What an incredibly stupid way to run a company.
You make big promises to employees, maybe give a carrot to a very select few. Everyone else will either accept the long hours and grueling culture or they’ll leave, and if they leave, they’ll go before their RSU compensation vests. So the other thing you do is weigh compensation heavily on RSUs instead of salary. If you leave before the 4 year vest, you get massively screwed and walk away with a small fraction, since vests don’t really kick in until years 3 and 4.
Now here’s the kicker. If the company does well and the value of your RSUs to up, you get nothing extra. You can get promoted and if your existing RSUs are putting you near or at the bottom of the next compensation band, you take more responsibility but without any meaningful compensation increase.
Now if the company does poorly, you’ll get extra RSUs, in 1.5 to 2 years out. You can hang around for that carrot, but they’ll work you like a machine. And it’s not just the labor. It’s the gaslighting and sociopathic behavior - “you’re so great at X, but you really didn’t do a, b, and c. You’re really just being your own bottleneck. Oh you’re working extra hours? Your fault for not scaling yourself better.”
Everyone I know who’s worked for Amazon has said the money was great but everything else absolutely sucked. And they all held out doing whatever they had to in order to get by until they vested, and we’re instantly out.
I don’t think Amazon has a good reputation.
It's genius if you don't have a shred of ethics left in your bones.
People opt in to this. They choose it over all of their other options because they believe it to be better than their other choices.
Is that really the world we live in? Have you met rational humans? Are we living in ideal markets?
Truth is, bad situations of all sorts are springing up and remaining in place long-term. A closer look at each individual issue (as done in this thread) reveals complex factors that need to be adressed. Using a simplistic model from economics to ignore any and all ethics (term used loosely for any attempt to do what's right) is not valid imo.
I then googled just in case I might have missed something, but it says "ethical" is "relating to moral principles or the branch of knowledge dealing with these", so again…
Not having ethics/empathy is actually _really dumb_ way to run a company.
They end up making a lot of people miserable. Eventually, all of the technology, market advantage yadda yadda catches up. IBM, Yahoo, heck even Meta/Facebook. Amazon won’t last.
But in their wake, they leave behind very different testimonials.
Working people to a grind has its obvious needs in times of crisis — I mean, that is literally what nations do via conscription in times of war. Everybody knows that.
But prop that culture up in a so-called attempt to stave off laziness, rest-and-vest or whatever and you’ll end up in state of perpetual war: a bleak, stupid world not even worth living in, let alone worth dying for.
Or, as St Ignatius quoted to St Francis Xavier, "What does it profit a man of he gains the entire world, but suffers the loss of his own soul?"
You can see that even though amazon mass hires candidates, they still have to shell out more salaries than say Google and Microsoft. It’s easier to fix bad salary+good wlb reputation (by increasing salary) than fixing good salary + bad wlb reputation (idk how they can even do it).
Not if the secret's out, one would imagine?
They are running out of ppl to hire. Now, to figure out how to short amazon… maybe they last another 5 years… before they just implode.