5 ms·
The $1K christmas bonus started no later than 2002. You say those times are gone, but have you seen what FAANG pays people now?
by emtel 5y ago
The $1K christmas bonus started no later than 2002.
You say those times are gone, but have you seen what FAANG pays people now?
- paxys 5y agoYeah, back in the 2000s or even early 2010s a $1K+ employee holiday bonus would be a "holy shit!" event that would make the news. Doing so today, even after adjusting for inflation, would be met with "yeah, whatever" by everyone, including new grads.
- thaumasiotes 5y agoI don't get the phenomenon of piddling bonuses. I worked for Amazon in the 2000s. And we got an employee discount. 10% off anything on the site. Capped at a maximum of $100 / year. This is a discount that feels like they're going out of their way to spit in your face. What if you raised my annual pay by... $100? Who would notice or care?
- dastbe 5y agofor good or for bad, one of the things amazon does is focus on providing benefits that can apply to ALL employees, i.e. the six figure devs all the way down to the fc employees.
- jacquesm 5y agoAmazon would notice because paying their whole workforce $100 extra per year would cost them significant money whereas that sum of all those discounts would work out to a small fraction of that amount.
- ggm 5y ago"Significant" is possibly mis-reading it. They only do significant things if they have existential risk or an FEC reporting obligation. On Amazon's revenue, payrise is only "significant" if its company wide, above CPI. If they can pay box shifters less than 50c rise, they will do it. If they can pay coders 10%, they will do it. They won't pay box loaders and coders 10% unless the unionisation drive makes them. Seriously? $100 per employee is almost too small to figure. Scale here. Amazon did $150b in quarterly revenue. QUARTERLY. it has 1.3m employees worldwide. $100 per employee is 0.001% of the quarters revenue. It doesn't move the dial.
- jacquesm 5y agoThere was never a dollar minted that Jeff Bezos didn't like.
- s1artibartfast 5y agoProfit margin is about 10% so it was more like 1/10,000 revenue
- thaumasiotes 5y agoWages don't get paid out of profits. They're paid out of revenue. Did you mean that markup is about 10%?
- s1artibartfast 5y agoA increase in wages comes out of profit (and adds to costs). Revenue is irrelevant to if a company can afford wages. I meant that Amazon profit is 10% of revenue.
- TheDudeMan 5y agoI agree. When I got there, I was stunned that that was the perk instead of "Free Prime membership" (which has about the same cost but just feels better).
- paxys 5y agoThere's a simple reason for it. This perk is a 10% discount on Amazon products, which means (1) to get $100, employees will have to spend $1000+, which not everyone will do, and (2) the total cost to Amazon is still less than $100, since a lot of the cost is their own profit margin. On the other hand, Amazon operates Prime at a loss, since 2-day shipping is ridiculously expensive. It uses it as a way to get and hold on to new customers, but you don't exactly need to do that when the user is already working for Amazon. So offering that as a perk would end up costing the company more than $100/employee.
- dan-robertson 5y agoAs I recall it was a silly thing where you received the bonus as physical cash (ie paper money) and you could still receive other comp like stock or a monetary bonus to a bank account.
- ergocoder 5y agoI remember. Didn't they hand out cash? And there was concern around having that much cash at HQ. What a time.
- s1artibartfast 5y agoThat sounds really fun