Hacker News Reader

At least one reason is that the stock has done so well. A typical software engineer hired 4 years ago is incredibly well compensated at Amazon because of this.

Consider a mid-level software engineer hired 4 years ago, on April 16 2014, with a salary of $100k. A typical stock grant at hiring for a mid-level software engineer in 2014 might be $400k over 4 years, backloaded so most of it comes at the end; on April 16 2014 the share price was $323, so the grant would have looked something this:

  Apr 16 2015: 154 shares @ $323 = $50k  = $150k total comp
  Apr 16 2016: 248 shares @ $323 = $80k  = $180k total comp
  Apr 16 2017: 371 shares @ $323 = $120k = $220k total comp
  Apr 16 2018: 464 shares @ $323 = $150k = $250k total comp

But the share price has gone through the roof since then, so things look more like this:

  Apr 16 2015: 154 shares @   $383 = $59k  = $159k total comp
  Apr 16 2016: 248 shares @   $625 = $155k = $255k total comp
  Apr 16 2017: 371 shares @   $901 = $334k = $434k total comp
  Apr 16 2018: 464 shares @ $1,440 = $668k = $768k total comp

That mid-level, totally normal software engineer is making more than $750k this year because the stock price has gone up so much since 2014. They're likely to put up with a lot of bullshit to get that kind of financial security - that's not just a down payment on a house, it can be the whole thing in cash in the east side suburbs, with great school districts.

Amazon (and Seattle in general) could be in big trouble if the stock price turns around. I don't think that's likely, but it's kind of scary to me.

Are those numbers real? As in, does (did?) Amazon really do $400,000 in stock grants for routine (I don't mean that to sound harsh, I just mean "not as a super-exceptional process to land a world-famous developer") software engineer hires?

If they are, holy shit. I thought the meteoric rise in housing prices around here was almost entirely due to the influx of people compounded by this region's seeming inhospitable allergy to building housing stock at anywhere near a reasonable rate.

But, damn, if your table is even within 80% of reality, I am floored. No wonder it's virtually impossible to rent or buy anything for a "realistic" (for me, and I make a pretty good income, or so I thought) price anywhere between Edmonds and Auburn. The rest of us, even those employed in the technology industry, simply cannot compete with that kind of cash on the barrel.

Yes, this is typical, more or less. Amazon tends to pay with a low base salary and high stock component. What I described would be somewhere between “pretty competent developer” and “tech lead on a team of 8,” not anything unusual like hiring a superstar principal engineer.

Amazon is minting millionaires like crazy. Of course people want to work there.

Anyone could have bought this stock if they would have known the price. Yes, the decision to join amazon turned out to be great money wise, but still doesn't explain why the top talent works there.

Hm, I don't understand what purchasing stock has to do with it. If someone bought the stock then they would own it. But that's not what happens when a company grants you stock - it's a promise to deliver you shares later.

If this hypothetical employee quit on April 10th, 2018, they would not get the 464 shares (== $668k) on April 16th, 2018. They also would probably not get a comparable offer if they quit to join Facegooglesoft. So, if they quit, they lose out on hundreds of thousands of dollars. That's enough to keep many people even if the work is unpleasant.

I am saying you could not anticipate which company's share will rise above the rest.

The contrast between payout to engineers and unqualified workers is impressive. Especially if those workers live in a place like California with high living costs.

I think growing housing costs are much more scarier for a worker than an idea that some engineer gets 200-300k less.

How professional technologists are treated by their giant tech employer is utterly orthogonal to how lower-skilled, hourly warehouse workers are treated by the same company.

Why do technologists reliably chime in with completely irrelevant details of a technologist's experience of working for a tech company, in response to articles talking about how poorly those companies treat their non-technologist staff?

What does the one have to do with the other? "Amazon can't be all bad, if they aren't abusing (some of) the subset of their workforce that can meaningfully vote with its feet"?

EDIT: not singling you out specifically, but you did the thing here, so you get the follow-up.

People are really, really good at assuming that their experience of just about anything is a representative sample. And because their experiences are subjectively pretty important to them (naturally) they must be objectively important and relevant in the grand scheme of things as well.

I think everybody is doing this? Looking through the comments and its nothing but people talking about SDEs and other well compensated employees, when the crux of this article and others like it are the issues faced by warehouse workers, which I'm betting make up a large majority of the ~550k workers employed by amazon.

At the risk of rehashing other comments here, software devs at Amazon are profit centers - when they work the company gains exponentially more value than it pays them. A good engineer retained can often deliver 2X to 10X the value of a new hire. The company treats them them accordingly.

Warehouse employees are cost centers. They're replaceable pseudo-robots that are filling in the gaps until the engineers mentioned above finish building the real ones. A new worker at a cheaper rate is objectively better than retaining one, because the number of boxes packed tends to increase inversely proportional with age and tenure. The company treats them accordingly.

Piggybacking on what you were saying I don’t disagree from a purely business sense. But I find it ironic society seems to have this constant droning fear about actual robots becoming sentient and dissenting but doesnt fear the droves of these sudo-robots who are already able bodied and sentient and being actively antagonized (piss in bottles, etc) to dissent.

> A good engineer retained can often deliver 2X to 10X the value of a new hire. The company treats them them [sic] accordingly.

The turnover rate is generally less than 2 years.

We’re mostly talking about large comp packages here, and I’m guessing they all vest over 4 years? I’m not saying devs are particularly pampered, just that there’s no comparison with the warehouse workers.

The people in my recent college graduating class who were planning on going to Amazon for software engineering were going there with a plan to burnout after 2-3 years and take their experience elsewhere. It was seen as worth it for the money + resume, even knowing those years would suck.

My Amazon RSUs more than knocked out my significant student loans, so I have to say that's a reasonable strategy.

