<Former Amazon>
I won't go on about the work quality at Amazon, there are plenty of other places to read about that.
It _is_ important to note that the average retention at Amazon (even for excellent people) is ~50% for 1 year, and ~20% or lower for the 2nd year.
Therefore, these comparisons should really take that into account. Amazon MAY look higher than Microsoft (for example) but because you only see 20% of your total vest the first two years, and everyone in the company makes a max of $160k with anything else bringing you up to market rate being a yearly "bonus", you likely won't see the majority of your earnings.
</Former Amazon>
Just to clarify - do you mean the expected year-over-year retention is 50% meaning that if 100 people are hired in a year, then 365 days later, only about 50 of them will still be there? How much of that is because they are leaving or being let go?
When I was there, managers were guided to PIP (performance improvement plan) to make these numbers. Whether that meant grinding people into the ground, natural attrition, or making up excuses to out people - I saw all of them happen.
> It _is_ important to note that the average retention at Amazon (even for excellent people) is ~50% for 1 year, and ~20% or lower for the 2nd year.
Your comment on "retention" is factually incorrect. I'll presume your comments are in relation to "tech roles" such as SDE SDM TPM etc.
First the number of Amazon hires in "tech roles" increases by ~50% per year. i.e., in year 1 there are 1,000 SDEs hired, year 2 is 1,500, year 3 is 2,250, year 4 is 3,375 and so on.
"Attrition" represents the number of individuals who leave for any reason. This may be because the employee terminates employment or the company terminates employment. Attrition levels are comparable to the rest of the tech industry, ~15% of the current population per year.
"Tenure" is the length of employment. Because hiring greatly exceeds attrition you should expect a relatively low average and median retention. As I recall Amazon is approximately 12 months median tenure. This is comparable to Google at ~13 months, for example.
Lastly the employees current tenure does not have a substantial impact on the probability of their attrition. Indeed the average tenure at exit is somewhere around 3 years. Which, again, is roughly in line industry standards.
In short, the average tenure at Amazon is low because they hire a lot. And while retention is not "good" it is a far cry from what you've represented.
Edit: The gross growth rate is actually above 50%. I've attempted to simplify the values where it does not make a material difference to the refutation.
> Your comment on "retention" is factually incorrect.
I disagree.
> First the number of Amazon hires in "tech roles" increases by ~50% per year. i.e., in year 1 there are 1,000 SDEs hired, year 2 is 1,500, year 3 is 2,250, year 4 is 3,375 and so on.
This could not possibly be true. If it was, they would be hiring ~1.5M technical people a year (since they've been in business since 1997). Perhaps you meant since 2005, but that would still represent 58k people per year hired. According to this article (http://www.geekwire.com/2015/huge-growth-amazon-reaches-2224...), they only have 24k in the state of Washington, where the vast number of people are. So nothing about this statement is true.
> "Attrition" represents the number of individuals who leave for any reason. This may be because the employee terminates employment or the company terminates employment. Attrition levels are comparable to the rest of the tech industry, ~15% of the current population per year.
Can you show me that data? about 15% per year? I've seen vastly different numbers internally, but would prefer not be sued in sharing them.
> "Tenure" is the length of employment. Because hiring greatly exceeds attrition you should expect a relatively low average and median retention. As I recall Amazon is approximately 12 months median tenure. This is comparable to Google at ~13 months, for example.
Correct, but these numbers are heavily obfuscated due to part time hires and vendors.
> Lastly the employees current tenure does not have a substantial impact on the probability of their attrition. Indeed the average tenure at exit is somewhere around 3 years.
Again, show me the data. I've seen the internal stuff. If you'd like not to believe me, feel free; I know I don't believe you.
First "id est" is used to explain or clarify, it is not a list of literal examples.
I'll again state that I am referring to "tech role" workers commonly represented by an "SDE"; not vendors, contractors, hourly, warehouse associates, etc. I am also referring to this population across all of Amazon; Consumer ("Retail"), AWS, and "Digital" aka "Kindle". I make no specific claims to particular internal organizations which may or may not represent the average.
I don't think that anyone is going to repeat or cite a companies internal data. Maybe we can use public data and some simple deductions to arrive at the most plausible explanation.
Your linked "geekwire.com" article is actually an illustration of the SEC 10-K filings. Under that documents definition of "Employees" it specifically terms this to be "full-time and part-time employees." Contractors, vendors, and temp workers are _not_ included in those numbers: "Additionally, we utilize independent contractors and temporary personnel to supplement our workforce." Unfortunately, that does coalesce "tech roles" with distribution ("warehouse") facility workers etc.
Additionally by reading these 10-Ks you'll note a section on "Stock-based compensation." As many have noted RSUs are a significant portion of Amazon compensation. From 2008 annually this is $275M, $341M, $424M, $557M, $833M, $1,100M, $1,500M, & $2,100M through 2016 Q1. Regardless of employee count the cost of issuing RSUs increased by 25-40% per year, with an increase in rate during recent years.
As you, and others, have noted the Amazon compensation package weights the initial RSU vesting schedule to years 3 & 4 of employment. I believe the typical structure is that only 5% of grants vest after the first 12 months, and an additional 15% at 24 months.
Let us use the public data which shows a distinct increase in employee count and compensation costs starting around 2011. Suppose again the company might have had 5,000 employees in tech roles at that time. Using my posited net growth of ~50% we could expect ~25,000 employees after 4 years, i.e. in 2015. Which happens to align pretty well to your citation of 24,000 in WA as of mid 2015. Don't forget that Amazon is a global company, so while a majority of tech roles may be WA based, it is certainly not all. Feel free to decrease the rate to 40% net, it merely changes the target dates by ~1 year.
