Everything I've heard is that it's a toxic work environment, with below-average pay and draconian employee agreements. And that's not even getting into the ethical issues. What in the world makes someone take a job there instead of pretty much any other tech company?
When I started working, Amazon stock was at ~$750 a share. When I started working, Google stock was at about the same. Google would have granted 100-120K in stock, Amazon closer to 50K. Google gives annual refreshes of ~50K, while Amazon would not until the initial grant is mostly vested. So at the end of this year, when both vests would be coming to a close, a Googler who kept all their stock would have 160 shares from their initial grant, as well as 25-40 additional shares from their refresh grants.
So that's ~180K in AMZN at today's prices vs. 230K in GOOG, plus another 40-60K in refresh grants. And the Google employee has a better salary and bonus structure. Facebook is equivalent or superior to Google in pretty much every aspect of this comparison (base pay, bonus, equity grant, equity growth, equity refresh).
It's innovation from the business side of things more than the tech side of things.
"At Amazon, a Seattle operations engineer on an $840k salary had his/her renewal application denied in February."
"a level III program manager in Seattle earning a salary of $1.3m"
The article was mixing up compensation elements, but people are paid well above US average wage at Amazon.
https://news.efinancialcareers.com/us-en/3003798/highest-pay...
I worked for Amazon because they recruited from my University and it was my first after graduation job. I'd had some internships, but I didn't have a large network or a lot of options.
Dev managers at Amazon leave to be CTOs at startups. Senior engineers leave to be architects. It's one of the best possible resume items you could get, particularly if you're moving to another cloud company -- although, obviously, that in particular seems to be a bit of a dangerous move if you don't wanna get sued.
But for me personally, it’s simple.
Big Tech salary and working fully remotely for AWS in a low cost of living area.