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Amazon keeps asking me to interview and everyone tells me it's a terrible place to work. After seeing this compensation via equity I'm thinking it might be wor

Amazon keeps asking me to interview and everyone tells me it's a terrible place to work. After seeing this compensation via equity I'm thinking it might be worth it. Anyone work at Amazon and loves it or think it's really worth it?

umanwizard 10y ago
Are we looking at the same data? SDE3 is a quite senior role at Amazon. I don't know very many of them, and almost all of the ones I know are extremely bright. Seems like they're getting ripped off.
debacle 10y ago
I know a few people who have worked at Amazon for 3-4 years and they've never let on that their job is awful. That said, one of them is the kind of person that I would expect to do really well in an Amazonian environment, and the other now works at Nintendo.
yannickt 10y ago
One of the tables has this important piece of information at the bottom: "Amazon's vesting schedule is 5%, 15%, 40%, and 40% over the 4 years" This is a significant deviation from the industry standard, which is to have a one year cliff, and have stock vest month-to-month afterwards. What happens if you leave in the middle of year 3?
- aluskuiuc 10y ago
  This is a little disingenuous - that schedule only applies to the RSUs granted at offer sign time. Yearly stock compensation vests over a 2-year period 50/50.
  - stepny 10y ago
    We straight lined Amazon's stock signing bonuses for comparison with the other companies.
- qihqi 10y ago
  Short answer: you are screwed. Longer answer: most people can hold half a year more.
- chatmasta 10y ago
  The word for this kind of vesting schedule is "golden handcuffs," because once you cross the threshold of two years, it would be irrational to leave for somewhere else. Amazon is paying you in year 4 for value you delivered in years 1, 2, and 3 (otherwise you wouldn't make it to year 4). It works well for Amazon because they only pay you lots of money once they know you're a good engineer, and because you have an increasing incentive to stay each year.
  - pc86 10y ago
    > It works well for Amazon because they only pay you lots of money once they know you're the type of person that will put up with their unending stream of shit.
- loeg 10y ago
  "Backloaded." Amazon's average retention is 2-3 years so they mostly don't have to pay that out. It's pretty horrific for individual employee compensation. If you leave in year 3, you lose 80% of your signing grants.
  - tamana 10y ago
    Amazon has front loaded cash signing bonuses. What you call "signing bonus" I call "guaranteed raise if you stay"
- tamana 10y ago
  It's actually 5; 15; 20,20 ; 20,20 and there's also refreshes that vest at (probably) a different time of half-year.
planckscnst 10y ago
I quite like it there. I work on DynamoDB where I'm surrounded by pretty amazing engineers. I have written code that had a major impact on the service. I've solved important problems and that has helped make new things possible. Just yesterday, I was in a room with 20 or so top engineers from across AWS; that was pretty rewarding. When I started, I expected that I'd be there a couple years then move on to Google, but I'm not even excited about talking to Google, Facebook, Uber, or the others at this point. P.S. We're hiring on DynamoDB. We need for software developers and SRE-type folks. My e-mail is in my profile if you're interested in finding out more.
loeg 10y ago
Most teams require some on-call time every month or two. That's a big factor for me—I value my sleep. Additionally, last time I interviewed there they did not have remote work in any form. If you get a 2am page, you have to drive in to the office. (And you have to commute.)
- umanwizard 10y ago
  The second part is not true in my experience at all.
  - loeg 10y ago
    This would have been in 2012 or 2013. Perhaps lack of remote work was specific to that team.
    - aluskuiuc 10y ago
      There used to be - unsure if now - some very specific teams (like 2-3 in the whole company) that had to drive in for very specific issues. Basically if you need to get inside the cage in the datacenter where there are credit card numbers. Amazon generally has a pretty strong remote work culture - I can even get my ipad onto the VPN and SSH around to get my work done.
- ghshephard 10y ago
  How on earth does that make sense? Amazon has data centers all over the world - why would working on a 2am page be any more efficient at the "office at location A" (corporate) versus the "office at location B" (home).
  - loeg 10y ago
    It doesn't make sense to me either. I believe at the time they said something about having a strict network access policy, forbidding access from home.
    - 10y ago
eclipxe 10y ago
I love it. You either love it or hate it. Read the leadership principles. If you align with what they're saying, you'll enjoy it. If you don't like them, you won't like Amazon.
- FmrAMZN_TA 10y ago