We can also compare the public data on employee count and stock based compensation. Using the hypothetical ~25,000 tech role employees for ~2015 and $2,100M of stock we arrive at an average of ~$84,000 vested RSUs per tech role employee. Of course RSUs arent a uniform distribution, but that seems to map to self reported salary data. Adjusting for the employee count at 2015 Q2 and the stock based comp cost at 2016 Q1 further improves the fit.
From your other comment you appear to posit that employee attrition is approximately exponential decay each year. I believe you have also stated that the average tenure at exit time is 1 year. In that case employees should have only vested ~5% of their total RSU grants at time of exit, forfeiting 95% on average. How do we reconcile that with the public data showing a ~40% annual increase in the cost of stock based compensation?
Further your exponential attrition should lead to asymptotic employee counts unless offset. I do not believe anyone is claiming a net decrease in Amazon tech role employees, most cite a rapid increase in active employees. What hiring rate do you posit to support both your claimed 50% attrition rates and the significant net increased employee counts?
You did not say roles were increasing at 50% per year as an example - that was your stated fact.
I'm saying unless they had 10 employees in 2000 (wrong) or only started the 50% hiring last year (so we have no longitudinal data to go on), there is no number where that level of exponential growth of employees wouldn't result in either a) a company that was bigger than Walmart in employees in just a few years or b) MASSIVE firings. Maybe that's what you're saying? They hire that many people and remove them from the company that fast? I know the removal from the company is certainly correct.
As far as the increase in costs of RSUs, there is a perfectly alternative solutions to your proposal: their stock has increased by 10x in 10 years. So in that way, they're EXACTLY keeping track (https://finance.yahoo.com/echarts?s=amzn+Interactive#{"range...), and not increasing people collecting RSUs at all. You'll note that you list amount of money required for the RSUs, not number of shares. (This is, by the way, another way that Amazon misleads their employees - your yearly cash bonus actually goes down when the value of the stock increases).
So by that logic, they have, in fact, not kept pace with the rise of their stock. New employees are receiving substantially less new grants than older ones (bordering on zero, which can't be true), or they're being removed before they vest.
Further, the 24k in Washington also include many thousands of non-tech roles (Amazon Fresh warehouse in Redmond, Customer Support in Bellingham, some portion of the more than 2500 sales people for AWS, etc etc), so your math does not add up for adding new 25k tech roles, even if we multiply by 40% as a reduction. Doing some approximations using LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/vsearch/p?keywords=amazon&f_CC=1586...) they do appear to have ~24k employees in Washington, but only ~8k in engineering (they appear to add another 4k engineers in India).
Again, these are all public numbers, so they are inaccurate, but they should be good enough to substantially disprove your point. So, without question, your statement about increasing hiring by 50% y/y has no facts to back it up.
As far as active hiring, that is absolutely correct. They are extremely active in hiring - but they have to be because people leave so fast that unless they do, they'd be out of people.
At least when I started there the first two years had cash bonuses to make up the target-comp difference before the larger stock vests came in, so it was fairly even.
Absolutely, if you stayed, the numbers definitely add up to what you see here. However, because the attrition was so high, you were not likely to stick around to get a bonus to make up for it.
It's unfortunate that this practice of giving almost the entire base salary amount as additional stock (RSU) has not spread outside the bay area. In other regions (such as LA, NY, Seattle, etc.) engineers only get base salary and sometimes a very small bonus. These base salaries are often competitive with the bay area, but the lack of the enormous RSU makes the total comp often 2x or more worse.
The following are excluded from the collection of OES wage data:
Attendance bonuses
Back pay
Clothing allowances
Discount
Draw
Holiday bonus
Holiday premium pay
Jury duty pay
Meal and lodging payments
Merchandise discounts
Non-production bonuses
On-call pay
Overtime pay
Perquisites
Profit-sharing payments
Relocation allowances
Severance pay
Shift differentials
Stock bonuses
Tool/equipment allowances
Tuition repayment
Uniform allowance
Weekend premium pay
Year-end bonuses
This means that BLS data is basically garbage for software engineers. And it's somewhat harmful, because companies probably use this trusted government data to check market rates. Even if a company has good intentions and wants to pay market rate, if they use this data they won't realize just how little that is compared to the true market rate.
It's strategic because they know that most candidates barely know what an RSU is and salary is the main factor they will take into consideration. So companies can get by with paying the workers half what they'd make at Google and still make it seem competitive because the salary may be the same.
I think another factor is the salary sites such as salary.com, payscale, glassdoor, etc. These sites often don't include RSU in comparisons among companies. If it was included, many could see just how underpaid they are and there would be more pressure on companies.
My guess would be at the vast majority of tech companies that are not called Google or Facebook, RSU compensation is a tiny add-on to your base comp and wouldn't move the needle much.
And another bad thing is that I don't really find RSUs for most startups that attractive. I'd rather have RSUs from some public company like Amazon or Google than some non-public startup. At least I can easily sell Amazon stock.
Nitpick: Non-public companies don't give RSUs. They either give stock options or "restricted stock", which is actually a completely different thing from RSUs. Either way, the basic intent is to ensure that, for tax purposes, the grant has zero value, because if they gave you a non-zero-valued grant then you'd have to pay taxes on it and if you can't sell the stock to cover taxes that is going to suck. Once public, the company can give RSUs because they are able to actually take tax withholding out of them (by selling a bunch).
