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, <i>every</i> 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 at a point where it really needs to try everything under the sun to try to attract talent, given their extremely poor reputation.<p>With this said, from reading the article, this move seems reminiscent of Netflix's pay structure, in the sense of offering a higher cash portion but lower equity. Some people here already mentioned that this was already sort of the case with a sign on bonus compensating for the backloaded vesting structure. From my experience interacting w/ professionals outside the FANG bubble, equity tends to be a bit confusing, so I wonder if a move towards bigger cash portions is a way to try to lure people who wouldn't otherwise be looking at big tech as a prospective career choice.<p>What's also curious to me is that bumping up cash comp is in direct opposition to the trends from some other tech giants, where they are frontloading equity vesting. My sample size might just be small, but it feels like cash comp seems to correlate somewhat with bearish stock feeling and that frontloaded equity tends to correlate w/ bullish stock feeling. Would love to hear whether I'm off the mark here or not.
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 FAANG companies (especially Amazon) at lower compensations with the hopes of moving up to those higher levels.<p>OTOH, the backloaded vesting system works. It was easy to hire people out of their first year at Amazon, but almost impossible to hire someone after a few years when the bulk of their vesting was right around the corner. I talked to a lot of people who admitted being miserable but felt they couldn’t leave until they got the equity that they had been toiling over for the past few years.<p>Weird situation all around. We eventually reduced our recruiting out of that particular Amazon office because so many of the people coming out of it were deeply disgruntled with the tech industry in general. Really changed my view of Amazon.
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 <i>really</i> bad, even in AWS (Amazon employees all agree that AWS is a much better place to work in tech than Amazon retail).<p>At the same time, Amazon has had to pay <i>very</i> high for new hires. Hiring managers used to need to get L10 approval to go out of bands on offers outside bands, but starting late 2021, they could go out of bands up to ~20% higher with no approvals.<p>To top all of this, Amazon has a 6% internal URA (non-regretted attrition) target: something that has been in place for close to a decade. The Amazon Music group revolted late 2021 as reported by the Big Technology publication in-depth [1] as they didn't have 6% of people to fire, at the very time when they could not hire. Yet they were forced to hit this URA target, just like all other orgs in Amazon. Apparently this “rebellion email” leaked across the company and is sparking Amazon-wide outrage, and adds fuel to the fire.<p>Amazon has been extremely frugal for the skillset they hire for, very demanding and have created a stressful workplace. They still force 6% of engineers to be fired, even when their own leadership opposes this (Amazon Music).<p>I wonder why they can’t hire. Also, why is Amazon still part of the FANG abbreviation when they have this culture across many of their organisations?<p>[1] <a href="https://bigtechnology.substack.com/?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=web&utm_campaign=substack_profile" rel="nofollow">https://bigtechnology.substack.com/?utm_source=substack&utm_...</a>
As a low-ish level MSFT employee I laughed at this line:<p>> The move promises to bring Amazon’s base pay more in line with other big tech companies, including Google, Facebook, Apple and Microsoft.<p>As a ~62/63 (almost senior or senior) at Microsoft my peers at Facebook, Google, and Amazon can easily make literally twice as much compensation a year in salary, stock, and cash bonuses.<p>Microsoft isn't even in the ballpark. If I didn't absolutely love my job there would be zero reason to stay at Microsoft.
I'm amazed both with the number of messages I get from Amazon about job openings and the aggressiveness of them. Add on how many are for ill fitting or basically Hail Mary type positions (During the height of the pandemic I got one wanting me to move to Ireland to work in an Amazon office there. They even acknowledged the oddness of the situation but they were really desperate for people to fill those roles).<p>Seems like Amazon was blown through most of the labor supply and now can't find workers, not because they don't exist but because they don't want to work for Amazon. Doubt more money is going to fix this though perhaps pushing for more visas will let them get some workers who haven't been burnt by Amazon yet. Amazon simply has a bad culture which must be fixed. Even then, it'll take time to repair their reputation.
My Amazon salary history, to anchor some of this story better:<p>- Joined early early 2017 as an L5 hire (no previous FANG experience, but 10+ elsewhere) with an an offer of base $145K, sign on of $50K year 1, $38K year 2, 150 RSUs (AMZN worth ~$850 = 127500). Vesting schedule: 5% @ 1y, 15% @ 2y, 20% @ 2.5y, 20% @ 3y, 20% @ 3.5y, 20% @ 4y.<p>- Negotiated without competing offers a bump to $150K base, $60K / $45K cash, 162 RSUs.<p>- A breakdown based on Amazon's 15% stock aprecciation YOY gives you Amazon's Total Compensation Target. This is Amazon's projection assuming that you perform at the middle of the expectation of your cohort in the yearly performance review (OLR, not forte as the article states)<p><pre><code> - year 1 (8 RSUs): $150K base + $60K cash + 8 * $850 * 1.15 = $218K
- year 2 (24 RSUs): $150K base + $46K cash + 24 * $850 * 1.15^2 = $223K
- year 3 (32 + 33 RSUs): $150K base + (32 * $850 * 1.15^2.5) + (33 * $850 * 1.15^3) = $231K
- year 4 (32 + 33 RSUs): $150K base + (32 * $850 * 1.15^3.5) + (33 * $850 * 1.15^4) = $243K
</code></pre>
- Actual salary<p><pre><code> - year 1 (AMZN @ $1430) = $221K. OLR bumped base salary for next year to $157K
- year 2 (AMZN @ $1844) = $247K. OLR bumped base salary for next year to $160K. No stock grant as projected salary > comp target
- year 3 (AMZN @ $1767, $2307) = $292K. Granted 18 RSUs to vest at year 4.5 and year 5
- year 4 (AMZN @ $3338, $3379) = $378K
- year 5 (AMZN @ $3409, $3400?) = $221K
</code></pre>
- Notes<p><pre><code> - due to manager / life reasons, didn't progress beyond L5. If I were to pursue this this year, my comp adjustment would have come about a year after starting at that level (but only to the lower end of the L6 band ~ $250K). $30K for a tonne more work seems rather stupid.
