<story><title>Amazon more than doubles max base pay to $350k</title><url>https://www.geekwire.com/2022/amazon-more-than-doubles-max-base-pay-to-350k-for-corporate-and-tech-workers-citing-labor-market/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>nebula8804</author><text>&amp;gt;For instance I received an offer that was 160 base, 325 cash bonus and 5% of my RSUs for my first year, putting my TC at ~510k. Second year was a slightly smaller bonus, and 15% of my RSUs.&lt;p&gt;Jeebus man. What is it that you FAANG developers do that is so much more complex than what regular developers do?&lt;p&gt;For reference: I do Angular and Python development. Is there like some open source project or code samples that give an idea of the complexity of code that 510k developers are writing?&lt;p&gt;Man you got me day dreaming about that kind of money: I would invest half of it in low risk mutual funds and then take the other half over to my friend Asadulah who works in securities.</text></item><item><author>yanslookup</author><text>This doesn&amp;#x27;t match my experience. I guess it depends on the role but for engineers it&amp;#x27;s well known Amazon has been throwing large sign on bonuses to close the vesting gap for years.&lt;p&gt;For instance I received an offer that was 160 base, 325 cash bonus and 5% of my RSUs for my first year, putting my TC at ~510k. Second year was a slightly smaller bonus, and 15% of my RSUs.&lt;p&gt;Is it possible that when folks were voluntarily disclosing comp they were just including base comp and not total comp?</text></item><item><author>PragmaticPulp</author><text>We had an office near an Amazon office. I interviewed a lot of people trying to leave Amazon. I don’t ask candidate’s compensation, but a lot of them volunteered it anyway. I was always surprised at how effectively low their comp was in the first few years due to the vesting schedule. The internet is adamant that everyone with FAANG jobs is rolling in TC, but there are a lot of people out there who are getting into FAANG companies (especially Amazon) at lower compensations with the hopes of moving up to those higher levels.&lt;p&gt;OTOH, the backloaded vesting system works. It was easy to hire people out of their first year at Amazon, but almost impossible to hire someone after a few years when the bulk of their vesting was right around the corner. I talked to a lot of people who admitted being miserable but felt they couldn’t leave until they got the equity that they had been toiling over for the past few years.&lt;p&gt;Weird situation all around. We eventually reduced our recruiting out of that particular Amazon office because so many of the people coming out of it were deeply disgruntled with the tech industry in general. Really changed my view of Amazon.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jedberg</author><text>&amp;gt; Jeebus man. What is it that you FAANG developers do that is so much more complex than what regular developers do?&lt;p&gt;I worked at the N in FAANG for four years.  It&amp;#x27;s not that we did anything so much differently, it&amp;#x27;s the people we did it with.  When I worked for non-FAANG, there were some people who I&amp;#x27;d have to work with and think, &amp;quot;boy, how does this person get&amp;#x2F;keep their job?&amp;quot;.  They just were not great to work with, had a hard time understanding hard concepts, and didn&amp;#x27;t produce great work.&lt;p&gt;I never had that at Netflix.  Every person I worked with was someone I&amp;#x27;d want to work with again and could trust and depend on. When a hard problem presented itself, everyone had a great solution, and we&amp;#x27;d discuss the pros and cons, and then someone would implement that solution.&lt;p&gt;Also, many of our internal tools were best in class.  Sure they had their warts, but not like the ones other companies had.  Even our corporate directory had cool features and was actively developed.&lt;p&gt;So that&amp;#x27;s really the difference.  It&amp;#x27;s the people you get to work with and the tools you get to use.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; Is there like some open source project or code samples that give an idea of the complexity of code that 510k developers are writing?&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;github.com&amp;#x2F;Netflix&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;github.com&amp;#x2F;Netflix&lt;/a&gt; is a good place to look.  Again, it&amp;#x27;s not that it&amp;#x27;s more complex, it&amp;#x27;s just the way it came about.</text></comment>