I would argue that RSUs are rarely something the employee wants, compared to equivalent cash. At a big public company, you aren't likely to be able to affect the stock price with your personal performance, so it's not an incentive. You also likely can't predict whether the stock is likely to go up or down -- if you can, you're in the wrong job.
I would speculate that the appeal of RSUs to Google is as a hedge -- if Google's stock price goes way down, at least they'll get a break in employee compensation. Otherwise I honestly don't know what the point is. Just give people cash.
Startup equity is a completely different beast. You're getting a grant that is (in theory) worth $0, but you may actually be in a position to predict whether that startup is going to succeed, and even to influence the outcome. Maybe. That said, if the company doesn't tell you what percentage of the company you're getting, then it's a scam and you should treat it as $0.
(I'm a former Google employee and current startup founder.)
Yes, you pointed out the main advantage - it's a bet against the stock price of the company. This lowers the volatility,and it doesn't lower expected earnings too much because if things go up you can just hire more people at lower RSU amounts.
The other advantage is you can incentivize people to stay to at least the RSU cliff, which improves your retention and institutional knowledge.
I would be more interested in data that shows how much money an engineer takes back home (net income) compared to the rest of the world.
eg
Software Engineer from Atlantis earns 100 000 USD but pays 55% of tax so takes home only 45000
Software Engineer from Middle-Earth earns 60 000 USD but pays 10% tax and takes home 54000
It's very hard to make these kinds of comparison (take a look at the Economist's Big Mac index which attempts to illustrate relative buying power in different places). Similarly income tax may be low (e.g. Texas) but property taxes, sales tax, and tolls may be high (e.g. Texas) and social services may suck (e.g. Texas). There are some cost of living calculators around which try to calculate equivalent salaries around the US but they have not been more accurate than guesswork in my experience.
Maybe, but on the flip side, I finished Uni with about £20k debt, in the most benign from that debt can take, and working in software I immediately earned more than that per year. I also never had to care about medical bills (still don't) because of the NHS.
Just want to point out that there is a good reason for the higher taxes.
I'm from the UK and now live in California. Income tax rates aren't very different.
As a proportion of GDP, Government spending in the US is only a couple of percentage points lower than the UK. The US actually spends slightly more on public healthcare than the UK, 7.9% vs 7.3%.
Of course healthcare here is so horrifically inefficient that another 8.5% of GDP is spent privately...
Not to mention the higher level of vacation time. Starting allocation in the UK is about 25 days plus 11 bank holidays. In the USA its typically 10 days plus 9 public holidays.
The legal minimum in the UK which just about everyone is entitled to is 28 days paid holiday assuming a full time job [1]. That can include bank holidays which are 8 per year for the vast majority of the population (1 or 2 more for Scotland and Northen Ireland I think).
For example, my first job was 25 days + 8 days of bank holidays and then you could earn up to 5 extra days if you stayed with the company long enough. Other jobs were all 22 + 8.
Let's throw schools in there... no use taking a 20k raise to move to Chicago if you have a child for instance. You'll pay more than that for the cheapest private school. If you want to use neighborhood schools you can move to Oak Park... and pay 20k in taxes instead...
When I have a 200k income, I don't really care about getting welfare, and I can probably pay healthcare myself. But I don't have that kind of income, and then healthcare, pension and social benefits really count.
We may pay more tax, but I'm glad we have the backup system that keeps you going when you're sick or unemployed.
Healthcare is actually a macro economic question. The private American system is much worse, and more expensive than the British public, universal system which is free at the point of delivery for everyone. Americans spend 17.9% of their GDP on healthcare, while the British only spend 9.6%. Americans are being ripped off by the American healthcare industry.
Personally, I rather pay a 10% tax to cover healthcare rather than 20% of my salary to insurance premiums.
The sad reality is if your employed, you have good health insurance, and if your not, your visa isn't there either and your back to europe/canada with social services anyway :/
American also has Social Security & 401k (pensions) and health care for the old (medicare) / poor (mediCAL, medicaid), and some social services (public school, various state programs in california)
Comparing pensions does get tricky very quick. In Canada for example there is a deduction from your paycheque for Canada Pension Plan (CPP) (assuming you don't live in Québec), but many employers will also have matching-contribution RRSP (same as a 401k) plans. So when you retire you get government pension plus private sector pension (which would be a mix of what you contributed and what your employer matched). The UK is similar where you get a government pension plus many employers have a tax-deferred retirement savings plan they will contribute to.
I am from the ostbloc som my taxes are are being spent on bribing, corruption etc.
We might not be paying that huge taxes but it's still a lot.
I am less compassionate than the other folks in Europe and would really prefer a more capitalistic system at least in my country. But we Europeans are....ehhhh.
A free market is denoted by the absence of intervention by government, price-setting monopoly, or other authority. Under what circumstances are these $500 aspirin being purchased? I have a strong suspicion that some sort of cartel is involved. If not, I'd be happy to supply the market for far less.
Cartel, like in a corrupt system, right? Maybe just what I've said?
If you can get in the healthcare industry in the US you'll be a genius. Or probably a criminal, there's no legal way to get out of the current status quo without government intervention.
I like the free market, but you're oversimplifying reality.
There's another explanation (among many) for $n aspirin, that is to cover shortfalls from public health program reimbursements. It's a similar story with life flights. Not exactly a problem borne out of the private market, unless you're arguing that government intervention is corrupt?
Healthcare costs were already high in 2008. Setting aside the issue of how much impact the ACA had, the period following the passage of the ACA saw lower price increases than the period before. Last year prices increased at a higher rate again.