  I disagree. There are many leadership principles which are contradictory either in part or in whole (e.g. Dive Deep vs. Bias for Action; Insist on the Highest Standards vs. Invent and Simplify). You can squint and see how these would be the same, but often they're just used as arrows in a quiver to knock someone down and/or put someone on a PIP (performance improvement plan). Example I witnessed during people review (obviously anonymized): A: I think X is one of the best members of the team, he took a bunch of customer requirements and put out something super fast that addressed some customer needs. (Invent and Simplify, Bias for Action) B: I disagree. His product didn't think about scenarios a, b and c [ed: these would be things that caused the product to slip a year, and would leave customers in pain during that time] and he did not investigate g, h and i [which would have taken 3 months to figure out, still with customers in pain]. I think he needs to be put on a PIP. (Dive Deep; Insist on the highest standards) Yes, I'm highly biased here - this person was on my team, and I endorsed his plan, as did person B, until we got into People Review. One of the most brutal and subtle things about the entire process is the fact that you're consistently asked for negative feedback about EVERYONE... even if you don't have it. I moved from that group (AWS) to new businesses shortly thereafter.
  - jcrites 10y ago
    Leadership principles (LPs) are not contradictory so much as they are in tension with one another. That's not a bad thing, it's a good thing. Navigating the tension is what helps discover good outcomes. For example, if a customer calls up wanting a refund, then granting the refund supports Customer Obsession but contradicts Frugality. When deciding between options, there is always a tradeoff, and the LPs provide a lexicon for identifying and reasoning about what you're trading off. Amazon strives to be the world's most customer-centric company, and hence will generally choose the approach consistent with customer obsession. Identifying and discussing that tension and how to resolve it is constructive. I don't see them as arrows to knock people down. I see them rather as, well, principles to use when reasoning about a situation. Giving a name to a concept is a good way to reason about it and discuss it. They are used when reasoning about performance, it's true, but it's used across the board: when justifying a promotion, when praising a high-performer who excels within their level, when identifying areas of growth, as well as while discussing job performance with people who are doing less well. Performance and leadership in a creative job like software engineering cannot be perfectly objective (it's not like an assembly line where you process N units per hour), but the LPs provide some objective concepts and terminology to apply while discussing performance; they break down performance into dimensions that can be discussed individually in the context of examples, which is an advantage over just vaguely discussing things at a high level. For example, "Bob found a creative way to pack more software onto existing servers without harming performance (Frugality)" or "Sally spent two hours on the phone helping our biggest customer (Customer Obsession)" or "After causing an outage, Joe wasn't able to identify anything he'd do differently next time. I'm concerned that he's not vocally self-critical." I'd much rather have a discussion of my performance or leadership in concrete terms like these, rather than vague ones.
FmrAMZN_TA 10y ago
I'm a former Amazonian. Since you asked my opinion, I'll give it. It's a truly horrible place to work and I would never ask my worst enemy to go work there. Engenders the worst in humanity (people review, anyone?), terrible technical architecture, many systems based solely on tribal knowledge that leaves the door every day, comp structure that is nearly outright lying... I could go on. Some people say that it was just the group I worked in but I worked in retail (1 year), new businesses (1 year) and AWS (1.5 years). There's virtually no difference. I still have PTSD (or at least what feels like PTSD) about by 3.5 years there, and I'd give anything to get that time back. BTW, I'm now at another 20k+ person company which is doing very well, and making 30% more than my total comp when I was there.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- Pyxl101 10y ago
  You wrote the following in a previous comment: > I am a former Amazon employee. I worked there for exactly a year. I assume I was doing well, I was offered increase bonus and base after my initial year. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10413966 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10413966 Just to clarify, did you work at Amazon for 1 year or 3.5 years? It seems like these messages are contradictory, but perhaps I've misunderstood. In the message I'm replying to now, you wrote: > I worked in retail (1 year), new businesses (1 year) and AWS (1.5 years)
  - FmrAMZN_TA 10y ago
    I admit, I lied in the previous comment. In the previous comment, I was worried that people would know who I was if I had said where I worked (what groups and how long). The truth is I had worked in the group I moved to for exactly a year, but I had been at Amazon for 3.5 years. The level of retribution at that company is substantial, and I was quiet worried they would hurt my ability to get a new job. I have a nice new job now (I was still searching when I posted that), and am less worried. It's really not hard to figure out who people are on HN.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

umanwizard 10y ago

Are we looking at the same data? SDE3 is a quite senior role at Amazon. I don't know very many of them, and almost all of the ones I know are extremely bright. Seems like they're getting ripped off.

