Here are the results: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/133LBigv7pOkgpTkA6bHH...

When I was hired I had to tell them "No" and hang up the phone (in the middle of the 2001 recession) to a $63k job offer. They called back the next day and bumped the offer to $70k. I later learned that I had one of the only "strong hires" ever given out by the bar raiser and the HR rep was told to hire me at all costs. HR played (and probably still plays) insanely hard hardball in negotiating salary.

Other SEIIIs hired at around the same time came on at $60-63k and were stuck there. Once the economy recovered in 2003/2004-ish we eventually started hiring SEIIIs at >$120k starting salary.

Gender: M Native English Speaker: Yes for myself and the other two or three employees I'm thinking of.

http://www.npr.org/2014/04/13/301989789/pay-secrecy-policies...

What is the flip-side to at-will employment though? Without at-will employment, do employees become slaves that cannot quit their job? Or are there only a small list of "legal" reasons for you to quit your job.

I always see "well the employee can always leave at any time too," but is that really something that disappears in places without at-will employment?

The following is true for a sizable part of Europe. The flip side(s!) are:

* I can't just walk out on a job, I have to give a 4-week notice (for any reason, though. It can be anything, from "I feel like I need a new challenge" to "I hate ever single one of you motherfuckers"), during which I'm expected to do my job more or less as usual. Everyone understands you're not as motivated, no one plans for major stuff to happen during someone's N-week notice.

* My employer has a small, but very open-ended list of reasons why he's allowed to fire me, which includes things like me underperforming (but he has to give proof that this actually happened -- i.e. he needs to have an actual evaluation process, has to warn me that I'm not performing as expected first and so on), shrinking clients base which means that they literally no longer need so many people and I drew the short stick and so on.

My employer is also required to give me a four-week notice, during which he has to pay me as usual, and he also has to pay for any vacation days I didn't take in this time (the idea being that I could have lounged in Belize instead of working my sorry ass at the office).

Furthermore, if I am being fired, my employer is also required to allow me to go to interviews during business hours (for obvious reasons).

Regulations vary from one country to another, but that's the gist of it. In general:

- Notices are typically 4 weeks for non-management positions and 6 weeks for management positions. The law around here allows these periods to be longer, but not shorter than this, and they're negotiated as part of the contract.

- However, they can be skipped by mutual agreement (i.e. if I want to leave right now and my employer doesn't have a problem with that, we sign an additional paper that says we both agree to leaving without a 4-week notice and I'm out).

- They don't apply for the duration of the test period at the beginning of an employment contract (if there is one). During that period (typically 3 months), both resignations and firings are effective immediately. I did it once, it' a very refreshing feeling :-).

I work for the European branch of a relatively small American company, which is how I've come to know all this. My colleagues from the US are mesmerized whenever they hear about these things.

Basically, if your notice period is 1 month, you can opt to pay the company 1 month's salary instead of having to work that time. If a company wants you gone, they pay you the equivalent wages for the notice period you were required to provide.

I think it's fair because both sides have agreed that $X amount is a fair exchange for the employees services. If those services cannot be replaced with $X then that's really the company's problem for taking advantage of the worker.

This buyout is in addition to any other severance package the worker might be receiving.

Anyways, I think it's pretty nifty as it allows the flexibility of leaving immediately, but also puts in some structure into the situation.

The flip side of this is that it's very difficult to get fired, even if you're not very competent.

You can, of course, not turn up to work. But that might well make you "unreliable" if you ask for a reference later. But it's not a problem, since a new employer giving a three month notice period will expect you to be on one at present.

(The notice period during the first 6 or 12 months is often less, eg 2-4 weeks.)

E.g. in Norway it is near impossible to give less than 3 months notice for permanent positions without providing additional compensation, no matter how junior the position, except for a typically 6 month trial period.

Before I'd moved to the UK, I'd never even seen an employment contract with less than 3 months.

In practice, shorter notice is often mutually agreed on with or without compensation when both sides agree it suits them, but it's very common to serve out the full 3 months.

