"Amazon was also just named the #1 business on LinkedIn’s 2018 Top Companies list, which ranks the most sought after places to work for professionals in the United States."
This statement/award strikes me as very far removed from reality.
This statement/award strikes me as very far removed from reality.
If it was a ranking based on The New York Times stories and reader comments, Amazon would definitely not be #1.
Yes, when Jeff translates LinkedIn's limited criteria into "the most sought after places to work for professionals in the United States.", he's editorializing. That's not too surprising since it's a letter to his fellow owners. Cheerleading is to be expected.
[1] https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/linkedin-top-companies-2018-w...
[2] https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/how-we-created-2018-linkedin-...
It's a fine place to be a software engineer, so long as you enjoy the high stress/low perks part of the tech scene, but that's a very different, air conditioned environment.
Remind yourself that the warehouse employees are in areas where their choice of work would normally be Walmart or a coal mine. Working for a big name company like Amazon has as much prestige for them as it does for us "tech scene folks".
https://www.matrixres.com/resources/salary-survey/
If I can make $140K in metro Atlanta, where a newly built 3000 square foot house can be had for less than $350K in a nice neighborhood, why would I want to live in Seattle?
"Metro Atlanta" consists of either 5 counties or 10 depending on which definition you go by. There is so much sprawl in Atlanta and so much undeveloped land that builders will jump at the chance to build. This is still the South. The government doesn't make builders jump through as many hoops to build.
The weather point is, of course, tough. Seattle summers are bloody amazing. The winter sorta blows.
Says nobody that's been to Atlanta or has taken two minutes to use the internet to check preconceived notions about Georgia against the city.
https://www.myajc.com/atlanta-neighborhood-2016-presidential...
Lived in Atlanta for many years. It is much more liberal than surrounding areas, true. However, Seattle is in another league when it comes to this sort of thing.
Which is not to say that we don't have a ways to go, either. In particular, we have some really hard problems to consider out here.
Seattle has one bad season, one good season. Atlanta is the same.
Now, the winter is much darker. The shift in sunset and sunrise is much more pronounced. This is somewhat offset by how much bloody sun we get in the summer. Which is truly insane. Sun is up by 4:30 most mornings, and you can see outside till near 10 most evenings. (Sunset, I think, is well earlier than that, but our twilight is bright. I am likely mistaken on this understanding, though. Haven't taken a journal or kept records, etc.)
Commuting to downtown was only about a 30-35 minute drive.
a. That salary is not low. If you chose to run a family of 4 on one salary of 160k, it's your choice. It's still quite good.
b. If you discount 30% of the comp because you feel like it, I wonder how many of the 20 other metro areas are going to match up.
- looking at another recruiting agency I've used, I found this job posting.
https://prestigestaffing.jobs.net/job/lead-net/J3W7C8754PTSH...
- from anecdotal experience, I have a group of four friends from a former job. We all still get together about once a month and we are in a private Slack group. All of us are in our early 40s and none of us have any desire to go into management. We all consider ourselves "full stack developers". Our salaries range from $125 to $145K.
- I just turned down a job for $145K as a lead developer (still hands on coding) because of the commute. I accepted a job that paid slightly less that was better commute and used newer technology.
What jobs do you think your "average joes" would kill for?
It's one of the few companies on my list of companies to avoid, unless they improved their employee treatment (and got rid of their bad employee RSU vesting schedule).
They are the most aggressive at recruiting. I've never gone 6 months without at least one e-mail from an Amazon recruiter, despite asking to be removed multiple times from their lists. This leads me to believe they have turn over problems that would make your assertion incorrect.
For anyone arguing it is growth, consider they are the _only_ company that does this but they are not the only company that is growing at that pace.
When all is said and done, Amazon pays a little less than Google/Facebook (the caveat here: most Google/Facebook jobs are in California, not Seattle), but with the stock performance we're seeing, they end up making more on average.
The question, is when Amazon's stock stops appreciating so quickly, is other comp going to make up for it?
If you think Amazon stock is going to go up and you have an offer from another company for more money, just take the offer for more money and buy some Amazon stock. Upward stock potential is never a valid reason to join a publicly traded company.
Imagine my yearly pay will be 150K at Amazon or 200K somewhere else.
Amazon stock could go up, and my pay in my second year could be 250K, in which case I am making more by being at Amazon.
Or it could stay the same or go down, in which case my pay in my second year would be <= 200K, but in that case I can just ditch Amazon for another company to bring my comp back to market levels.
Remember, predicting that a stock goes up is just as lucrative for an outsider as it is an insider. Never make a stock prediction part of your evaluation of a job offer because there are plenty of financial instruments to allow you the same upside as an outsider.
As I used to tell people about why I was selling my options at [some other name brand company] as fast as they vested, choosing to work for the company is an investment. A huge one. And since I was far more likely to be laid off if the stock tanks, owning shares and working there was not diversifying my assets.
It’s the only time I made money on stock options and most of what I earned I earned by... profit taking on shares of a different company that enjoyed two stock splits before our stock started to crater.
When that behavior ends, if Amazon doesn't adjust my comp, I can go to some other tech company, while still having one of the best names you can have on a resume (although, Google would have been arguably better in that case). Furthermore, if we consider my stock gains as part of my annual comp, it gives me a vastly better bargaining position.
Still blowing smoke?
Yes, you're not correctly understanding that you depended on a gamble to outperform the Google offer. That same gamble you could have explicitly made in the stock market while taking the Google offer and capturing the upside of the Amazon stock.
They take stock performance into account and it effects your future raises.
So yeah stock can go up, but if it does, you are never getting a raise.
That is a really bold way to frame "We don't even give you all of your signing bonus up front" as a positive. Kudos for coming up with it.
Of course the 5/15/40/40 model only applies to your signing; all further yearly stock grants are over the next 2 years from grant time.
For the record "bad managers" are no more common or less common at Amazon as any other company.
Easy to say when you're making six figures. I doubt most pizza delivery drivers would agree with you.
Amazon, meanwhile, won't let anybody get free snacks from the bins except for mice.
You can use that to your advantage or not, but you won't be helping any low-wage workers by choosing to work at a small tech company over a famous one -- well, maybe you will if you pass on a job offer from Uber, but for the most part, tech companies pay low-level workers better than non-tech companies.