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Comment by _trackno5 | Hacker News Reader

Finally Amazon is realising their trash comp won't get them any hires in the current market. They were not even close to being competitive with other FAANG before. Couple that with the bad culture and I'm sure they were feeling the pressure to get new hires.

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My Amazon offer from last year was one of my highest ($500K first year TC for senior SWE in Seattle). Amazon has trouble retaining talent but I doubt compensation is the real cause (at least for recent hires).

Yep if you go on levels.fyi you can see that recent promos to SDE 2-3 make 100-200k less than external hires.

They probably were testing new paybands to see what stuck.

The bleeding has to be pretty bad for them to make an announcement like this though, otherwise they'd quietly bump up pay/bonuses for their top performers.

they are starting to do better, but from folks i know who have gotten offers from Amazon/Netflix/Google/Apple/FB, Amazon is consistently 10-20% less than the top (usually FB after several rounds of negotiation..)

I believe Amazon significantly increased their offers last year. FB was one of my other offers and they couldn’t match my top offers after negotiation, so I just declined. That being said, it is possible that a combination of my location (Seattle) and career stage (upper side of Senior level) are at play here.

At 500k are you actually working 40 hours or expected to be always working? Also what is considered a senior engineer? Someone specifically specialized in a field or management type role?

Senior SWE in the tech industry is typically someone with > 5 YOE who has led at least one big project and is considered a leader in their immediate team. It is not a management role.

Yeah, I’d probably work more than 40 hours a week at Amazon, which is why I didn’t take the offer (I accepted another offer with similar comp and my WLB is pretty good).

500K is a good improvement but I doubt you were the norm.

Before last year they were seriously lagging behind in terms of comp. Even in EMEA I hear they couldn't hire due to low comp compared to other companies. Even non-FAANG were beating them easily.

What I hear from friends at Amazon (joined prior to 2020) is that their comp is well below market rates.

Trash comp? You might be talking about FAANG companies but very few Devs (maybe London) in the UK would get close to $160K, let alone $350K. They might want to attract talent but I suspect there are diminishing returns after a while, you only have to look at Amazon music App, Amazon web site, GMail and the Netflix app on my smart TV to realise they are not releasing good stuff all the time.

This is mostly for US, particularly in the Bay Area. There, fresh grads (SDE1s) are making $175k total comp, with $133,500 base salary. The base hardly increased for higher levels (SDE2/SDE3) before today, only being able to rise $26,500 before hitting the old cap.

You also have to look at how much $$ is printed year to year and how much inflation hit IT sector.

After finally deciding to switch jobs I got twice the salary of previous employer when I hoped Ill get 20-30%.

Market is not catching up to goverments pomping out new taxes and inflation.

Not necessarily FAANG, but even unicorns pay more than them.

I got better offers from Bloomberg, Reddit, Stripe, and Facebook. Amazon also backloads the equity. You get barely anything if you leave after 2 years.

Don't worry, it's not like Amazon is paying like that in the UK ;] US market is kinda special thanks to high concentration of tech companies in SV behind great wall made of Visas/greencard lotteries

But the bad culture stories are out now, and the culture hasn't changed as far as I can see, so what's the point of the increased comp?

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