debacle 10y ago

I know a few people who have worked at Amazon for 3-4 years and they've never let on that their job is awful. That said, one of them is the kind of person that I would expect to do really well in an Amazonian environment, and the other now works at Nintendo.

yannickt 10y ago

One of the tables has this important piece of information at the bottom: "Amazon's vesting schedule is 5%, 15%, 40%, and 40% over the 4 years" This is a significant deviation from the industry standard, which is to have a one year cliff, and have stock vest month-to-month afterwards. What happens if you leave in the middle of year 3?

aluskuiuc 10y ago
This is a little disingenuous - that schedule only applies to the RSUs granted at offer sign time. Yearly stock compensation vests over a 2-year period 50/50.
- stepny 10y ago
  We straight lined Amazon's stock signing bonuses for comparison with the other companies.
qihqi 10y ago
Short answer: you are screwed. Longer answer: most people can hold half a year more.
chatmasta 10y ago
The word for this kind of vesting schedule is "golden handcuffs," because once you cross the threshold of two years, it would be irrational to leave for somewhere else. Amazon is paying you in year 4 for value you delivered in years 1, 2, and 3 (otherwise you wouldn't make it to year 4). It works well for Amazon because they only pay you lots of money once they know you're a good engineer, and because you have an increasing incentive to stay each year.
- pc86 10y ago
  > It works well for Amazon because they only pay you lots of money once they know you're the type of person that will put up with their unending stream of shit.
loeg 10y ago
"Backloaded." Amazon's average retention is 2-3 years so they mostly don't have to pay that out. It's pretty horrific for individual employee compensation. If you leave in year 3, you lose 80% of your signing grants.
- tamana 10y ago
  Amazon has front loaded cash signing bonuses. What you call "signing bonus" I call "guaranteed raise if you stay"
tamana 10y ago
It's actually 5; 15; 20,20 ; 20,20 and there's also refreshes that vest at (probably) a different time of half-year.

planckscnst 10y ago

I quite like it there. I work on DynamoDB where I'm surrounded by pretty amazing engineers. I have written code that had a major impact on the service. I've solved important problems and that has helped make new things possible. Just yesterday, I was in a room with 20 or so top engineers from across AWS; that was pretty rewarding. When I started, I expected that I'd be there a couple years then move on to Google, but I'm not even excited about talking to Google, Facebook, Uber, or the others at this point. P.S. We're hiring on DynamoDB. We need for software developers and SRE-type folks. My e-mail is in my profile if you're interested in finding out more.

loeg 10y ago

Most teams require some on-call time every month or two. That's a big factor for me—I value my sleep. Additionally, last time I interviewed there they did not have remote work in any form. If you get a 2am page, you have to drive in to the office. (And you have to commute.)

umanwizard 10y ago
The second part is not true in my experience at all.
- loeg 10y ago
  This would have been in 2012 or 2013. Perhaps lack of remote work was specific to that team.
  - aluskuiuc 10y ago
    There used to be - unsure if now - some very specific teams (like 2-3 in the whole company) that had to drive in for very specific issues. Basically if you need to get inside the cage in the datacenter where there are credit card numbers. Amazon generally has a pretty strong remote work culture - I can even get my ipad onto the VPN and SSH around to get my work done.
ghshephard 10y ago
How on earth does that make sense? Amazon has data centers all over the world - why would working on a 2am page be any more efficient at the "office at location A" (corporate) versus the "office at location B" (home).
- loeg 10y ago
  It doesn't make sense to me either. I believe at the time they said something about having a strict network access policy, forbidding access from home.
  - 10y ago

eclipxe 10y ago

I love it. You either love it or hate it. Read the leadership principles. If you align with what they're saying, you'll enjoy it. If you don't like them, you won't like Amazon.

