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I got a big bump in 2016 because I got a competing offer from Oracle, and Amazon matched it. 2017 and 2018 growth was from stock appreciation. If the stock hadn

I got a big bump in 2016 because I got a competing offer from Oracle, and Amazon matched it. 2017 and 2018 growth was from stock appreciation. If the stock hadn’t increased so much, the last 2 years would have been at around the 2016 level. AFAIK, people with ~10 years experience commonly get offers at around my 2016 level.

opportune 8y ago
This is less a direct question and more of a discussion: I always thought it was considered a bad move to stick with your old company after receiving a competing offer and negotiating a higher wage at your old company. Conventional wisdom I've read is that your old company will slowly phase you out (thus missing out on promotions/raises). Have other people been so successful using an offer for a raise at your original employer and staying?
- mercutio2 8y ago
  I have never retaliated against employees who gave me competing offers; some times I haven't been able to meet them and they left, but every time I did meet them, people stayed. The people who stayed basically pulled forward a stock grant that was coming anyway, and increased this year's raise while decreasing it a fair bit for the next two years. I've always been explicit that this is what's happening; the area under the income curve does end up larger, but not by a large amount. Of course the option value of having a grant vs. hoping for a grant is worth something, too. DVassallo's $160k bump across one year's W2 is much larger than I've ever seen granted.
- DVassallo 8y ago
  At big companies I don't think that happens. Everyone understands that everybody is there for a temporary period. In my case, I think only about 3 people knew about this, and I believe they genuinely wanted me to stay.
  - opportune 8y ago
    This is really good information to know, thanks.
ChuckMcM 8y ago
I was wondering about that. I mean when I was at Sun they paid a market wage and had an employee stock purchase plan[1]. When I left Sun in '95 the stock I had left was worth about $1.2M, it had gone from the $20's to over a $100 and split twice (if you do the math that was $60,000 worth of stock to begin with, which had accumulated over about 6 years). I don't think of my wages being $1.2M so much as I happened to get lucky with that equity. (I have also experienced the reverse where > $1M worth (on paper) of stock was worth less than $10K when I could sell it, it isn't all roses.)
- DVassallo 8y ago
  But ~$500K is the market rate right now. Several people I know got that amount at Google, Facebook, and Oracle here in Seattle with ~10 years experience in cloud or AI/ML. Amazon’s stock increase has inflated the market rates because other companies had to pay so much in the last 3 years for people to leave Amazon. Obviously there’s no guarantee that this will last forever, but I was pretty confident I would have continued to make $500K/year as long as the market conditions remained the same. I also had enough unvested RSUs until end of 2020 to make that much.
  - ChuckMcM 8y ago
    I understand what you are saying, and when you sell stock that vests it is completely reasonable to count it as income as it shows up on your W2. My point was that just prior to the dot com crash I had over $6M in "RSUs" (well restricted stock which was a better deal since the number can't be fudged but what ever) and when it "vested" it was worth less than $12K. It showed up on my W2 because I used an 83b election to vest it all up front (and get in on a lower tax rate when it unlocked) only to have it generate losses when it unlocked. Where I was going was that there is 'base pay' which you are going to get if you show up every day and don't get fired, and there is 'variable pay' which can come in the format of annual bonuses and or vesting equity. The annual bonuses tend to be something of a beauty contest and so can be hard to predict, and the market can swing wildly (hopefully nobody with RSUs today has to experience a 99.9% drop in value that I did during the dot com crash but it can happen, you could have had Theranos RSUs for example). The original author went out of their way to stick with just base pay and I understood their reasons for doing so as I largely agree with them on the lack of predictability of other remuneration options.

opportune 8y ago

This is less a direct question and more of a discussion: I always thought it was considered a bad move to stick with your old company after receiving a competing offer and negotiating a higher wage at your old company. Conventional wisdom I've read is that your old company will slowly phase you out (thus missing out on promotions/raises). Have other people been so successful using an offer for a raise at your original employer and staying?

mercutio2 8y ago
I have never retaliated against employees who gave me competing offers; some times I haven't been able to meet them and they left, but every time I did meet them, people stayed. The people who stayed basically pulled forward a stock grant that was coming anyway, and increased this year's raise while decreasing it a fair bit for the next two years. I've always been explicit that this is what's happening; the area under the income curve does end up larger, but not by a large amount. Of course the option value of having a grant vs. hoping for a grant is worth something, too. DVassallo's $160k bump across one year's W2 is much larger than I've ever seen granted.
DVassallo 8y ago
At big companies I don't think that happens. Everyone understands that everybody is there for a temporary period. In my case, I think only about 3 people knew about this, and I believe they genuinely wanted me to stay.
- opportune 8y ago
  This is really good information to know, thanks.

ChuckMcM 8y ago

I was wondering about that. I mean when I was at Sun they paid a market wage and had an employee stock purchase plan[1]. When I left Sun in '95 the stock I had left was worth about $1.2M, it had gone from the $20's to over a $100 and split twice (if you do the math that was $60,000 worth of stock to begin with, which had accumulated over about 6 years). I don't think of my wages being $1.2M so much as I happened to get lucky with that equity. (I have also experienced the reverse where > $1M worth (on paper) of stock was worth less than $10K when I could sell it, it isn't all roses.)

DVassallo 8y ago
But ~$500K is the market rate right now. Several people I know got that amount at Google, Facebook, and Oracle here in Seattle with ~10 years experience in cloud or AI/ML. Amazon’s stock increase has inflated the market rates because other companies had to pay so much in the last 3 years for people to leave Amazon. Obviously there’s no guarantee that this will last forever, but I was pretty confident I would have continued to make $500K/year as long as the market conditions remained the same. I also had enough unvested RSUs until end of 2020 to make that much.
- ChuckMcM 8y ago
  I understand what you are saying, and when you sell stock that vests it is completely reasonable to count it as income as it shows up on your W2. My point was that just prior to the dot com crash I had over $6M in "RSUs" (well restricted stock which was a better deal since the number can't be fudged but what ever) and when it "vested" it was worth less than $12K. It showed up on my W2 because I used an 83b election to vest it all up front (and get in on a lower tax rate when it unlocked) only to have it generate losses when it unlocked. Where I was going was that there is 'base pay' which you are going to get if you show up every day and don't get fired, and there is 'variable pay' which can come in the format of annual bonuses and or vesting equity. The annual bonuses tend to be something of a beauty contest and so can be hard to predict, and the market can swing wildly (hopefully nobody with RSUs today has to experience a 99.9% drop in value that I did during the dot com crash but it can happen, you could have had Theranos RSUs for example). The original author went out of their way to stick with just base pay and I understood their reasons for doing so as I largely agree with them on the lack of predictability of other remuneration options.