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Comment by cletus | Hacker News Reader

Amazon is notorious within tech for being cutthroat. The impression I've gotten from the outside looking in and knowing people who've worked for Amazon is that stack ranking and firing the bottom 5-10% every year was and still is standard operating procedure. It may even be that positions get filled by managers explicitly for that person to be fired to protect the rest of the team.

On top of that, the vesting schedule sucks (5/15/40/40%) and the RSU value is overstated: it assumes growth in the stock (no other FAANG does this). Yes I know there's a sign on bonus. No I don't care.

So in such an environment, what would motivate someone that would get paid 20% less to ostensibly get a day off when you still need to be compared to your colleagues who are working the extra day? It seems like setting people up for failure and paying them less for the "privilege".

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> On top of that, the vesting schedule sucks (5/15/40/40%) and the RSU value is overstated: it assumes growth in the stock (no other FAANG does this). Yes I know there's a sign on bonus. No I don't care.

It's funny how Netflix is given credit for their all cash offers and yet Amazon is dinged for giving the best of both worlds. They give huge signing bonuses which are tacked on to your paycheck for the first 2 years, which is cash money you can use however you want. After that, either the stock increased in value a sufficient amount and you are even more happy, or you move on to other opportunities that pay better. The up front cash mitigates the short term risk, and the long term back weighted grants give you the potential upside if it does pop.

That said, assuming the stock will increase 15% every year is certainly non-standard from a comp perspective, and Google and Facebook blow Amazon out of the water with their stacking refreshers and generous equity awards for high performance.

> It's funny how Netflix is given credit for their all cash offers

I don't know who does this. I don't. Personally I'd need an all-cash offer to be at least 30% higher than cash + equity. YMMV.

> yet Amazon is dinged for giving the best of both worlds.

Amazon is dinged, at least by me, by having significantly worse benefits including:

1. As noted the 5/15/40/40% vesting schedule. If nothing else, this creates a perverse incentive by the company to fire you before your 3rd year vest;

2. You have to vest your 401k match. Depending on what point in the year you join this will take 2-3 years (it's based on hours). Many in tech don't know what vesting 401k means. It means if you've failed to vest your 401k and you leave or get fired, they take it back;

3. Amazon's 401k match is 50%, which is pretty normal, but only up to 4% of your income, compared to Facebook (7%), Microsoft (6%) and Google (no cap);

4. Implied 15% growth in RSU valuation in offers;

5. From what I understand it, no annual refresh grants.

So what this means is that if you compare a Google offer to an Amazon offer, you'd probably have to discount the Amazon offer by a third.

All of that is actually fine but what really turns me off is the workplace toxicity, implied or actual stack ranking, firing quotas and the perverse incentives that creates (eg hiring ballast employees).

> Yes I know there's a sign on bonus. No I don't care.

But why? The sign on bonus makes it almost 40%/40%/40%/40%.

Because other companies can also give sizeable sign-on bonuses and they don't inflate their RSU values.

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