#281

Post by trunnell »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #2

We had an office near an Amazon office. I interviewed a lot of people trying to leave Amazon. I don’t ask candidate’s compensation, but a lot of them volunteered it anyway. I was always surprised at how effectively low their comp was in the first few years due to the vesting schedule. The internet is adamant that everyone with FAANG jobs is rolling in TC, but there are a lot of people out there who are getting into F…

When I've recruited people somewhere within their multi-year vesting schedule, I've found that they absolutely hate the "golden handcuffs." It leads them to resent their employer and ultimately motivates them to leave.

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.

Re: Amazon more than doubles max base pay to $350k

#282

Post by ipaddr »

mathattack wrote: post #175

Their recruiting process is very onerous too. Very hard to get people who are well paid to even interview when they know it’s so much work, only to get a pay cut.

This is an interesting point. Do you the total rounds/average expect time to complete the loop.

I agree if I'm looking and someone makes the interview process quick that interest will make me more likely to join.

Re: Amazon more than doubles max base pay to $350k

#283

Post by Tempest1981 »

gregdoesit wrote: post #169

I’ve been talking to close to a dozen current and former Amazon employees since the end of 2021, and reached out to people publicly sharing attrition observations. Amazon attrition is really bad, even in AWS (Amazon employees all agree that AWS is a much better place to work in tech than Amazon retail). At the same time, Amazon has had to pay very high for new hires. Hiring managers used to need to get L10 approval t…

Your link took me to the home page. Is this the story?

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

Re: Amazon more than doubles max base pay to $350k

#284

Post by coredog64 »

darknavi wrote: post #133
wiskinator wrote: post #82

What's a 'maximum base' pay? Is that the max salary someone with the right credentials could earn in an entry level position?

Previously you could not make more than ~$160k in salary at Amazon at any level. Now they are raising the cap.

AIUI, the 160 max only applied below L8.

Re: Amazon more than doubles max base pay to $350k

#285

Post by tdhoot »

arcticbull wrote: post #77
_dain_ wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

hard to get visa. and I don't fancy trekking across the mexican desert to get in the other way.

If you are a Mexican citizen, then a TN visa for a software engineer is pro forma - should be about $50, no caps/quotas and adjudicated in a few weeks. If from further south then why not have an employer sponsor you for an H-1B around lottery time and you either get it or you don't? The employer handles the cost and paperwork. You don't start until they do. If this really is life changing money it seems like the risk…

> employer sponsor you for an H-1B around lottery time

The vast majority of employers will not sponsor you for a H1B, esp. if you don't currently work for them.

Re: Amazon more than doubles max base pay to $350k

#286

Post by 9530jh9054ven »

vanusa wrote: post #255
CyanLite2 wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You work there 3 years and you'll earn a million bucks. Plenty of life to live after that and a lot of money to do whatever it is you want. Many people are willing to make that tradeoff, perhaps not you though.

Plenty of life to live after that and a lot of money to do whatever it is you want. 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?

Doesn't that kind of depend on having kids or love? There's probably a fair number of people out there skilled enough to do the work that doesn't have those things to distract from having a demanding job.

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?

Re: Amazon more than doubles max base pay to $350k

#287

Post by Xeronate »

habitue wrote: post #91
dymk wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When the average tenure is 1.8 years, it certainly is working. That's nearly 50% of their tenure resulting in less than 20% of their equity vesting. 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..."

Scam is the wrong way to look at it. Basically, it's like airlines charging you fees for overhead baggage. If you can get into a big tech company without back-weighted vesting, of course you're going to take that. The difference is on the margin. 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…

All FAANG interviews are easily studied and passable by anyone that's motivated. Ridiculous to imply FAANG only hires geniuses. And since sign on bonus offsets backloaded vesting it hardly matters unless you truly believe amazon stock growth is going to rapidly increase in the next two years (and even then you could just buy the stock yourself with your bonus).

Re: Amazon more than doubles max base pay to $350k

#288

Post by brimble »

nebula8804 wrote: post #220
yanslookup wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This doesn't match my experience. I guess it depends on the role but for engineers it's well known Amazon has been throwing large sign on bonuses to close the vesting gap for years. 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…

>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. 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 giv…

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

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)

Re: Amazon more than doubles max base pay to $350k

#289

Post by coredog64 »

ipaddr wrote: post #282
mathattack wrote: post #175

Their recruiting process is very onerous too. Very hard to get people who are well paid to even interview when they know it’s so much work, only to get a pay cut.

This is an interesting point. Do you the total rounds/average expect time to complete the loop. I agree if I'm looking and someone makes the interview process quick that interest will make me more likely to join.

The full in-person loop is 5 60 minute sessions. Maybe another hour for the initial phone screen.

Re: Amazon more than doubles max base pay to $350k

#290

Post by allthecybers »

lhorie wrote: post #145

Judging from what an insider in the HR org told me, we're going to be hearing a lot of stories like this going forward. Apparently, Amazon scale is so large and their attrition rates are so bad that in some markets, every potentially qualified candidate has already applied and failed an interview, or previously worked at Amazon and quit. As the adage goes, necessity is the mother of invention and Amazon seems to be a…

I think you are on target.

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.

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