Unless you're a director you will never come even close to $100K of stock vesting in a single event, and directors are not subject to PIPs.
So that's a nice theory you have here but it doesn't work in practice.
So that's a nice theory you have here but it doesn't work in practice.
I’m aware of a newly hired SDE2 (~2 years ago) that was hired with a TC of $305k. While the breakdown of compensation for an SDE1 and SDE2 might differ, an SDE1 breakdown is 5% vest after 1st year with 95% comp coming from salary + signing bonus. 15% vest after 2nd year with 85% comp coming from salary + signing bonus. Then after years 3 and 4 it was 40% vest + 60% from salary. It’s a little less straightforward than this because they build in an expected ~15% stock growth price YoY as part of your expected TC.
So assuming SDE2 payout structure is same as SDE1, their compensation might look like this for a new hire where the strike price is $100 for AMZN at their date of hire.
Y1: 165K salary, 15K stock (15 RSU), $120K bonus.
Y2: 165K salary, 45K stock (45000/(1001.15) RSU), 90K bonus.
Y3: 165K salary, 135K stock (135000/(1151.15) RSU)
Y4: 165K salary, 135K stock (135000/(132.25*1.15) RSU)
So their signing package would be like 300K TC with 15+391+1020+888 (2314) RSUs.
After year 2 or 3 stocks vest twice a year. So granted payout structure is likely much different now with higher base salaries I agree it is not implausible for non-directors to receive $100k in stock in a single vest.
> I got to the point where they offered me a job, and I was going to quit. But I had a huge stock investment coming up. So there was no way I was going to rock the boat in any way, shape, or form just trying to get to this date.
> If you walked away during the Pivot or anytime before you had your investment before it was there for you, you would lose it all. And I'm not talking a little bit of money. I'm talking: I had a couple hundred thousand dollars coming to me.
> I played along, and I'm good at playing along when I have to be. So then the money is in my account. That next day, I called my manager and I told them I was resigning.
I have £110K coming up if I look on the stock portal, but it's over the next two years, so 25K at a time, and I don't consider it as money I already have.
An IC software dev L6 offer I reviewed for a colleague 4 years ago was TC comprised of 180k salary and a little over $1 million of stock with a 4 year vest that Amazon backloads so you get most in the last 2 years. $200k in a single 6 month vest cycle is definitely possible in that offer depending on timing of amzn stock.
This article was from someone who had been at Amazon 6 years and who was managing people. They were HR, which obviously doesn’t comp like software, but once you’re managing a team the stock may be similar.
A principal engineer that is tenured will be on around 550K a year. An HR person that administers PIPs is at most L6 and unlikely to be on more than 250K a year.
6 years in Amazon means a salary was low, not that it was high. Managing people doesn't mean anything, you can earn less than $100K TC in Seattle and be managing people.
Additionally, compensation has been reworked a lot 2 years ago to increase a lot the cap on salary and reduce a stocks.
You ignored what I wrote
The currency symbol is the tell. At FAANG, people get paid a lot more in the US.
A former manager of mine moved to another (non-FAANG) company and was given a $500K sign on bonus. If it vested annually over 4 years, that's over $100K each vest. Start adding annual RSUs provided, and I can see a single vesting event going over $150K.
And as others have pointed out, Amazon backloads the vesting. 40% in the 3rd year. Another 40% in the 4th year.
And, mine was a manager position. So, yes, I did start to learn about this pip nonsense, and was asked to identify the low performers from a team that I inherited. The team was full of bright, diligent, capable workers making real impact on our project. It was foolish.
But it happens. You legally need precedent to fire someone. Nowadays you even legally need precedent to not give someone the average raise. This kind of "precedent caching" is a natural outcome of a tightening budget and a desire to filter through workers to find the best of the best. I hate it. I'll never manage again.
If it wasn’t about the equity, why would they be so mad? The point of the PIP is generally to remove the employee.
In the end, they went to bat for the author and then ended up in the same place. They could have just PIP'd them with a lot less effort.
The article doesn't make the reason clear, but this seems more likely to me than vesting stock.
And it has the double advantage of 'id you leave under PIP, you lose a bunch of money'.
It's 100% about culture of fear and control.