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Comment by danudey | Hacker News Reader

Ideally it takes a full year for them to realize that you're not competent, at which point you hit your 1 year cliff and can snag 25% of your options or RSUs before you get PIP'ed out.

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I've been at my company for 10 years. It went: competent -> high performer -> competent (promotion) -> high performer -> competent -> low performer

This is known as the Peter Principle.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle

I mean, not quite. My performance at the same level went from high performer to low performer. So I was doing the role very well for a while, even getting good reviews for filling the role above mine (intermediate dev filling tech lead role). Performance gradually atrophied following my disenchantment and mistreatment.

Did you go from high performer to low performer at the same role? what has changed?

Things that changed: subdivisions/teams, tech stacks, managers, areas of the business, enterprise procedures/processes. Basically everything. They even outsourced my job, then laid off my entire old department to ship that entire business unit to another contract company.

Then at home, kids and multiple family health issues. I guess my age plays a role too.

If you're at Amazon you'll walk away with 5% after one year, and only 20% after two years.

True, but misleading. Amazon gives big cash bonuses to new hires in years 1 and 2 in order to compensate for the back-weighted vesting schedule.

As big as 20% of their RSU grant + the bonus they would get at another company would be? If not, not misleading at all.

Comp is meant to stay stable at the agreed upon target for the first two years. There is a cash bonus for years 1 and 2 used to offset the vesting schedule. The final 2 years are really dependent on stock performance. For example, I basically will need AMZN stock to get increase by 25% from todays value by Jan 2025 to be making what I did for the first two years.

From what I've heard, yes they size their Y1 and Y2 cash bonuses such that your TC will be stable over the first 4 years as long as AMZN stock goes up 15%/year.

eg one of the first Google results for "teamblind Amazon offer eval" turns up someone who was offered >$100k of cash bonus in each of their first two years: https://www.teamblind.com/post/Offer-Comparison---Amazon-vs-...

Plus the cash sign on bonus worth as much as 50% of your stock. You actually come out ahead if you work at Amazon for only two years, that's why a lot of people duck out after two years.

And you hope the stock doesn't go down by 30 percent after 6 months.

This is misleading. You get a prorated sign up bonus for the first two years that makes up for the back heavy vesting schedule. With all of the tech sectors stock price dropping, this has been a preferable outcome over the last two years.

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