FmrAMZN_TA 10y ago
I disagree. There are many leadership principles which are contradictory either in part or in whole (e.g. Dive Deep vs. Bias for Action; Insist on the Highest Standards vs. Invent and Simplify). You can squint and see how these would be the same, but often they're just used as arrows in a quiver to knock someone down and/or put someone on a PIP (performance improvement plan). Example I witnessed during people review (obviously anonymized): A: I think X is one of the best members of the team, he took a bunch of customer requirements and put out something super fast that addressed some customer needs. (Invent and Simplify, Bias for Action) B: I disagree. His product didn't think about scenarios a, b and c [ed: these would be things that caused the product to slip a year, and would leave customers in pain during that time] and he did not investigate g, h and i [which would have taken 3 months to figure out, still with customers in pain]. I think he needs to be put on a PIP. (Dive Deep; Insist on the highest standards) Yes, I'm highly biased here - this person was on my team, and I endorsed his plan, as did person B, until we got into People Review. One of the most brutal and subtle things about the entire process is the fact that you're consistently asked for negative feedback about EVERYONE... even if you don't have it. I moved from that group (AWS) to new businesses shortly thereafter.
- jcrites 10y ago
  Leadership principles (LPs) are not contradictory so much as they are in tension with one another. That's not a bad thing, it's a good thing. Navigating the tension is what helps discover good outcomes. For example, if a customer calls up wanting a refund, then granting the refund supports Customer Obsession but contradicts Frugality. When deciding between options, there is always a tradeoff, and the LPs provide a lexicon for identifying and reasoning about what you're trading off. Amazon strives to be the world's most customer-centric company, and hence will generally choose the approach consistent with customer obsession. Identifying and discussing that tension and how to resolve it is constructive. I don't see them as arrows to knock people down. I see them rather as, well, principles to use when reasoning about a situation. Giving a name to a concept is a good way to reason about it and discuss it. They are used when reasoning about performance, it's true, but it's used across the board: when justifying a promotion, when praising a high-performer who excels within their level, when identifying areas of growth, as well as while discussing job performance with people who are doing less well. Performance and leadership in a creative job like software engineering cannot be perfectly objective (it's not like an assembly line where you process N units per hour), but the LPs provide some objective concepts and terminology to apply while discussing performance; they break down performance into dimensions that can be discussed individually in the context of examples, which is an advantage over just vaguely discussing things at a high level. For example, "Bob found a creative way to pack more software onto existing servers without harming performance (Frugality)" or "Sally spent two hours on the phone helping our biggest customer (Customer Obsession)" or "After causing an outage, Joe wasn't able to identify anything he'd do differently next time. I'm concerned that he's not vocally self-critical." I'd much rather have a discussion of my performance or leadership in concrete terms like these, rather than vague ones.

FmrAMZN_TA 10y ago

I'm a former Amazonian. Since you asked my opinion, I'll give it. It's a truly horrible place to work and I would never ask my worst enemy to go work there. Engenders the worst in humanity (people review, anyone?), terrible technical architecture, many systems based solely on tribal knowledge that leaves the door every day, comp structure that is nearly outright lying... I could go on. Some people say that it was just the group I worked in but I worked in retail (1 year), new businesses (1 year) and AWS (1.5 years). There's virtually no difference. I still have PTSD (or at least what feels like PTSD) about by 3.5 years there, and I'd give anything to get that time back. BTW, I'm now at another 20k+ person company which is doing very well, and making 30% more than my total comp when I was there.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
Pyxl101 10y ago
You wrote the following in a previous comment: > I am a former Amazon employee. I worked there for exactly a year. I assume I was doing well, I was offered increase bonus and base after my initial year. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10413966 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10413966 Just to clarify, did you work at Amazon for 1 year or 3.5 years? It seems like these messages are contradictory, but perhaps I've misunderstood. In the message I'm replying to now, you wrote: > I worked in retail (1 year), new businesses (1 year) and AWS (1.5 years)
- FmrAMZN_TA 10y ago
  I admit, I lied in the previous comment. In the previous comment, I was worried that people would know who I was if I had said where I worked (what groups and how long). The truth is I had worked in the group I moved to for exactly a year, but I had been at Amazon for 3.5 years. The level of retribution at that company is substantial, and I was quiet worried they would hurt my ability to get a new job. I have a nice new job now (I was still searching when I posted that), and am less worried. It's really not hard to figure out who people are on HN.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]