Now, your relationship with your manager might be strained, but hey, that's life.

Sparked a lot of controversy. It kinda made me not want to work at Amazon ever. Although I hear that the Amazon experience varies depending on team and location.

(I think the only state with a meaningful divergence from at-will is Montana).

From experience (as a bystander), what really happens in a case like this is:

* Employee is terminated

* Employee believes they were terminated for a reason forbidden by state or federal law

* Employee retains an employment lawyer, who drafts a letter demanding compensation for the improper termination, citing specific claims of (say) sexual harassment, complaints articulated to superiors and to HR, and subsequent retaliatory firing.

* Employee does not necessarily prove those claims; they need only demonstrate sufficient facts and allegations to ensure that a lawsuit would not easily be dismissed.

* Employer almost invariably settles.

The two cases where employers don't settle:

* Employer is stupid, and believes that they will pay less to litigate a wrongful termination case than to settle.

* Employer is smart, and has an HR department that keeps excruciatingly careful records of things like sexual harassment complaints, alleged racially-tinged comments, ratio of black/white hires to black/white applications, &c, and is prepared to make it clear to employee's lawyer that the case will cost too much to pursue.

If you've ever wondered why smart employers go fucking apeshit when people make racially-tinged jokes, or why it's not necessarily in your best interests to bring your concerns to HR unless your game plan is to bring a wrongful termination complaint, there you go.

This is also the reason why, despite at-will status in basically every locale where you can hire people, "Performance Improvement Plan" is a euphemism for "slow-motion termination". The purpose of a PIP is to establish in the written record that an employee is a non-performer, so that when they're terminated, the employer can present evidence that there were reasons other than retaliation or discrimination.

EDIT: It's worth noting that in these cases the staff in question also had clear evidence in the form of signed reviews rating them that they were performing well. E.g. the guy I spent most time on a performance improvement plan for was ranked "exceeds expectations" in every criteria three years in a row while I was there, and was given 15%+ raises each of those years. This was in Europe, but for a US company.

I was the recipient of a PIP at my last job, went through the improvement process, and at the end of it, my manager signed off that my performance had returned to acceptable levels. I left about a month later.

So why am I not still there? Well, in the process of going through the PIP and asking myself how I let things get to that point, I realized that I was quite capable of excelling at everything I was supposed to be doing, but I just didn't give a shit anymore. My subconscious had already checked out of that job and was telling me it was time to move on.

When I realized that, my reaction was to start looking for another job while bringing my performance back to a good level. We quit on good terms: they "hired" me back to consult on some problems that came up after I left; I helped someone transition into my old position and I have a job better suited to my personality.

The right thing to do is to take the paperwork and say, "thanks, can you give me a few days to review this?" and stall as much as possible while looking for another job.

If you're feeling especially ballsy (and very confident in your ability to find another job quickly) you can say, "I'm not familiar with these at all, and my grandpa (R.I.P) always told me to get everything reviewed by an attorney before signing it, so that's what want to do. Is that OK?"

There is no self-improvement.

It's called court. No provided reason does not imply a lack of reason, and (say) discussing pay on a public forum would certainly be relevant evidence, if highly circumstantial.

That's leaving aside entirely the issue of how at will employment gives companies confidence to hire since they know they can shed employees if things go south.

If you are looking for an end run try binding arbitration, which allows employers to opt out of the legal system.

Because the employer is at a massive advantage. For an employee having gaps in employment is a major thing when it comes to future employment, and can have massive effects on personal finances. For the employer, losing an employee a bit earlier is rarely a major issue (and if it is, they can generally convince people to stay a bit longer by throwing cash at the problem).

It is less relevant in high-paid positions where employees generally have the ability to put aside more of a cushion, but for lower paid employees it can be dramatic.

There's a reason the long notice periods in large parts of Europe are a direct result of decades of union pressure.

> That's leaving aside entirely the issue of how at will employment gives companies confidence to hire since they know they can shed employees if things go south.