I think it's not true that the ACA caused that reduction (the recession is probably a much bigger factor), but it also didn't cause prices to increase faster than they were prior to the ACA.
Regardless of what one thinks of the tax it's clear one can't compare salaries after taxation. Fact is I don't spend anything on healthcare. In the US I would need insurance. I don't save for my kids university education because it will be free. In the US I would have to.
Comparing pre tax income is more useful, by and large.
For what it's worth, I'm almost certain that every company in this survey provides health insurance at no additional cost (or maybe a small cost, but probably not) to all of the employees surveyed.
No it's not. Public healthcare spending in the US is higher, per capita, than spending on the NHS.
And how the buggery are you managing to spend £2300 a year on health insurance in the UK? That's crazy expensive. Ok, it's less than people in the US pay, but it's still mad for UK.
2300 isn't that expensive BUPA would cost you nearly double also please don't compare the public healthcare spending it has nothing to do with the actual prices you end up paying.
The health care expenditure in the US is the biggest in the world but that's including all the prices that insurance companies pay for treatment and services.
If the US stops charging 3000$ for an MRI scan it's expenditure will go down drastically (an MRI costs about 300$ in most European countries) but it might not have any affect on what the individual ends up paying.
I last looked about 6 years ago, right enough, but then £120 a month was the maximum charge I could find, that was with zero excess and get paid money for any nights in an NHS hospital, etc etc. I'm not sure what I'd need to add on to get it up to £200 a month - a free chauffeur for any time spent sick? ;-)
I suppose prices could have increased a fair bit since then. Also, I note you're in London. I'm in Scotland, so we actually have a different NHS, and it does generally get rated higher than NHS England.
I can compare public healthcare spending as that's the money that comes out of your taxes. Americans are taxed more for their public healthcare than we are in the UK for the NHS. They also pay more for private healthcare than we do in the UK. So your claim that it's more expensive here is simply wrong.
NHS is good when you are bleeding and need to go to the emergency room.
Preventative medicine and specialist care is horrible under NHS at least in inner London, why would I want to wait 6 weeks to see an orthopedist?
iPhone-like items are a very small part of anyone's annual budget. What matters are housing costs, transport costs, healthcare costs and quality of life. All of which are highly variable depending on location.
The iPhone itself may be a small part (depending on your budget) but wireless plan costs also vary widely. I know that UK/EU plans are substantially cheaper than the US where many pay $150+ per month for a couple lines.
Wireless prices in the USA are higher than any other country I've been to, developed or not. Nevermind the absurd contracts.
In Taiwan, for example, I got a 3G phone plan for $40 month-to-month, unlimited data, and consistently ~20mbps download speeds.
In developing countries like Thailand or Central America, I can get a 3G card for 60 days and 1-2GB for less than $10. Speeds obviously aren't as good as Taiwan, but the basic access to Internet is way cheaper.
I don't think electronic gadgets are a good item for this comparison.
You might want to take a look at the Big Mac Index, which tries to give some measurement of how much your money is worth in another currency or country.
Right, but easier doesn't mean useful. E.g. One of the easiest steps in comparing salaries across countries is exchange rate, but it's not nearly as useful as a list of local prices for commonly needed stuff. E.g. In Singapore when I last visited (quite a while back) car registration cost about $30,000 per year.
It's will be almost impossible to compare at that level since there are so many contributing factors that affects much one gets taxed. How much does the employee contribute to 401K, does he have dependents, medical claims?
Amazon keeps asking me to interview and everyone tells me it's a terrible place to work. After seeing this compensation via equity I'm thinking it might be worth it. Anyone work at Amazon and loves it or think it's really worth it?
I'm a former Amazonian. Since you asked my opinion, I'll give it.
It's a truly horrible place to work and I would never ask my worst enemy to go work there. Engenders the worst in humanity (people review, anyone?), terrible technical architecture, many systems based solely on tribal knowledge that leaves the door every day, comp structure that is nearly outright lying... I could go on.
Some people say that it was just the group I worked in but I worked in retail (1 year), new businesses (1 year) and AWS (1.5 years). There's virtually no difference. I still have PTSD (or at least what feels like PTSD) about by 3.5 years there, and I'd give anything to get that time back.
BTW, I'm now at another 20k+ person company which is doing very well, and making 30% more than my total comp when I was there.
> I am a former Amazon employee. I worked there for exactly a year. I assume I was doing well, I was offered increase bonus and base after my initial year. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10413966
Just to clarify, did you work at Amazon for 1 year or 3.5 years? It seems like these messages are contradictory, but perhaps I've misunderstood. In the message I'm replying to now, you wrote:
> I worked in retail (1 year), new businesses (1 year) and AWS (1.5 years)
In the previous comment, I was worried that people would know who I was if I had said where I worked (what groups and how long). The truth is I had worked in the group I moved to for exactly a year, but I had been at Amazon for 3.5 years.
The level of retribution at that company is substantial, and I was quiet worried they would hurt my ability to get a new job.
I have a nice new job now (I was still searching when I posted that), and am less worried. It's really not hard to figure out who people are on HN.
I quite like it there. I work on DynamoDB where I'm surrounded by pretty amazing engineers. I have written code that had a major impact on the service. I've solved important problems and that has helped make new things possible. Just yesterday, I was in a room with 20 or so top engineers from across AWS; that was pretty rewarding.
When I started, I expected that I'd be there a couple years then move on to Google, but I'm not even excited about talking to Google, Facebook, Uber, or the others at this point.