<story><title>Amazon more than doubles max base pay to $350k</title><url>https://www.geekwire.com/2022/amazon-more-than-doubles-max-base-pay-to-350k-for-corporate-and-tech-workers-citing-labor-market/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>nebula8804</author><text>&amp;gt;For instance I received an offer that was 160 base, 325 cash bonus and 5% of my RSUs for my first year, putting my TC at ~510k. Second year was a slightly smaller bonus, and 15% of my RSUs.&lt;p&gt;Jeebus man. What is it that you FAANG developers do that is so much more complex than what regular developers do?&lt;p&gt;For reference: I do Angular and Python development. Is there like some open source project or code samples that give an idea of the complexity of code that 510k developers are writing?&lt;p&gt;Man you got me day dreaming about that kind of money: I would invest half of it in low risk mutual funds and then take the other half over to my friend Asadulah who works in securities.</text></item><item><author>yanslookup</author><text>This doesn&amp;#x27;t match my experience. I guess it depends on the role but for engineers it&amp;#x27;s well known Amazon has been throwing large sign on bonuses to close the vesting gap for years.&lt;p&gt;For instance I received an offer that was 160 base, 325 cash bonus and 5% of my RSUs for my first year, putting my TC at ~510k. Second year was a slightly smaller bonus, and 15% of my RSUs.&lt;p&gt;Is it possible that when folks were voluntarily disclosing comp they were just including base comp and not total comp?</text></item><item><author>PragmaticPulp</author><text>We had an office near an Amazon office. I interviewed a lot of people trying to leave Amazon. I don’t ask candidate’s compensation, but a lot of them volunteered it anyway. I was always surprised at how effectively low their comp was in the first few years due to the vesting schedule. The internet is adamant that everyone with FAANG jobs is rolling in TC, but there are a lot of people out there who are getting into FAANG companies (especially Amazon) at lower compensations with the hopes of moving up to those higher levels.&lt;p&gt;OTOH, the backloaded vesting system works. It was easy to hire people out of their first year at Amazon, but almost impossible to hire someone after a few years when the bulk of their vesting was right around the corner. I talked to a lot of people who admitted being miserable but felt they couldn’t leave until they got the equity that they had been toiling over for the past few years.&lt;p&gt;Weird situation all around. We eventually reduced our recruiting out of that particular Amazon office because so many of the people coming out of it were deeply disgruntled with the tech industry in general. Really changed my view of Amazon.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>brimble</author><text>&amp;gt; Jeebus man. What is it that you FAANG developers do that is so much more complex than what regular developers do?&lt;p&gt;Nothing, for nearly all of them. Hell, half the time they&amp;#x27;re not even particularly impressive at executing on the totally-ordinary things they do. The companies just have firehoses that spit out money so can afford to spend more on developers, and choose to do so for a variety of reasons, most of which have nothing to do with how challenging most of the work actually is.&lt;p&gt;One reason (of several): insanely high comp means everyone (more or less) wants at least some time in a FAANG(-alike) job to bank some money. The flip side is that their hiring process is hellish. Put those together and you have high motivation for people to apply from one side, and a strong disincentive for anyone who&amp;#x27;s got any amount of doubt in their ability to pass the interview, any reluctance to put in the time to prep for them, or low bullshit-tolerance, or whatever. The result is that practically their entire &lt;i&gt;candidate pool&lt;/i&gt; would be good hires (=good enough at the actual job, and willing to jump through hoops), so they don&amp;#x27;t have to bother figuring out how to spot good (for their purposes) developers, they just keep comp high and interviews unpleasant and time-consuming, and it all sorts itself out.&lt;p&gt;Combine that with several companies all in similar situations trying to do the same thing, and you get what you see before you WRT developer compensation in a narrow slice of the industry. Except when they collude to keep wages down, which they have done and (speculation) almost certainly are still doing in less-obvious ways.&lt;p&gt;[EDIT] Just to be clear, &lt;i&gt;some&lt;/i&gt; of the work they do is Actually Hard, but that&amp;#x27;s not unique to FAANG (though it probably is more common there than, say, at your average Web agency or whatever). More of it&amp;#x27;s not especially hard but is hard to get experience with outside of FAANG (scale-related and fine-tuning stuff mostly, some of which &lt;i&gt;is&lt;/i&gt; hard but much of which isn&amp;#x27;t more difficult than most other development or ops stuff, just different)</text></comment>