If this was a real concern, then we ought to see a persistent problem of high unemployment across the countries with long notice periods, but to my knowledge we don't.

Maybe for unskilled jobs, but the idea that an employer will hire/fire employees at the whims of the market, and there is zero cost to this process does not apply everywhere. There can be significant cost to on-boarding people depending on the industry / position.

The effect is that by protecting existing jobs you lose out on future ones. Over time this pretty much cuts you out of any industry where there are waves of creative destruction.

It is a tricky issue though. I am sure that a powerful enough company that wanted to throw resources at it could make all sorts of arguments about whether certain parts of the information (e.g. bonuses, vesting schedules, options grants, stock price discounts, relocation provisions) are allowed to be classified as confidential even if basic salary is not.

As a lowly employee, your only hope would be if some national labor union or pro bono legal institute took on your case, otherwise you'd never be able to afford the legal costs to defend your NLRB collective bargaining rights.

With pay secrecy, it's unfortunately still mostly a "might makes right" situation, where rich companies can sort of make up their own rules and at the very least bankrupt you with legal nonsense even if they don't ultimately win. So few people have the fortitude to endure that kind of legal harassment that it implicitly still does censor our ability to talk about pay, even if it's illegal that this is so.

It looks like one of the main criteria is that it has to be a part of a "concerted action" to benefit a collection of employees, and this had historically been broadly interpreted in support of employees with a very liberal understanding of what a concerted action is.

This whole HN thread about it, for example, would almost surely qualify (I am not a lawyer, of course, so that's not a professional opinion and not a form of advice for anyone here), since it is explicitly focused on the whole class of Amazon employees and encourages employees to share for themselves.

I wish I could find the older case about the leaflets. IIRC it was from the late 1970s.

1 - Full-time freelance audiobook editor.

$30/hr

2 - Post-Production Associate - Level 6/4

$50,000/yr

35 shares of AMZN per year for three years

3 - ACX Production Coordinator - Level 7/5

$65,000/yr

Additional 20 shares of AMZN per year for three years

I am no longer ashamed to write these figures out to the public because I now make more than twice the salary that I was making before I left the company. I found that my salary at Amazon was always far too low given what I did, and my job titles were not at all representative of the job I actually did (for the 2nd and 3rd jobs they were almost entirely software engineering jobs.)

NOTE: Audible and Amazon have different job levels - Audible's job levels are two points higher than the same Amazon job level.

An audiobook is made in four basic steps:

1. A voice actor records the narration for the book.

2. The editor takes the raw audio recordings and edits these files for pacing, flow, and aesthetic flavor. The editor also makes note of any errors in the narration which require a re-record.

3. After making all re-records and inserting the new audio, the audio is listened through one more time. They call this a "QC pass."

4. Finally, the QC'd audio is mastered and encoded for delivery.

I was the owner of step two for all Audible Studios productions.

Do they read all of the dialogue for one character in a big chunk, then move on to the dialogue of the next character? Or do they read through the book naturally and switch voices? I would think that the latter would be very difficult.

Narrators actually do switch all character voices in real-time. This does not commonly cause issues that require recording to stop, as the narrators are usually very experienced professionals that come from the Broadway stage or from other voice acting professions (cartoons and the like.) I've also recorded and edited my fair share of bad voice actors (for instance, former Labor Secretary Robert Reich narrated his book 'Beyond Outrage' even though he was told that it really wasn't a good idea.)

That's a very interesting aside. I could see how a non-professional narrator would struggle with the demands of the process. Would it not still have made sense for someone like Mr. Reich from a personal branding point of view? He is, after all, a somewhat well-known public figure and paid public speaker.

Audiobooks are a very intimate media, and the wrong voice can really put off the experience. With training I think he could do it, but to just give a public speaker the task of narrating a book he/she wrote without such training is usually a recipe for disaster.

If you don't mind my asking, when people want to do their own reading and are willing to get training, how are they trained?