P.S. We're hiring on DynamoDB. We need for software developers and SRE-type folks. My e-mail is in my profile if you're interested in finding out more.
One of the tables has this important piece of information at the bottom:
"Amazon's vesting schedule is 5%, 15%, 40%, and 40% over the 4 years"
This is a significant deviation from the industry standard, which is to have a one year cliff, and have stock vest month-to-month afterwards. What happens if you leave in the middle of year 3?
"Backloaded." Amazon's average retention is 2-3 years so they mostly don't have to pay that out. It's pretty horrific for individual employee compensation.
If you leave in year 3, you lose 80% of your signing grants.
The word for this kind of vesting schedule is "golden handcuffs," because once you cross the threshold of two years, it would be irrational to leave for somewhere else. Amazon is paying you in year 4 for value you delivered in years 1, 2, and 3 (otherwise you wouldn't make it to year 4). It works well for Amazon because they only pay you lots of money once they know you're a good engineer, and because you have an increasing incentive to stay each year.
> It works well for Amazon because they only pay you lots of money once they know you're the type of person that will put up with their unending stream of shit.
This is a little disingenuous - that schedule only applies to the RSUs granted at offer sign time. Yearly stock compensation vests over a 2-year period 50/50.
SDE3 is a quite senior role at Amazon. I don't know very many of them, and almost all of the ones I know are extremely bright. Seems like they're getting ripped off.
Most teams require some on-call time every month or two. That's a big factor for me—I value my sleep.
Additionally, last time I interviewed there they did not have remote work in any form. If you get a 2am page, you have to drive in to the office. (And you have to commute.)
How on earth does that make sense? Amazon has data centers all over the world - why would working on a 2am page be any more efficient at the "office at location A" (corporate) versus the "office at location B" (home).
It doesn't make sense to me either. I believe at the time they said something about having a strict network access policy, forbidding access from home.
That's deeply not true for at least 10 years. Amazon has worldwide coverage for oncall rotations, and VPN for access from home or anywhere with a cell connection
There used to be - unsure if now - some very specific teams (like 2-3 in the whole company) that had to drive in for very specific issues. Basically if you need to get inside the cage in the datacenter where there are credit card numbers.
Amazon generally has a pretty strong remote work culture - I can even get my ipad onto the VPN and SSH around to get my work done.
I love it. You either love it or hate it. Read the leadership principles. If you align with what they're saying, you'll enjoy it. If you don't like them, you won't like Amazon.
I disagree. There are many leadership principles which are contradictory either in part or in whole (e.g. Dive Deep vs. Bias for Action; Insist on the Highest Standards vs. Invent and Simplify). You can squint and see how these would be the same, but often they're just used as arrows in a quiver to knock someone down and/or put someone on a PIP (performance improvement plan).
Example I witnessed during people review (obviously anonymized):
A: I think X is one of the best members of the team, he took a bunch of customer requirements and put out something super fast that addressed some customer needs. (Invent and Simplify, Bias for Action)
B: I disagree. His product didn't think about scenarios a, b and c [ed: these would be things that caused the product to slip a year, and would leave customers in pain during that time] and he did not investigate g, h and i [which would have taken 3 months to figure out, still with customers in pain]. I think he needs to be put on a PIP. (Dive Deep; Insist on the highest standards)
Yes, I'm highly biased here - this person was on my team, and I endorsed his plan, as did person B, until we got into People Review. One of the most brutal and subtle things about the entire process is the fact that you're consistently asked for negative feedback about EVERYONE... even if you don't have it.
I moved from that group (AWS) to new businesses shortly thereafter.
Leadership principles (LPs) are not contradictory so much as they are in tension with one another. That's not a bad thing, it's a good thing. Navigating the tension is what helps discover good outcomes. For example, if a customer calls up wanting a refund, then granting the refund supports Customer Obsession but contradicts Frugality. When deciding between options, there is always a tradeoff, and the LPs provide a lexicon for identifying and reasoning about what you're trading off. Amazon strives to be the world's most customer-centric company, and hence will generally choose the approach consistent with customer obsession. Identifying and discussing that tension and how to resolve it is constructive.
I don't see them as arrows to knock people down. I see them rather as, well, principles to use when reasoning about a situation. Giving a name to a concept is a good way to reason about it and discuss it. They are used when reasoning about performance, it's true, but it's used across the board: when justifying a promotion, when praising a high-performer who excels within their level, when identifying areas of growth, as well as while discussing job performance with people who are doing less well.
Performance and leadership in a creative job like software engineering cannot be perfectly objective (it's not like an assembly line where you process N units per hour), but the LPs provide some objective concepts and terminology to apply while discussing performance; they break down performance into dimensions that can be discussed individually in the context of examples, which is an advantage over just vaguely discussing things at a high level. For example, "Bob found a creative way to pack more software onto existing servers without harming performance (Frugality)" or "Sally spent two hours on the phone helping our biggest customer (Customer Obsession)" or "After causing an outage, Joe wasn't able to identify anything he'd do differently next time. I'm concerned that he's not vocally self-critical." I'd much rather have a discussion of my performance or leadership in concrete terms like these, rather than vague ones.
It is impossible to create a total ordering of preference when you have conflicting priorities (or "tension" between priorities). This reflects reality. Humans often get in weird situations where they prefer A to B, B to C, and C to A. The issue is not that the principles are incorrect, but that their application is confused for objectivity.
We'll agree to disagree. Tension is good, when that's all it's used for. When it is specifically used to tear people down (either with a purpose, or just for vindictiveness), I think the original benefit is lost.
