11 ms·
This isn't a secret. Engineers are treated this way as well. At my time at Amazon, it was explained to me that this is why their comp structure is so wrapped up
by madrox 4y ago
This isn't a secret. Engineers are treated this way as well. At my time at Amazon, it was explained to me that this is why their comp structure is so wrapped up in stock and salaries are so low. Unless you keep getting promoted and get more stock, employees will naturally want to leave within four years.
- capableweb 4y ago> employees will naturally want to leave within four years That also explains why the breadth of AWS services keep growing, but the depth of the existing ones remains the same. Seems they would, every 4 years, lose a bunch of people with deep knowledge in the existing ones, the ones who'd be able to add new and deep features.
- anigbrowl 4y agoThat seems like a good (albeit cynical) strategy to be honest. 80% of your users only care about 20% of the features, and by offering as many different services as possible, you minimize the number of purchasing decisions that customers need to make. Are all your offerings just OK or even mediocre compared to the competition? Yes. Do most customers care? No, as long as it's adequate and doesn't actively cause problems. I can think of many purchase/usage decisions of my own where I prioritize convenience over optimization, because the apparent return from optimization exceeds the apparent cost. I mean, just look at the Amazon retail operation - everyone agrees that the website is tired, ugly, and slow, but lots of people still do all their shopping from there because they're used to it and it's easier than maintaining accounts with 15 different retailers with 15 different websites. Amazon's bottom line seems to indicate that breadth-first algorithms work well on problems involving human populations.
- shimon 4y agoThis actually seems like a structural weakness in cloud, where so much of revenue comes from the relatively few customers who are very deep in their usage. On the other hand, you can usually rely on close relationships with those customers to identify their significant needs. However, it might be harden to implement them without the bench of deeply knowledgeable engineers.
- PaulDavisThe1st 4y agoIt seems unlikely to me that this analysis applies to amzn's retail division.
- pacoWebConsult 4y agoIf you spend any time reading their retail forums [1], you'll see almost everyone lambasting Amazon constantly. Either disgruntled sellers who broke the rules and got terminated, or normal, hardworking mom-and-pop stores that were all but forced to sell on Amazon and consistently lose money due to amazon's ever-changing policies, poor support, and catering to large retailers. Large retailers get a direct line and quality support, while most sellers on Amazon get treated like crap. [1]: https://sellercentral.amazon.com/forums/ https://sellercentral.amazon.com/forums/
- baxtr 4y agoOr maybe it’s just a tiny fraction of those millions of sellers on their platform?
- PaulDavisThe1st 4y agoThe GP claim was > where so much of revenue comes from the relatively few customers who are very deep in their usage. I'm disputing that for retail.
- renonce 4y agoIf you view the sellers rather than the buyers as customers, then you’ll see that it is the case.
- jhugo 4y agoWho would bother writing on these forums unless they have an axe to grind?
- robocat 4y ago> Are all your offerings just OK or even mediocre compared to the competition? This was Microsoft’s strategy way-back-when. You can go surprisingly far, especially in enterprise, by covering all the basics without excelling at anything in particular, and fixing your mistakes. Avoiding fatal flaws is really really important and is extremely difficult to do, so just managing to be mediocre at everything necessary is actually quite uncommon in my experience. I have seen this particularly in my limited experience of founders and startups: you may need to be great at one thing, but you also need to be OK at many many things, and you must avoid the infinite sea of fatal flaws.
- tetromino_ 4y ago> everyone agrees that the website is tired, ugly, and slow, but lots of people still do all their shopping from there because they're used to it and it's easier than maintaining accounts with 15 different retailers with 15 different websites Slow compared to what? Amazon's website feels more responsive and more usable than 90% of online stores I've seen that carry orders of magnitude less variety of inventory. It loads fast, searches fast, provides for easy navigation between related products, and displays all needed information on one page without jank. Sure, it doesn't look modern, but it feels far more functional than the competition.
- cm2187 4y agoThough the filtering features are pretty much useless for almost every product. Too many products to maintain any decent classification. That makes it pretty much useless for looking for computer hardware (that and counterfeit products).
- the_biot 4y agoSo true, but I don't think it's impossible to maintain classification, that's just Amazon. I think they just gave up trying to, probably after they opened up up other sellers. I suspect their search, classification, filters etc are all so broken because it's all based on a Google-style textual search, with no backend database driving those site features.
- tails4e 4y agoPricespy had excellent filters for the produxts they listed, though I guess it was more focused than amazon. I would say maintaining is possible, especially if they let retailers define the fields and responsible for filling them for the products they list.
- viraptor 4y agoYet they could do much worse. By just not having multiple options merged into one item makes them better than the disaster that's eBay. In comparison they're not useless, because someone is doing it even worse.