I ask because (like every geek) I sometimes think about doing a podcast some day, plus I just want to be a better public speaker, and there seems to be a lack of options between free/cheap resources focused on basic skills (like Toastmasters) and intensive training for people who want to do voiceover for a living.

Then I listened to Leonard Mlodinow's "The Upright Thinkers"; Oh god. Euclid's Window by Mlodinow was absolutely fantastic, and it was narrated by the slightly pompous-sounding -- but fitting -- Robert Blumenfield. Leonard had a somewhat slow, drawling voice, and he often stumbled over words. This was pretty disappointing because he seems like such a smart dude. He just shouldn't narrate his own books :)

The pauses between lines/phrases were often tightened up, yes, by pasting room tone over the pauses. This way, the near-silence of the room tone is consistent throughout each pause, which makes the narration easier to comprehend and allows the listener greater immersion into the experience.

The exact duration of room tone impacts the pacing of the narration. This is, in a way, the audiobook editor's "art." They can't over-edit because it would ruin the narrator's dramatic delivery - they need to be able to edit within the stylistic flow of the narrator. At the same time, if they are not careful enough to make the resulting delivery consistent, then the extraneous audio may distract listeners and lead to a lower quality result. That balance is acquired with experience.

The reason this all happens, really, is to ensure a clean "noise floor" - the background sounds heard in addition to the narrator's voice. The sound of the room and the gear, if you will. The narrators are such pros (my experience) - there are many who I could get away with not editing at all, if it weren't for the incredible need for near-silence throughout the entire finished production.

I was thinking I really wish there was a good app where you can listen to audio articles. It is partly solved in iOS as you can speak selected text, but problem is you cannot select all text easily and you don't wanna mess with it while driving.

Was wondering what would be a great UI for the transcriber and whether you could create p2p network to share the transcriptions.

Anyway, on iOS if you enable voiceover you can read the entire screen by swiping down from the top with two fingers (I think - check the Apple website for accessibility information if not!)

Another possibility i just realised is the possibility to pass texts from reader mode into 3rd party text-to-speech application. Will have to research some of them.

Honestly, though, it was a great job. It never felt exhausting. Not only was the pay rather good for a 21 year old fresh out of university - the job was really fun. I got to read medium-to-high quality novels and create the audiobook experience.

Later, I got to witness Audible's rise into the mainstream and evangelized producing audiobooks for ACX [1], bringing it to a new generation of actors and engineers.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QHmtV1Pe1hA

(I discovered a couple years ago that I really like audiobooks.)

Salary: $115k base, no regular bonus or stock, $50k offer in stock over 4 years if I remember correctly although I don't know offhand how many units that came out to.

Level: SWE1 (60 internally)

Tenure: 2 years internally, 7 in industry

Yearly pay increase: Averaged ~6k/y thus far.

Internal candidates have NO leverage. The only way to get a promo is to be in the right place at the right time, and have both high visibility and a manager who has proper political influence and will fight for you. If you want a salary boost, leave and come back a year or so later. "Performance" reviews, accomplishments, hours put in, is all moot unless you have the above, in which case it's a nice bit of ammo if your skip level has a lot of competition for his promo budget, but proper political clout can likely force through a promo without. (To add another tidbit that I've always wanted to clear up anonymously: Stack ranking absolutely still exists, if not in a formal process but as a necessity from how budgets are assigned and promos divvied up.)

There's a college hire PM in my team (not PM II, so he's either 59 or 60) who's single and in the 33% bracket. That means he's making at least $189K a year.

Edit: I should add, my PM coworker could be wrong about his tax bracket. I can't fathom how they would offer him that much in base salary + stock. But he did mention being in the 33% bracket.

I really want to empathize with your underpaid for level statement, I certainly have a pile of stories, I'm just hesitant to tell them because they're rather identifying to anyone who knows me, so you'll have to trust when I say "A good number of us have gotten the short end of one stick or another, often beurocratic or political"

Also, if you're a 2 and only at a slightly higher base than I am, you're "somewhat on track" from the conversations I've had, as far as pay per level for us normals :) That being said, I really botched my negotiation when coming in and didn't push my position, which left me coming in at a 59 from an industry position with greater responsibility, and role seems almost harder to change than pay from what I've seen.