Needs a bit of definition for levels, I take Level 1 is straight out of college, L2 is some (3-5 years) experience, kind of default, L3 "senior" (internal promotion, really good experienced candidates) and L4 super-senior?
Thanks for the feedback :). L1 is right out of college, but the others are based on different criteria. Quora has a pretty good post that describes the levels at Amazon, which you can translate into our levels that we created to compare across the companies.
https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-different-levels-of-softw...
The numbers don't seem obviously way off when compared to the numbers of folks I know. This is with the caveat that, for example, I don't know the compensation of that many people who are T6 at Google or at Amazon at any level. The only thing that looks off is that the numbers for Microsoft look low.
Why would that be? I suspect that's more because the pool of people I know is biased than because the pool that posted is biased -- some orgs in Microsoft will match offers from other companies even though average compensation is relatively low, so if you're new and you know a lot other people who are new, the sample of people you know is probably biased high.
To be clear, I think that's bad both for Microsoft and for Microsoft employees. I'm just trying to figure why the Microsoft data is anomalous relative to the numbers people have personally told me. The reason it's bad for employees is obvious. The reason it's bad for the company is that it's pretty common for people who have been here a long time to shop around, find out that they can make much more elsewhere, and then get a matching offer from MS. Once word gets around that the best way to get a fair raise is to interview elsewhere, people start interviewing elsewhere, and some of the people who interview are going to leave, even if that wasn't their original intent.
> Once word gets around that the best way to get a fair raise is to interview elsewhere, people start interviewing elsewhere, and some of the people who interview are going to leave, even if that wasn't their original intent.
We actually suspect that people who are paid less or are underpaid are more likely to report their salaries. For example, it seems like Glassdoor data skews low.
I can sort of understand that as a signal not to interview at the company or information for future potential coworkers to use during negotiations. A rising tide raises all ships so to speak.
IMO sharing salary data is the perfect first step for some sort of software engineers association/guild/professional body.
This may be an unpopular opinion but if internet forums and message boards are any indication I don't want some omnipotent group of software developers making decisions for the industry as a whole. Absolute power corrupts absolutely and all that...
And perhaps more relevant to the thread, I know two types of people who talk about their salary, people who make a lot and people who make a little. Their is just so much bias present to me to give any credibility to these lists. Take the google spreadsheet where the employee was fired, do you think the engineers who thought they did better then their peers in negotiations listed their wages?
I'm not sure I follow but you may be misunderstanding me. I'm definitely not advocating for an omnipotent group of software developers making decisions for the industry as a whole. I can only assume you've seen that advocated for somewhere else and are equivocating it with my post?
At it's simplest level I think something like the SAG or profession sports players associations. Kept out of the way, stars can rise, and there if you need them. It'd be useful to be able to have an organization that I can say "Hey, I'm interviewing at Github, based on your verified compensation data that you keep, what can I expect?"
The fact is, our employers share and buy each others compensation data similarly for use in negotiations and when setting compensation. It only makes sense that the parties on the other side of the table do the same thing.
Sure, because Glassdoor is a place for people to go air their dirty laundry. With this, you're surveying a very niche group of users, that are probably being well paid.
Good, let HR get a hold of it, figure out who all the people sharing numbers are and fire them.
Surely scalping a ton of mid level engineers at major tech firms for sharing their salaries online will fix that pesky problem of soaring profits and thick margins...
No, we don't have hard data on this. We just notice that of the engineers on our platform, we find that the people who make more money generally don't seek out this kind of data. And the people who are more uncertain about what they should be making tend to be more curious and willing to share.
If you are selling data, you will need to be extremely thoughtful, quantitative, and specific about the statements you put out, and be prepared to back them up.
There is a market for doing user submitted comp analysis, but the real value is building trust, which takes a very long time and is expensive.
Glassdoor has no way to distinguish newer salaries from older salaries - all are used to give one average number. Their average salary has so much old data that it doesn't keep up with the rate at which it's increasing these days.
We just notice that of the engineers on our platform, the people who make more money generally don't seek out this kind of data. And the people who are more uncertain about what they should be making tend to be more curious and willing to share.
Luck, basically. Working at Google was both a gateway to more opportunities, and a gateway to a much higher salary.
I had been working remotely for a long time for a small company, and making what I considered to be good money, considering that I lived in a fly-over state. When I was hired at Google, it more than doubled my salary after a while, when stock grants began to vest.
I now work for Netflix, and I am making even more than I was at Google. To this day, I cannot believe I am paid so much.
Yes. I probably work about 45-60 hours in any given week. I have a family that I see for breakfast and dinner every day, and spend all day with most weekends.
All-in-all, I work less, and have a far better work-life balance than I did a few years ago, when working for the small company. In that company, I had sole responsibility for an entire product area, and often worked over 80 hours per week.
As an afterthought, I actually worked far less at Google. Probably about 45 hours a week. It was like a vacation. Being a cog in a machine and not on-call 24/7 was refreshing and enormously freeing after years of constant pressure.
Do you mind sharing your contact details? I literally burned out by working at a SmallCo (24x7 on-call) and developed multiple diseases due to stress and unhealthy sleep patterns. I'm currently rehabilitating (from an unrelated surgery) and thinking of getting back into the game.
At GOOG/FB a large chunk of that comes from equity. 400k for a senior+ level engineering job at one of the "big" tech co's in the valley/SF isn't outrageous at all. Base salary ~200, bonus/equity another ~200.
