$10k is usually the signing bonus I get for just changing companies. Is this in addition to the signing bonus?
Um, wow. Yet another reason not to work at Amazon.
How does Amazon still get employees when they just seem to pile these kinds of irritating, anti-employee behaviors up one after another?
How else do you stop someone walking out on day 1 with 50k cash?
> These prorated periods are the same for Microsoft.
Ah. Understood.
> How else do you stop someone walking out on day 1 with 50k cash?
If that happens enough that you have to actually worry about it, you have much bigger problems.
Amazon pays competitive salaries.
They are probably a bit below Google or Facebook salaries, but compared to an average SF startup, they pay literally 50-100% more. (the offer I just got from them was 80% more than my SF startup salary).
Some of their behavior is indeed "annoying" ie they have a weird stock options vesting schedule, but if you actually do the math, and think with your head, you see that their total compensation is quite competitive.
The moral of the story is, if you care about compensation, don't work for startups. Even the "less competitive" companies like Amazon, with "scummy" behavior like claw backs, are still miles ahead of the average startup, in terms of compensation.
Were you making 100k or something? Or are you looking at total comp?
You get RSU stocks that are actually worth a bunch. You get huge signing bonuses, you get great benefits as well as 401K matching.
All that adds up to something like 70k+ a year in "not salary" benefits, even though it just as good as cash (on top of a much higher base salary ).
Especially at large public companies, a huge chunk of your comp is either a bonus at year end or stock on a vesting schedule with a 1 year cliff. When switching companies, it's fairly common to get a sizeable signing bonus to compensate for the reduced cashflow for the first 12 months.