* Accept a job somewhere

* Get promoted (doesn't matter how)

* let yourself get hired away from your current company

Getting hired away from your current company is the only way to get a fair raise based on increased experience. Companies never give substantial raises to current employees.

No negotiation, no threats to leave, they weren't aware until we gave them the cash.

> Companies never give substantial raises to current employees.

and a single counterexample is enough to counter it.

If you are just internally lobbying for a salary increase at your existing employer, regardless of how successful you may be, how much revenue you are bringing in, etc. I would say at the vast majority of companies you will not see nearly the same raise as either presenting a compelling outside offer, or actually taking an outside offer.

Another way of thinking of it is that a company cannot pay their employees an arbitrary amount, it has to be justified up the chain, and usually that justification is based on "grades" or "scales" of some kind or another. Most of these scales will include a fixed range for annual raises. By bringing an outside offer, you are providing the necessary documentation that your manager, HR, all the way up the chain is required to actually sign off on the raise. The outside offer means no one is sticking their neck out to justify an out-of-spec raise, or claim someone was being previously underpaid, it's just a simple equation -- the employee has an offer, and the company can make a counter-offer or not.

Of course the trick is if they decline to counter, or counter low, you have to consider if you then leave, or stay? You also probably can't come back year after year with new outside offers, it's a trick you can only turn to so often.

That said, I did get a raise once with an outside offer. But I left just inside a year later.

That's why I look at it now as a system that just needs the outside data point in order to properly process the request. It's not a person holding back the raise, more often the process which the outside offer fixes.

If there was such a thing as an "employee appraisal" service maybe you could do it without actually going to interview, which would be pretty cool!

My dad was a little like Al Bundy though, he never really sought to improve himself like I do constantly and I'm sure almost everyone here does too.

I think the industry still has a lot of managers who think in terms of running a shoe store with employees that are improving themselves at a rapid pace.

Our company intentionally hires juniors so that we can groom them as they grow. I was one of those juniors < 5 years ago and I've increased my salary > 100%.

A single counter example is sufficient evidence to disprove such a universal claim.

I do think that overall switching employers makes it easier to get a raise, because a current employer is more likely to know your true market rate making it harder to convince them to pay you above that, or even at that rate (with them figuring you won't leave for a small difference).

You do have to be careful not to become a 'job hopper'. When i see a resume where somebody never stayed somewhere more than 18 months i'll figure we won't be any different and am less inclined to give a thumbs up to HR if that person needs a sizeable training investment from my part.

Hired: 2011

- Level: SDE I (4)

- Location: San Francisco

- Salary: $96k base, $20k bonus, relocation, ~160 stock over 4 years.

- Average yearly total comp: ~ $150k

Promoted: 2013

- Level: SDE II (5)

- Location: San Francisco

- Salary: $110k base, 168 stock

- Average yearly total comp: ~ $170k

Relocated: 2015

- Level: SDE II (5)

- Location: Seattle

- Salary: $125 base, ~160 stock, relocation

- Average yearly total comp: ~ $190k

I used a throwaway account, but I'm sure I'm identifiable by this information if my manager sees this. I'm not too concerned. I think it's in Amazon's and the employees' best interest for this stuff to be transparent. Besides that, while I like my work, I can easily get an offer from Google, Facebook or pretty much anywhere else.

Position: SysDE 2 in AWS Tenure: 1.5 years Job Level: 5 Base: $120000 Stock: 140 RSU (granted at signing, almost none vested) Bonus: $20000 + relocation at signing, $15000 will come after 2 years Gender: M Native English: yes

I was hired at L4 as SE 1, moved to SE 2/L5 after a year, and now SysDE 2. There was no raise for SE2->SysDE2.