- note the golden handcuffs as well as that huge cliff
- some of the above is intentionally inaccurate (but not by a huge amount)</code></pre>
Finally Amazon is realising their trash comp won't get them any hires in the current market. They were not even close to being competitive with other FAANG before. Couple that with the bad culture and I'm sure they were feeling the pressure to get new hires.
As a Googler I was approached by Amazon, and when I started to look at the culture, a photo came out with Jeff Bezos using a door because he was too ,,frugal’’ to buy a desk… I would never join an office where people are proud of that.
Or they are pushing more compensation into cash because cash is a lot cheaper for them than equity. What I mean by that is that they have almost unlimited borrowing capacity at near-zero rates, versus a fixed amount of equity, and as long as the equity keeps growing, the cash pool grows with it. If the employees want to then purchase the equity, then that is upward pressure on the price, versus downward pressure on the price when an employee sells equity for cash.
LOL only took them ... forever ... I left Amazon ~7 years ago to go to FB because my <i>base</i> FB pay was higher than my Amazon total comp. Nevermind FB RSUs ... LOL
Not sure why the article mentions Microsoft, or if Amazon really worries about them. MS salary is notoriously low compared to FANG, with talent often leaving only because of money, particularly in the Seattle area where Amazon HQ is, and SF/SV.
About time, given the amount of horror stories coming out of <i>The Forest</i>. More money will definitely increase (at least to a certain extent) how much bullshit people are willing to put up with.
2 things why I dont bother interviewing:<p>1. very difficult long interview that I most likely won't pass
2. I only want to work remotely. driving every day few hours back and forth is very expensive in many ways.<p>When something changes about those I will think about it.
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.
I get contacted by Amazon recruiters multiple times a week. Now that I'm actively looking for a job, I thought I'd give them a chance. It would be good interview practice at the very least. So I take the online assessment and it turns out that one of the questions was a LeetCode Hard. Like... what? Did they want me to fail?
This is good news for tech workers, but the income disparity between Amazon tech workers and Amazon warehouse/delivery workers is absolutely obscene.<p>Understandably, skilled vs unskilled labor, and supply and demand, and all that, but as Jon Stewart recently recounted telling Jeff Bezos at a dinner party, “sounds like a recipe for a revolution.”
I think this is a good move. The compensation structure of Amazon (max $160k, rest is RSUs) made sense when the company delivered stock value growth each year. It felt startup-esque. The issue is that the stock performance has been unimpressive for several years now, which means that a lot of higher-ups and older employees were seeing their compensation become significantly below market-rate and would, as one expect, leave.<p>To give people here an idea, my RSUs lost ~4% in value since I've been at Amazon (more than a year). This is perfectly fine if there's an expectation that the RSUs are a "bonus", it's not fine if you need it to go up 10-15% for your TC to match Microsoft.
Will Amazon at any point start considering hiring more engineers from countries that command lesser salaries like Brazil/EU than they do US engineers?<p>Why <i>do</i> US engineers command such higher salaries?
Does this affect contractors, or just employees?
This year, I noticed Amazon hires international contractors for engineering roles and I don't think I saw that before.
I wonder if Amazon is opening up more roles internationally (via contractors), while increasing wages of employees to retain folks in US/Canada/etc.
I don't have any data to back this idea up, it's just a thought.
I guess this only changes the stable salary component, which will bring the first year's comp to more comparable levels. Amazon pays an insane amount of cash bonus the first two years to make up for their backloaded vesting and capped salary. Even then the total compensation was pretty high. It might be the case that their stock isn't growing as expected leading to employees to be unhappy.
My understanding (from friends who have interviewed at Amazon and received offers) is that they are offered a $160k base... plus a $XXX bonus (guaranteed?) every year, to get their cash comp competitive with all the other tech companies.<p>So while this might indeed result in pay bumps, I highly doubt the bumps will be very large. This is also a "simplify how we do offers" thing.
Pre-pandemic, I occasionally got some recruiter email from them and they were always really insistent about relocating to the Seattle area (something I wanted to do about as much as I want a hole in the head). Makes me wonder if they've done a good job with their remote culture.
More stocks are actually favorable over cash to avoid Medicare and SS taxes which are approximately 15%. To me, this seems like a strategy to counter the volatility in the stock market and it gives Amazon a way to exit equity based employee retention.
Seems like it would be a lot better to realize you have a problem with management if your base (developers in this case) can't be retained or evidently bribed. Something is clearly broken in their organization, I mean holy shit 350k???
I haven't done any interviews since before covid. What resources do people suggest reading in order to prepare? I'm familiar with leetcode but I'm wondering what books I should read besides Cracking the Coding Interview.
Now is the perfect time to move to amazon as an experienced corp manager.<p>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.
Ok. amazon has a high attrition rate because of it's culture. Making the pay higher won't necessarily fix that.<p>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.