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Comment by xvector | Hacker News Reader

I’m in this situation right now. Got my first job 17 months ago at a FAANG. Was promised compounding RSUs every year and a bonus every year.

They’ve delayed the compensation by 5 months because “I joined late.” They didn’t tell me about this until I asked about 10 months in.

Hell I joined this company earlier out of college than most students. 2 weeks of vacation post-college when most students were taking 2-3 months. And now they turn around and tell me my compensation is going to be 30% less than what was promised my first year?

Now, 17 months later around the review cycle they are saying that our org has less money or whatever, and compensation will be lower this cycle. I’m expecting maybe a fourth of what I was promised.

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Which FAANG company hasn't been giving you bonuses or refresher grants?

Has to be Amazon or Apple. Probably Amazon due to the skimping on RSUs and bonuses, have heard that they’re upping the PIPs lately

You know, it baffles me that Amazon is the only tech giant[1] that consistently sounds absolutely terrible to work at. (In my experience - YMMV)

How do they keep finding engineers?

[1] Well, except Intel. You don't hear about them much online, but around here the local office (not sure about others) bait-and-switches employee openings for contractor openings. They don't even pay that well, and no extra compensation either.

I'm sure a lot of people think the team they are joining will be different, and some of them must be right.

People join, build up their resume over two years, and then quit to work somewhere better.

Intel may not pay like the FAANGs but I don't think they're terrible to work at like you said. My first job out of college (15 years ago) was at Intel (Folsom) and it was actually relatively peaceful and nice. I left after 2 years because I wanted to chase the silicon valley startup dreams at the time (which was a right move for me at the time I think, and looking at the outcome/my past 13 years, I'd say it was a good decision), but I also could've stayed -- some of my coworkers from back then are currently still at Intel and happy. Maybe your local office has specific issues?

I had a few Google coworkers that were Intel alums. It's not that they're a bad place to work - I heard that working conditions were fairly good actually, in terms of pay, work/life balance, management, etc.

But they could be a stifling place to work. Intel is effectively a monopoly, with a clear development roadmap and a clear Process-Architecture-Optimization model with deliverables every 12-18 months. Pretty much everything about the company is setup to prevent anyone from rocking the boat. So their software activities are all about making sure the Intel architecture stays on top, their hardware activities are all about making sure that a new architecture comes out every 4 years and the die shrink happens on schedule, and they're basically averse to anything that might add variability or risk into their market position.

Certain people do really well in that environment, but for a lot of folks in software (itself a creative profession), that kind of work environment is basically hell.

Intel is (recently) no longer effectively a monopoly, and Intel and the industry is in huge turmoil between process issues, neural accelerator chips, ARM, and AMD. Intel just hired Jim Keller, and we will see what happens to them, but it's bound to be interesting.

I’ve heard similar accounts lately from some friends at Amazon. They seem to be tightening the belt.

"Upping the PIPs"? Is that a thing? For a company to formally raise the bar across the board as a means to not give bonuses or raises!

I wonder if having Amazon on your resume is a bad signal now. Risk of the candidate being a participant in a toxic environment. Also a signal that the candidate was at Amazon because they couldn't get into other FAANGs (is it common for people to select Amazon over others when holding multiple offers?)

As someone who is involved in some of the recruiting process at a large tech company, I can say that the Amazonians who come our way tend to be decent people stuck in a toxic environment. Whenever I do a culture fit interview with them, I have several tactics I use to draw out the horror stories they inevitably have, and I'm usually pleasantly surprised by how they seemed to have maintained their own integrity through it all.

The contrast of their own attitude and actions in the face of being in a bad situation ends of very much working to their advantage. I enthusiastically recommend many of them as a "hire." On the flip side, every so often I churn up one of the perpetrators of toxicity, and I make sure what they tell me about themselves gets meticulously captured and reported to the decision makers.

So just having worked at Amazon doesn't automatically disqualify you in my book.

My experience matches yours, my friends and acquaintances at Amazon have been fine people, it’s just that some of their organizational decisions / probably how middle management comp gets calculated can make things toxic.

Also Amazon is easier to get hired at than other big tech companies, so I guess it is some strategic decision to hire/fire easily rather than have a stricter hiring process that would also introduced a lot of false negatives (like FLAG do).

Why do you guys automatically want to hate on Amazon so much? Amazon compensation doesn’t work like that. In fact there are no bonuses. You get a sign on bonus and 4-year stock grant so no way you get anything lower than the number specified in your offer letter.

Definitely not Google or Netflix. Netflix they’re automatic and basically the same for Google.

Same at Facebook and Apple. At least, they're entirely formulaic.

That was not the case when I was at Apple- the formula recommended a bonus but IIRC it was officially at managerial discretion. Different orgs were run with different budgets, and while not this extreme I had seen similar things happen while I was there, including getting lower bonuses myself and one coworker quitting after their bonus was significantly lower than promised (or maybe they were denied it entirely, I don't remember exactly). We were told the same thing about organizational budgeting.

AFAICT (as a non-manager), it was entirely manager’s discretion, within a budget, at Apple.

Alphabet shifted the timing of stock compensation in 2017Q1, and this definitely screwed over some Noogler cohorts in 2017 (who may have expected a refresh in January 2017 or July 2017, but actually didn't get one until January 2018).

https://abc.xyz/investor/static/pdf/2017_Q1_Earnings_Transcr... (first paragraph, page 3)

How are those things not specified in the contract?

Bonuses are discretionary, or based on future performance

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