Is it still the ridiculous 5-10% year 1, 5-10% year 2, and then the rest spread out over years 3-4?

Obviously it can back-fire on the company. If the share price drops a lot then people that were planning on staying till the 6 monthly vesting may quit.

I was a systems engineer in Dublin and the only significant payraise I got was after I left the company for 4 months to then rejoin, my salary was bumped up 12k euros, for a total of 62k/yr, with 150 shares over 4 years (sorry I do not remember the vesting scheme).

The HR department in AMZN has the tendency to screw internal employees upon promotion. The way it was unofficially explained to me by a low-level buddy in HR is that there are salary ranges for each corporate level, and during a promotion you get just over the lower bound of the salary range for your new corp level, that's the policy, that's what happens.

New hires instead have negotiation margin and, while the hiring manager can't offer a salary higher than the approved salary range, more often than not the offer will end up in the upper bound of the range, to lure the candidate in.

Furthermore, there are huge differences between salary ranges in job roles, a Systems Engineer will always be paid 15 to 30% less than a Software Development Engineer at the same level, despite the fact that the skills and duties are not that much different, why? Again unofficially "because Amazon values more people that write software". Except the fact that in my ex-team, we all wrote software and the expectations were all the same regardless the job title (there was however a difference between levels).

So yeah, as internal promotion you have absolutely NO leverage regarding salary, if you want a salary increase and your organization is hungry for people but is having trouble in hiring (like it happens frequently in Dublin where the job market is quite competitive), I'd suggest you start looking around for a new job, accept the offer and then come back to your same team 4 months later. If you leave the company for less than 6 months and your position hasn't been filled in the meantime, the hiring manager is able to extend an offer without sending you through an interview loop, you'll get your old job back but with a nice pile of money on top.

Personally, this netted me a 10% base pay increase. More counting the performance stock bonus that came with the change.

Were your offices by that famous Gaol? I thought it was interesting seeing a mix of the old and new so close together.

And yes, the office was exacly in front of the Kilmainham Gaol, unfortunately the office was quite depressing, so much so that it was an inside joke that the Amazon office was 21st century Gaol.

Luckily they moved in a much better place now.

Who said he was at another company for those four months? And who's to say the company didn't just fold in that time or earn someone walking out on them?

In the past couple of months this was fixed by the creation of a new role called 'Systems Development Engineer'.

But what? Returning to the employer you quit from seems like a terrible idea. If it was years later, maybe you could explain it away with interview BS like "changing direction" or "finding your place."

But months later makes you not much better than the guy who shows his boss an offer from another company to negotiate a raise. It might work in the short term, but then you're branded as a flight risk. The next time they need to lay someone off (or if you slip up and they have a legitimate reason to fire you) you'd be high up on their list of disposable employees, perhaps moreso because you're more expensive than you were before.

Your compensation can fluctuate based on what Janet Yellen says in a speech.

I agree with your premise, but don't give too much credit to "the high level management". Most of them are groping in the dark.

Unless you get that kind of equity yearly—which is crazy, and brings up dilution questions—you're better off taking a higher salary and investing as much as possible.

But—adding X market value for equity vesting over Y years with 40% capital gains tax for the first 12 months of holding it leads to a 2016 pay of.... just your salary.

Oh, and you get equity every else in addition to that nice pay, and they don't strap your pager to your face.

The annual and midyear review process takes this into account and attempts equalize total compensation depending on the value of the stock (basically, you want the stock to be down when the price is used to calculate your total comp at the end of January).

When I was there, it was somewhat difficult to recruit some higher level roles because they might only be offered $120-$150K salary and then 200 or so RSUs over the course of the first year. That doesn't always look as enticing to someone as $250K salary.

At my annual review last year I received more stock along with a pay increase. So, thus far, yes.

>>But—adding X market value for equity vesting over Y years with 40% capital gains tax for the first 12 months of holding it leads to a 2016 pay of.... just your salary.

Can you elaborate on this? I'm not following.

>>Oh, and you get equity every else in addition to that nice pay, and they don't strap your pager to your face.

