Your take home will easily exceed $1m which will help you gain a nice bump if you choose to move elsewhere in 18 months or so.

Does ANYONE in amazon see culture changes occurring at all? I'm willing to respond to the 5 recruiters contacting me BUT only if there is a huge drive to change culture as well.

Doesn't really make much difference, unless you were hiring finance bros. The total comp is what mattered.

OK – we can use the RSU’s with the following conditions:

Your borrower will need to have a 2-year history of liquidating the RSU account and evidence the RSUs are received as part of the borrower's regular income. Fannie Mae requires you obtain the issuance agreement, schedule of share distributions, vesting schedule, evidence the stock is publicly traded, and evidence of payout of the RSU per YTD paystub and W-2s for the most recent 2 years. Freddie Mac requires the same in addition to a 10-day PCV. The income will be required to continue for a minimum of 3 years.

If you can get me these items highlighted above, I will send to Underwriting for them to calculate the income and get us a valid number to use for qualifying.

There IS an expectation of managers being able to identify the bottom performers in their team, but for the PIP part it's up to the manager. They absolutely can push back and say that no-one in their team deserves to get PIP'ed. They would have to write a reason (i.e. "No one on my team is performing low enough that I'd prefer re-hiring") but that's pretty much it.

Anecdotes on the Internet make it seem like we are all scared at review time to see who is going to get PIP'ed, but that's just not how it is...

Disagree. The measure of the entire performance of the team will always be a bell curve distribution. Even pruning the lowest performers doesn't change the bell curve. Think about it. You remove the lowest performer, that switches the lowest to another person on that team who's now at risk of pip.

Here's a way to evaluate the team in a way that makes sense. Ask the manager if he thinks someone needs to be PIP'd rather then asking the manager "who's your pick of PIP for the year? if you don't have one you better justify it"

Maybe so, but the probability that the manager will have to write a justification is rather high (35.8% each year).

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.

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.

https://www.reuters.com/business/exclusive-amazon-hikes-star...

1. i.e. skirt the laws while relying on mutually-benefiting aspects of the arrangement, assuming a 1-in-a-100 dispute won't happen and/or the tax authorities don't turn their gaze on your operation.

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 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.

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

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.

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 suppose this light rail train I am watching go by outside my window is just a mirage or something. Same for these buses, obviously a plant.

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'll tell you the reason: they do this because they can. It's not talent, it's competition. Who in EU is going to give you even 80k as a junior? Nobody. So why bother offering 300k or even 150k when people will take the tole for 60 or 70k?

Inb4 "but housing is more affordable!"

Whatever. That's not related to the employer. It's simply racist. "You earn less because you're European" is the truth. It's not because cost of living is lower (although it's related) but it's just a matter of employers being able to get away with shitty pay.

Because it is true.

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.

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.

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

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 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.

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.

If you took the same amount of high earners and dropped them in an area with five times as many equivalent utility houses, then prices would not be high even though there are the same number of high earners. Hence high housing prices are not a result of a population of high earners simply existing.

As an example, I can afford and am willing to pay $5 for an apple, but I will not because I can easily find an equivalent one for $1.5.

Pay is usually max(COL, local market rate). You don't need a super high COL if the local market is very competitive, but COL can raise the pay because you still need to convince people to move to your location and most people won't do that if it has an abnormally higher cost of living without a corresponding pay increase.

The reason house prices are high in Seattle is because geography limits how well they can sprawl to build new houses and lots of people don't like higher density housing.

[0]: https://www.zillow.com/chicago-il/home-values/

After one year, you qualify for what's called an L1B 'internal transfer' visa. You can then transfer to another team within the same company that's based in the US. In many cases the company will sponsor your visa application and even the cost of moving (e.g. plain ticket, cost of shipping your belongings, etc.)

Once in the US, you can start the application process for a green card. As long as you're not a citizen of either India or China, this should take 2-3 years.

I'm Dutch and this is the path I took.

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.

Of course if you're willing to take 20-30% less pay, immigrating to Canada and working for one of these tech companies in Vancouver or the Toronto area is much, much easier.

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.

I don't see what downside there is?

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 $.

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

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.

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

It's a scam when it's compared to how every other tech company does it. The standard is a 1 year cliff at which point you get 25%, then uniform vesting every quarter.

> that you're not eligible for a bonus until you have been with the company for a full year for exactly this reason

This is exactly the standard in tech as well, but we're talking about an equity grant vesting schedule, not a bonus payout.

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?

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

There are a lot of people making 100-200k salaries.

There are also a lot of people making subsistence wages in a system with no universal public health care and meager government benefits.

Those are two very different voting blocks. The first group doesn't want to do anything too radical to rock the boat and mess up the good thing they have going. The second group wants radical change but has trouble organizing against the high paid lobbyists and campaign donors.

And then the really mind bending thing is those two groups often vote for the opposite party you would expect, considering their economic position.

Yet, everything changes if you consider housing, medical expenses, childcare, pensions: ta-dah the ratio between income and expenses is worse than in Europe.

Then count your real working hours over a 30-years period and redo the math.

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?

You can ruin all that on a 70K job.