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One thing to consider is the runaway stock market. It has a huge effect on total comp. Yes, Amazon has lower base salaries than FB/GOOG, but they've always been

One thing to consider is the runaway stock market. It has a huge effect on total comp. Yes, Amazon has lower base salaries than FB/GOOG, but they've always been pretty generous with RSUs and their stock is damn high right now. There are no doubt many engineers there making those $400k figures by virtue of having been granted RSUs when they were half as valuable as they are today. It may take a true outlier to get hired today and immediately be making that kind of salary, but it doesn't take much of an outlier for someone with a few years of grants to get that high.

rifung 8y ago
> Yes, Amazon has lower base salaries than FB/GOOG, but they've always been pretty generous with RSUs and their stock is damn high right now. Actually my salary was very similar at Amazon when compared with Google and my friends have similar salaries. The problem with Amazon is that their vesting schedule is very heavily weighted towards the 3rd and fourth year. It's true that if you stay the entire time, that might work to your benefit since by that time the stock value may have increased greatly, but I'm not sure how much that should count since you could in theory just sell your RSUs and buy Amazon stocks if you wanted to. My experience is that total comp at Google is much higher than Amazon but again this may be anecdotal?