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Comment by ses1984 | Hacker News Reader

ses1984

How many friends do you have who worked for a company more than 5 years?

Work for Amazon for 2 years, learn a lot, get paid a lot, move on.

Except the vast majority of your equity award, which itself makes up the vast majority of your total compensation at Amazon as an engineer, vests in your third and fourth years.

Your first and second years you vest 5% and 15% (reportedly).

Being an intern is a huge bonus here. My wife got a decent equity grant under the terrible 5/15/../.. plan, but also a 20k cash bonus for each of the first two years for being a returning intern.

This makes it very attractive to quit after two years, imo

I don't think you need to be a returning intern to get the cash bonus. At least I got one without being an intern

And yet Facebook offered $50k for retuning interns on their first year. This was 5 years ago when I was an intern manager.

That's nice! In the time I've been in the industry, fb has generally been considered a better payer than amazon, I think. Would you agree?

I was just trying to say that the amazon vesting percentage doesn't adversely affect a returning intern's total first/second year comp.

You get cash bonuses the first two years to make up for that so your total comp doesn't actually change that much.

You get a first and second year signing bonus that is equal to the total comp target that you’d have with your 3rd and 4th year stock, so it’s the same thing.

Amazon does not even pay a lot. It's 80% of everyone at best (yes, including the grossly overweight restricted stock units).

Amazon (among others) imports legions of new-graduates and mid-level engineers from oversees on a variety of visas, pays them the local wage but in the US. If you leave the company for any reason, you have something like 7 days to pack up and go home.

It's modern indentured servitude.

80% of the other FAANG companies is at least double what most developers make, right, at mid career?

https://www.levels.fyi/SE/Amazon/Google/Facebook

has Amazon at 116K, Google we 123K and Facebook at 112K, just cash for all three, not including bonus or stock, for entry level employees.

Paying Chinese employees Chinese wages, but in America, would be both hella illegal and very obvious.

Thank you for pulling out the data. That's a cool site.

Amazon benefits are shit and you generally can't negotiate a raise within 2 years. Generally, you're not really off the chopping block until you're an SDEIII or entered as an SDEIII and performed "above the bar" for at least 1.5 years or a requisite number of quarterly reviews.

Shit compared to what?

If you think Amazon benefits for software engineers are shit you should check where the surface of your bubble is. There's a big world outside it.

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