- mter 4y agoThat's more promotion oriented architecture and design. New services/businesses are how you get promoted. Maintenance or incrementally improve existing functionality and you'll never get promoted. Amazon isn't really alone in that short sightedness though, it's just extra noticeable when combined with high churn
- torginus 4y agoThe number of services is just crazy - I've worked with AWS solutions architects in trying to find the perfect solution to our particular problems, and even they don't seem to know what half the stuff does.
- jjoonathan 4y agoLet alone which ones are the good ones. That only comes from experience. AWS never cancels anything... but they never complete anything either and they abandon 80% of their products in minimum viable state, where "viable" is defined by the PM's bonus packet, not by anyone who has to use the damn thing.
- p_l 4y agoAnd the level of actual integration of various services varies a lot (I mean, you expect things like IAM to be included if it's AWS service, right? Lol nope) plus then there's stuff that will be documented with something like one paragraph in docs and highly paid support engineers will never find anything internal about it, so you end up building a complete SSO solution for AWS from scratch...
- mr_beans 4y agoYes- this is real. There used to be “subclasses” to the Principal Engineer role and you could pick if you wanted to be a Depth Principal or a Breadth Principal, and that no longer exists now.
- sbf501 4y agoToo many features: code bloat from noob engineers Too few features: too many new apps from noob engineers Can't win. I know you didn't say #1, but both of these contradictory points are floated quite often.
- glenngillen 4y agoEx-Amazonian here, so take what I say however you will. The back-ended equity structure (i.e., you only vest 5% of your equity grant in the first 12mo) isn’t great when you’re comparing it with a standard vesting schedule as an employee. As an employee if you’re given two identical grants for two identical companies with the same future prospects then you take the one that gives you that equity sooner. But the rhetoric is usually that equity is meant to be an employee retention tool. So from that perspective the AMZN vesting structure makes much more sense to me than what is common elsewhere. As for the service dynamic: the whole “2 pizza team” thing is both a blessing and a curse IMO. Once you launch a service at AWS’s scale you’ve immediately got tens of thousands of users. And AWS takes stability/availability/scalability incredibly seriously. I think it’s more likely that team is now in a permanent operations mode fixing weird edge cases you find at scale and keeping the lights on. If it was a staff retention issue like you suggest then you’d see the platform plagued with reliability issues and services being shut down. But that doesn’t happen. Even SimpleDB is still available for use (though well hidden).
- uncomputation 4y agoCombine that with aggressive pruning/PIPing and you have people fighting to stay long enough to get their shares vested, once you stop getting promoted there is little stability because you will either get torn down for someone else’s ladder climb or have to keep getting promoted by any means necessary.
- madrox 4y agoIn my experience there, PIPing wasn't any more aggressive than anywhere else I've worked. The fighting was certainly real, though.
- cpeterso 4y agoLeaked memos show Amazon’s senior leadership asks managers to “manage out” (PIP or let go) the bottom 6% of their workforce each year: https://bigtechnology.substack.com/p/standing-up-for-us-plebs-amazon-leaders https://bigtechnology.substack.com/p/standing-up-for-us-pleb...
- madrox 4y agoI remember when that memo leaked. I was an EM at Amazon, and that wasn't my experience. I didn't feel any more pressure to PIP there than anywhere else. Maybe I wasn't there long enough to feel it.
- dixie_land 4y agoironically in this down turn Amazon offers are extremely appealing since your first two years are all cash. So you shore up on your cash while your future vesting have an upside if the recession is short lived.
- madrox 4y agoYes, their comp plans have changed in the last couple years because the stock isn't as exciting as it used to be. A couple years ago, it wasn't like this.
- faangiq 4y agoYep it’s a churn n burn shop.
- simonw 4y agoWas that Amazon or AWS? I've heard that the cultures are different between the two. I would expect AWS to value holding onto their most experienced engineers.
- pjbeam 4y agoThere are differences of course, but culturally there is One Amazon. Both take a meat grinding approach, even for software engineers. Source: worked at AWS.
- hintymad 4y agoAs a result, AWS engineers are very much promotion oriented. This leads to two results: title inflation and disgruntled employees. L6 used to be a big deal but not any more. L7 is now the new L6. The challenge with this arrangement is that whoever got promoted early on but stayed in the same level get less in return. And apparently it's human's nature to compare. When engineers see that their peers get promoted to L7 (a role used to be considered almost impossible to reach) in three years for no particularly obvious reasons, they can barely hide their cold anger.
- knolan 4y agoThat almost sounds like a cult.
- woah 4y agoYou need to buy 10,000 hours of self improvement tapes to get to L7. Only the most enlightened have achieved it
- burntoutfire 4y agoA cult takes money from you and doesn't pay you a million a year or whatever these people are making.
- deanCommie 4y ago
- ActorNightly 4y agoIn what world is a $150k out of college starting salary low?
- kache_ 4y agoIn a world where you can get 250
- colinmhayes 4y agoNo one is paying $250k salary out of college. Every one of those jobs has similar salary to amazon with the rest in stock. Maybe high frequency traders will give you that cash, but no one else.