Bit like been a lawyer for one of the big firms.

They work you like a dog but proof that you can 'graduate' from them gets you better offers afterwards.

Crazy system when you think about it.

I think it largely comes down to a few factors: Amazon does a lot of hiring, changing jobs is a hassle that many people won't do just because of momentum, and we naturally only hear about the very worst of what it's like to work at Amazon. If you keep hiring enough developers, enough of them will stick it out thanks to momentum (through possibly sub-optimal but not necessarily tortuous conditions) for long enough to have a large number of developers at any given time.

I worked at Amazon for ~5.5 years, and it was fine. I wasn't in bliss, but it wasn't awful, it was fine. I eventually left not because conditions worsened but because my team's responsibilities eventually shifted to work I disliked enough to overcome the momentum (web ads), and I found out they have a very generous severance program if you know what to ask about.

>> I found out they have a very generous severance program if you know what to ask about.

What do you mean? Are you referring to the severance you get if you leave on a PIP?

Yes, but you can also opt-in to that. I told my manager I was dissatisfied and thinking of leaving, he suggested I talk to HR about the pivot program. They then put me on a PIP so I could accept the severance option.

Also I had been on an actual PIP before and I'm pretty sure that option wasn't mentioned.

this is crazy to me, check out /r/consulting they view being on a PIP as a doomsday clock where the company will find any excuse to fire you in the next 6 months.

I can't speak universally, but I "passed" mine, and lasted another full year before leaving willingly. My manager seemed to very earnestly want me to pass, and implied that most people do.

All that said, I would advise that if you get put on a PIP, just take the severance right away. You're ineligible for a raise or additional stock grants in the cycle following the PIP.

I think the conditions apply more to the warehouse workers than the software engeneers.

Presumably both groups are vastly different regarding qualifications, income, ability to switch jobs and freedom to structure their work, so I think they should be taken separately when discussing workplace conditions.

(As an analogy, during the industrial revolution, the people that designed the machines probably weren't the ones that were working 18-hour days in hazardous conditions either.)

Not to offend you or your work, but IMO Amazon makes the worst software out of all the big tech companies. I think that this is related to their ability to attract and retain talent due to their poor work culture.

What software specifically? The AWS cloud is still the leader in most products.

AWS is the leader in the cloud because of its 6-7 year head start on the competition, not because their product is better than their competitors. There was even a company built on top of AWS that made money by creating a reasonable UX on top of that product.[0]

walmart.com is better designed that amazon.com. I don't know when that happened but you can take a look at two product pages for the same book and be the judge. [1][2]

That's just the tip of the iceberg. I could rant about Amazon's software for days, but in the end software doesn't necessarily mean they are a bad company. If I order something from amazon I expect to get it quickly and in the case something goes wrong I can talk with someone who will be more than agreeable. That is why they are successful, not because of their software prowess.

[0]: https://www.heroku.com/

[1]: https://www.amazon.com/Thinking-Fast-Slow-Daniel-Kahneman/dp...

[2]: https://www.walmart.com/ip/Thinking-Fast-and-Slow/20530246

Heroku is PaaS while AWS started as IaaS and these are completely different. AWS has some PaaS offerings now and is leading the way in an even lighter abstraction with FaaS/serverless. Azure and GCP definitely have unique products but AWS still has plenty of leading tech and I think it's rather misleading to say they don't have anything better. In several instances they're the best simply because there isn't even any serious competition for that niche.

The design of a webpage for companies doing 100s of billions in revenue will be rather subjective and hard to change without materially affecting that revenue so I'm not sure how valid that comparison really is, or what it has to do with "better software".

I will say that building the infrastructure to power such an efficient ecommerce empire along with AWS is not trivial and you're likely vastly underestimating the quality of their systems based on what seem to be rather surface-level observations.

Heroku was targeting a much different audience from what AWS was targeting back in 2007 (yes everyone, its been over a decade!). AWS has gradually crawled up the stack over the past few years, but I'd still say Heroku is targeting customers for which the Heroku model is exactly what they want/need.

I'd also say that if AWS had a 6-7 year head start on the competition, then that was the competition being lazy. It's not as if Microsoft/Google didn't have the ability to deliver a cloud platform back in 2007, and history shows they were delivering cloud products around this time. Microsoft Azure was announced in 2008 and launched in 2010; Google App Engine launched in 2008, storage in 2010, and VMs in 2013.

Those product pages aren't really self evident as to which is better, I actually prefer Amazon's also, it seems to have more details about the item in addition of course to the 1000s of reviews.

While this isn't a direct problem with Amazon vs Walmart site design, I'm more likely to use Amazon due to the amount of reviews.

Walmart can do one thing right, while Amazon has the majority of it right for me. It's going to take a lot to sway me away from Amazon.

>Judging from some of the comments here, software engineers working in Amazon must either be stupid or irrational to continue working there, given the market for software engineers.

Hacker News hates big companies, Amazon being evil is in the zeitgeist, and people are unable to contextualize criticisms properly.

Being a software engineer at Amazon is fine (yeah, yeah, congrats, out of the tens of thousands of engineers you were able to uncover a few horror stories and terrible teams. Shocking) and very lucrative.

Does the treatment outlined in the article apply to just warehouse workers or does this policy apply to software engineers/office bods also? (pee in a bottle etc?)

There have been reports of toxic management [0] and at least one suicide attempt over the years [1], which indicates that the problem is not purely on the warehouse floor.

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/16/technology/inside-amazon-...

[1] http://fortune.com/2016/11/29/amazon-employee-suicide-attemp...

> Judging from some of the comments here, software engineers working in Amazon must either be stupid or irrational to continue working there

This is sparing the employer at the expense of the employee. Employee's employment status is.....far more sticky.