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Comment by mmmeff | Hacker News Reader

I quit a few months back and hope it continues to crumble. You won’t be missed, Amazon. After 5 years and countless long nights, I was thanked with a pay cut and ignored when petitioned, even after rearchitecting the entirety of one of their floundering subsidiaries and leading a team of 10 thru it’s execution. The reason? One of my junior engineers missed a deadline. When petitioned, my cries were ignored and I was recommended to boomerang if I wanted a pay raise.

At the same time, a friend was interviewing for the exact same senior engineering role and received an offer. The total compensation he was offered in his first year was nearly double my pay. He didn’t even take it - another company offered him more.

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To be frank, this compensation issue isn't a problem specific to Amazon. It's common knowledge that if you want significant raises (50%+) you have to jump among the FAANGs/Tier1 companies, mainly due to the external vs internal offer policies. An internal promo will get you into the bottom of the next pay band versus an external offer which usually puts you near the top. The compensation delta can be in the 6 figures for non-new grad roles. This holds true all the way up to director level roles in my observations.

Fair or not, this is currently the optimal career/comp progression strategy, although recent hiring downturns might change the meta(heh)game to favor internal candidates. We shall see.

very true. your manager and skip might be able to see your impact and performance, but for people who control the purse strings, the only value you can prove is a better offer.

Stories like this are the reason why I keep turning down Amazon recruiters, not the lack of shiny/speedy tools. This article is fluff. And I'm glad you got out.

Thank you for sharing your experience. I'm sure there might be some guy going "but, but, it depends on your team! I've never seen this" --but Amazon has a large variety of bitter ex-employees and horror stories.

RE: Boomerang, Amazon changed the policy recently. If you return within one year at the same level, you get the same comp you left at. A comp increase requires a new level and a full loop. The upshot is that you have to have proof of impact for that new level for boomerang to be worth it.

I'm curious, do you mean pay cut as in literally they changed your total comp or pay cut as in the share price of AMZN dropped?

>"When petitioned, my cries were ignored and I was recommended to boomerang if I wanted a pay raise."

Is petitioning a process in AWS? What does boomerang mean here?

(Disclaimer: I left Amazon about 6 months ago)

Petitioning isn't a process in AWS, but you can ask your manager for a raise if your projected total compensation isn't to your satisfaction.

Boomerang means you leave the company, get another job, and then come back to the company with much higher compensation. It's a way for otherwise happy employees to fight salary compression.

Petitioning is referred to as a "Dive and Save" internally. It is a last ditch offer to retain an employee, usually reserved for high performers who are seen as a flight risk.

A caveat there is, proactive dive and save is reserved for high performers who are seen as a flight risk Reactive dive and save is for anybody who can show a competing offer.

Slightly OT, but someone should set-up an (anonymous enough) wiki somewhere with all of this big IT company jargon, would make for interesting reading. Threads like this one, coupled with that Google comic written by an employee that was full of those jargons would make for a good start.

I’d have expected that to have started as “diving save” rather than “dive and save”.

Wow. Is boomeranging actually common at Amazon then? Why would you go back to a company that you had to leave in order to get a raise? It seems like the cultural aspects at the root of leaving would not have fundamentally changed the second time around.

Can't speak to Amazon, but while this seems surprising it's not that uncommon at big companies. One leaves assuming the grass is greener elsewhere and if/when that turns out not to be the case returning to the place you left provides a sense of confidence that you at least know the bad parts going in. And as described elsewhere it's sadly often an easier way to get a promotion/raise than grinding out the process at the company.

Sometimes it’s cause your TC takes a nose-dive after year 4 and the company has no interest in compensating for that drop. You might not want to leave but in order to keep pace with the market you’d boomerang to come back to be on par or above the new hires making 50% more than you.

I’ve also seen a scenario where someone has trouble getting promoted and leaves to boomerang back at a higher level.

Of course the company hates to give existing or recently departed employees raises of any type so they closed that loophole.

I don't know but I imagine it means to leave and then come back.

Leave and get rehired.

Boomerang is “leave and come back” (quit, get a job elsewhere, later re-apply).

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