- hikingsimulator 4y agoIt's not unheard of, but usually you need a PhD is a hot field with several conference papers. But it does not seem the norm yet. However, anecdotes make up hopes.
- mrep 4y agoThat's just a bachelors with 6 YOE (masters + phd). I have a bachelors with 6 years of actual experience and my target comp is 250k and actual is like 350k but in the meantime I've made a million dollars pre-tax in those 6 years. Totally different.
- kache_ 4y agoare you sure about that?
- peanuty1 4y agoI think their new grad salary is around 120k in HCOL areas like SF.
- cebert 4y agoThat sounds low to me
- vishnugupta 4y ago> stock You left out a big part here; RSU vesting schedule is back loaded. It's something like 5-20-25-50
- lbrito 4y agoIt's 5-15-40-40
- peanuty1 4y agoIt's 5-15-40-40
- georgeecollins 4y agoTo me that is a real tell. New employees are a risk, but you can tell if they are going to work out after a year. If you are still discounting the RSUs at the second year, it is in hopes that some won't survive to the payout of the third.
- yazaddaruvala 4y agoThis is not me defending Amazon's comp structure (they need to improve it in many ways), just correcting the facts: At the time of calculating an offer, all 4 years are considered the same "Total Compensation Target" i.e. no built in reduction or raise. Amazon just pays cash equivalents for years 1 and 2 - through a signing bonus to make up for the lack of stocks, and through stocks in years 3 and 4. The stocks in for each year are calculated assuming an average of 15% growth. This can be problematic, or can be great depending on the year you join. Disclaimer: Worked at Amazon for 9 years.
- WalterBright 4y agoHow'd the combination to my safe get on the internet? Drat, now I have to change it.
- stale2002 4y agoTo say that it is backloaded is misleading. Yes, technically speaking, the stock only compensation is backloaded. But that is balanced out by a 2 year "signing bonus" that is front loaded an equivalent amount of money, such that you are almost getting a hybrid stock/signing bonus package, so that it is technically the same amount of compensation each year.
- swat535 4y agoYes and it has always been like this. Why would companies truly "value" Engineering? The majority of execs thinks we are just interchangeable drones and the only reason the salaries are so high in SV is because they literally can't get away with less. If they could, US salaries would be comparable to Canada or EU which are embarrassingly low for the amount of work they require. They will fire you in an instant to save cost, never increase your salary and come up with elaborate schemes to basically screw you. I have seen executives try it all: Replace senior engineering with students or interns (I'm not kidding), hire from third world companies and pay the peanuts, bring in cheap labor on visa restrictions and abuse them, low ball you in salary negotiations, attempt to pay with "stocks" (I'm talking about penny stock companies here..) To management, Engineering is nothing but an annoying expense that gets in their way of profit. All the free foods, foosball tables, "family" mantra and cool hats are designed to distract you from the fact that you are being paid in pittance. This is why there is so much discrimination against older engineers, because they are more likely to catch up to this and demand a fair wage and good working conditions. When you are young, naive and hungry, you don't think about it much because burning the midnight oil with pizza is exciting.
- ljm 4y ago> If they could, US salaries would be comparable to Canada or EU which are embarrassingly low for the amount of work they require. I think that misses a cultural difference, which is that Canada and EU jobs don't require as much work because our work ethic is different. I can earn 100k in London and be very comfortable doing less than 40 hours a week, never working weekends, never doing crunch time, never being forced to work overtime, taking 6 weeks of vacation every year, sometimes more, and half of that is legally mandated. I don't have to flat-share on 100k. US salaries are extreme because the US work-ethic doesn't support that lifestyle. If you value your time more than your money then it's the US that provides an embarrassingly low return.
- doubled112 4y agohttps://www.ontario.ca/document/industries-and-jobs-exemptions-or-special-rules/government-employees-and-professionals#section-3 https://www.ontario.ca/document/industries-and-jobs-exemptio... IT professionals in Ontario, at least, are probably exempt from most of your list of things you'd think are required. Engineers and engineering students get an even shorter stick, in the form of more labour law exemptions. https://www.ontario.ca/document/industries-and-jobs-exemptions-or-special-rules/government-employees-and-professionals#section-2 https://www.ontario.ca/document/industries-and-jobs-exemptio...
- raverbashing 4y agoThere has been rumours of engineers "bouncing back" recently (they had a better term for it, but I forgot)
- iglio 4y ago“Boomerang” most likely
- raverbashing 4y agoYes, that's the term, thanks
- ornornor 4y ago> This isn't a secret. Engineers are treated this way as well. That still doesn’t make it acceptable. People are not Bezos’ minions slaving away so he can get even richer. Even Amazon employees deserve to be treated like humans, whether the abusive culture at amazon is a secret or not.