Being paid in equity is just plain annoying. It makes your taxes far more complex and, at least at Google) unless you set up an autosale program a year in advance, your money is tied up in company stock until the next trading window.
The taxes on equity are a huge PITA when equity is a large fraction of your salary. This is because they withhold at only 25%, even if your tax bracket is higher. This means you have to file quarterly estimated tax payments or over-withhold from your salary.
I much prefer Netflix, where I just get salary. I might even be able to do my own taxes again!
Anyone finding their $200K in tech company equity to be a big pain in the ass should feel free to send it to me. I'll grudgingly bear the burden for you.
Did you consider simply skipping estimated payments and paying the interest? It's only 3% above the federal funds rate. (Historical real return on equities is usually computed to be higher.)
Or a hybrid (pay a reasonable amount in estimated taxes but don't put any serious effort into getting it exact).
Parent poster is being silly. It's trivial to withold some money for taxes. The pain is in calculating get your 1099 because the stock brokers get it wrong evey year, often more than once .
That's in line with a VP position (directing working for the CIO) at a Non-Tech Fortune 500 company, assuming it means total comp (base, bonus, options).
There's obviously going to be a bias of some sort, but it would probably be worth looking at the distribution of the reported salaries to get a better sense of that. (The author may have already looked at the spread of salaries, I haven't read through the whole thing yet).
You could also try comparing with visadoor.com or another source of H1B data for the same companies to try to see where they fit in. There may be a systematic difference between H1B salaries and the larger employee base at these companies, but at least you're not limited by self-reporting.
The data you see on such sites is only the base salary component as they parse through LCA disclosure data. As highlighted above, much of the compensation comes from bonuses / stocks etc. I did some analysis on the above data as well: http://ashwinikhare.in/tech-firms-guest-visa/
Yeah, sorry if I came across as implying it to be an equivalent data set. I just meant that if someone is wondering how the distribution of salaries compares to everyone with a specific title at a specific company, they might want to compare the base salaries being collated here with the base salaries for H1Bs with the same title.
That would be a fair comparison, but a challenging given the data available by OFLC. Most of the companies just mention the "Software Engineer" title, and don't mention the level when applying for LCA, whose data is disclosed. Some companies do, but don't everyone. FWIW, I'm pretty sure it should be around the same number.
Holy crap, I didn't realize that starting salary at Google was $175K. That seems a bit high for new college hires, but I suppose I'm comparing that to my salary as a freshie sdet.
Read the chart again. It says the median starting salary is $110,000. $172,000 is the median total annual compensation, which includes bonuses (and stock typically won't vest during the first year, which means total compensation for the first year is actually closer to $123,000).
This "fact" keeps getting repeated here. While it may be typical for Google, it is in no way typical for "the bay". Median salary is around $110K for sw developers, and I highly doubt people are getting 100% of their salary in RSUs and bonuses their first year.
Huh? $110k is low. $90k is the starting salary at a lot of companies in the Bay Area for an entry level software engineer.
Myself, I make $160k base salary at a small company in Palo Alto (was offered that at 2.5 years of experience), and know I could've gotten a lot more elsewhere.
At any rate, I've received more than my fair share of $200k+ 1st year total comp offers for _start ups_ in SF for positions that only wanted 2-3 years experience. So, I wouldn't be so surprised.
Google is an "elite" company, almost every engineer there would be one of the best hires any other company could ever make. Generous compensation is one aspect to accomplish that hiring goal (amongst other things)
Not true - they just lived through the interview process. I remember working with a former Google engineer at a startup who flat out told me that I was a better engineer than him.
It's harder to see who will be amongst the best engineers early on in someone's career. Each person develops their abilities at different speeds & times in their lives.
Would like to see a discussion of possible systematic bias. The "hacker" group generally prides itself on a) creatively messing systems up, and b) anticipating (and preventing) creative system mess-ups, I have to wonder how accurate this data is. Sure, there's little incentive to lie - but there is a small incentive, which is simply to mess with people. (And there might even be another, which is to exaggerate income to encourage others to ask for more money, which might eventually positively affect you.) I wonder if there is any way to measure this effect, or eliminate it.
There are a bunch of spreadsheets. We consolidated and standardized the data on a few of them, but we still have more to do. We clean the data, and then we try to see what type of synthesized info we can provide back.
Would be interesting to see hours worked too, are those $200k+ bonus salaries 84hr work weeks with 3 weeks vacation you can never take or normal hours.
I would like to see one of these analysis break down base salary versus total compensation. I have never received less than 95% of my total compensation in base salary. Neither has my non-technical wife. I have no idea what is "normal" in that respect.
I'd also like to see a breakdown by market, as I have been led to believe that my salary is only slightly below market for Dallas, but the median compensation numbers posted in this article for my experience level are three times what I make now, and it's depressing.
It's hard to compute non-base compensation precisely, because stock price is inherently volatile, especially over four years. If your vesting schedule includes absolute numbers of shares you will receive in 1, 2, 3, 4 years, you cannot possibly predict the value of those shares, and therefore cannot reliably measure your per-year compensation.
For example, if you knew four years ago that you would receive 30 GOOG stock in 2016, you would assume in 2012 that would mean a $10k bonus. But now the stock has gone from $325 to $754, the bonus is actually $22k.
If you work for a company with an increasing stock price, then stock based compensation can also create the illusion that your "salary" is increasing each year, even if you get no promotion.
Base salary vs total comp data from the research can be eyeballed from the first graphic in the article.
For anecdote, approximately 66% of my total compensation is in base salary. When I first started working 5 years ago, it was 92%.
