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Comment by yannickt | Hacker News Reader

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?

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"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.

Amazon has front loaded cash signing bonuses.

What you call "signing bonus" I call "guaranteed raise if you stay"

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.

> 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.

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.

We straight lined Amazon's stock signing bonuses for comparison with the other companies.

Short answer: you are screwed. Longer answer: most people can hold half a year more.

It's actually 5; 15; 20,20 ; 20,20

and there's also refreshes that vest at (probably) a different time of half-year.

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