These numbers are probably skewed somewhat by Bayarea salaries, which have to compensate a little for the high cost of living (compare for example Facebook/Google to Microsoft/Amazon, which are primarily Seattle-area employers). In general, I've found the Bayarea salary bump doesn't overcome the Bayarea cost-of-living bump. So these salaries are only higher on paper.
Well, for the past four years my total compensation has been 100% base salary, and I'm the equivalent of a low-end SDEIII so my total would double in salary alone. That leads me to believe I am underpaid even by Dallas standards, but I really have no idea how to gauge my market value.
The second chart should show the compensation breakdown across salary, cash bonus and equity.
In NYC and SF, there's high demand for and short supply of developers, which drives up compensation. Companies in these cities will recruit from across the country to get talent. Cities like Dallas though also have a much lower cost of living, so that should be taken into account. There was a Hacker News thread about this at one point.
We don't yet have enough data on each market, but we plan on breaking out the analysis by city once we get that data.
Holy cow! Facebook's median signing bonus for Level 1 (new grad) engineers is $75K! Why is that higher than for experienced engineers? How can the other companies compete with that?
The expectation, I've heard from recruiters, is that as a new grad you have a higher need for cash immediately (to buy furniture for your first apartment, e.g.). As an industry hire, you are probably already established and don't have a particular need for a lump sum right out of the gate (especially since relocation is provided for separately).
Good question. We checked the raw data again, and the signing bonuses are all consistently high for Facebook Level 1. We also know a couple of people at Facebook who have received signing bonuses in line with the $75K. But we don't yet know why it's so high compared with the other companies.
Why does MS pay their engineers less than other tech companies when most of their services are not free? It's like getting paid at tight budget startups. Despite of the reported salary here, I admire the engineers there. Is it because MS has great work culture and excellent benefits?
I'd be surprised if any of the big companies didn't provide at least 401K and as much matching as the law will allow. There really isn't a lot of freedom to innovate in this space that I'm aware of.
With that said, Google did have this odd thing where you could do an in-plan Roth conversion, and put post-tax dollars into your 401K. I did this in 2013 or 2014, and I think Google was one of the few companies to offer this at the time.
One interesting area of differentiation is health care. When I left Google in 2015, they were cutting health benefits to avoid Cadillac plan taxes. Lots of people were saying that Facebook had better plans.
Unfortunately, we don't have that information right now. We could try to find out. It just wasn't part of the compensation data that the people on Hacker News had posted.
I would love to see something similar for Finance IT (i.e. the Global Banks and Insurance Firms). It would also be nice if there was a country breakdown as well, but from reading the comments I see that data is not available in your current analysis.
Definitely. We have a few data points on tech roles at non-profits, but not enough to draw any meaningful conclusions yet. Hopefully, we can get some more data around this to be able to post the same type of analysis. We'll also be doing it for smaller companies too, to see how compensation compares across company size.
These are just the companies that had the most data points, probably because the original posts that the data came from were about Amazon and Google salaries :). We plan to update our analysis with more companies and roles as we get enough data.
I'm pretty sure the data is coming from the self-reported salary spreadsheet that was posted on here about a month ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11331223). There's a lot of valuable information in it and there were no geographical restrictions on participation. However, it's all self-reported and unverified, and there are some values that are obvious fakes.
It's possible that some of the data came from that spreadsheet. The sources of the data are cited at the bottom of the post. You're right that it is all self-reported and unverified. We tried to clean and standardize the data as best we could. The biggest source of error for us in the process might have been the level, particularly because some of the reported bonuses and stock compensation seemed out of line with the stated level. But we took the Level as it was in almost all cases. It may very well be that companies overpay in certain circumstances.
Google engineers would certainly like to think that.
In reality, Google's hiring process selects for people who can follow instructions and are happy trading self-sufficiency and independence for the social validation that comes with working for such an "elite" company. Google engineers are some of the most sheep-like creatures on the planet.
Any big company has massive variations in employee skill levels. I get the feeling that Google tries to get a certain minimum standard for the people they hire (even if that standard may be high).
I don't think ego is really the only thing that drives pay distinction. I think that many people consider that different individuals contribute differently and that those who contribute more value should get more pay. Isn't that realization independent of ego?
Even for a married couple earning 500k in high-income-tax California, effective tax rate (as opposed to marginal tax rate) is only 30-35%, and that includes the employee portion of Medicare/social security (the latter of which cuts out around 110k).
The exact effective tax rate will vary mostly with your mortgage interest deduction.
quick calculation comes to about a 45% tax rate for single in CA and 42.4% for married. So 50% is a small exaggeration, but it's definitely closer to reality than 30-35% underestimate.
Note that these numbers are likely the marginal tax rate, the tax rate that the very last dollar was taxed at. However, all of the income is not taxed at that rate. That is why the commenter above mentioned effective tax rate, which is the calculation of (total tax paid / total income).
Why would you guess when someone told you they calculated? For marroed filing jointly earning $450k, the marginal rate is 35% federal plus 2.35% Medicare tax plus 9.3% CA tax.
It _is_ important to note that the average retention at Amazon (even for excellent people) is ~50% for 1 year, and ~20% or lower for the 2nd year.
Therefore, these comparisons should really take that into account. Amazon MAY look higher than Microsoft (for example) but because you only see 20% of your total vest the first two years, and everyone in the company makes a max of $160k with anything else bringing you up to market rate being a yearly "bonus", you likely won't see the majority of your earnings. </Former Amazon>