What do you suggest I do?

Well, if you do get more stock it complicates things—but you have to distribute out the pay out over the vesting period. In other words, collecting the entire value of the equity into one pay period implies you'll get the same amount of money the next pay period—which is only true if you get that amount of equity annually. It sounds like this may be a possibility

Furthermore, it assumes you'll be at the company for the entire vesting period. Which you might not want to do.

Additionally, you can't cash out the equity you DO get in 2016 unless you want the government to take a sweet 40% off the top.

> What do you suggest I do?

Don't wait for the equity to vest fully, work hard for some good recommendations, and get out of that sweat shop. Amazon rewards ambitious workaholics. Everyone I've talked to who USED to work there (key point being these people left) has issues balancing work, pay, and a life.

To be clear—I'm not arguing anything but that other companies will use you a little more compassionately, and you might make a little more cash in the meantime. You're still doing very well for yourself, Amazon is far from the worst place to work, and you might be very happy there.

Unless you do spectacularly poorly, you can expect that to continue

Do they give you the stock as a bonus at the end of the year, or are you promised it at the beginning and it gets doled out during the year? If it's the former, be careful that they don't decide retroactively that you had a bad year and decide to cut your total compensation almost in half!

5% the first year

15% the second year

20% every six months thereafter

Compensation at Amazon typically is a combination of a base salary, a signing bonus (distributed over time), and a stock grant. The package is structured in such a way that the employee's total pay stays consistent over time, even though the pay comes in different forms. New hires will have their signing bonus structured over the first two years, and then it ends. At that point, the more significant stock vests begin to occur at six month intervals, so the total pay amount stays relatively the same after the bonus ends.

The standard (at GOOG & others) is:

25% on year 1 2.08 & 1/3rd every month thereafter (75% vested equally over the next 36 months)

Furthermore, there are other grants that vest quarterly for the first 18 months of employment (in addition to the normal 4 year).

Look, I used to work at Amazon. They are the worst paying big company out there. Complete with totally shitty vesting plans. My first vesting with Amazon was over 5 years. Yup, they really took advantage of us new grads.

Anybody earning 6 figures is in the top few percentiles of society, especially if you are a new grad!

You are obviously free to take advantage of your employability but just remember that you pretty much are the 1% before saying that it sucks. :)

He is saying that Amazon's RSU vest schedule sucks compared to the standard used by Google and others. His income level has nothing to do with anything about that.

Fair enough I guess, but I am not a fan.

I ended up not accepting that offer because another company gave me a more interesting role. Also their stock vesting schedule is horrible (most of the money comes in year 4), and many people find amazon to be soul-sucking. You're likely to leave at the 2 year mark, thus losing out on most of the stock anyways. 4 years is a long time to be at Amazon (though if you're the right mix of "in-it-to-win-it" and "workaholic" you might thrive there)

My initial offer from Google was $150k base, ~15% holiday bonus, and came with >$100k in stock vesting over four years, and they give another four-year stock grant each year. I have 7 years of industry experience and I interview well.

"Underpaid" and "overpaid" are relative terms. If you currently earn less than what you can expect to receive elsewhere for the same work, you are underpaid.

>>In the real world (outside FaceGoogAmaWallstreet), the story for developers is quite different.

Interestingly enough, this is precisely the sort of thing that this very thread is attempting to challenge. Have you noticed how many "wow I am seriously underpaid" comments have been posted?

All of this reminds me of a quote by Michael Corleone in The Godfather:

Never be embarrassed by your wealth. This recent contempt for money is still another trick of the rich to keep the poor without it.

Keep in mind also that Amazon is not some tiny startup strapped for cash. It's a big player in the industry and their hiring standards are rigorous.

It's not just the big few who pay really well. There are whole constellations of medium to small software companies you've never heard of that pay very well. The differentiator is that they see software as a strategic asset, not just a cost of doing business.

This package would be underpaid for pretty much any pure tech company on a coast.

I have to praise Google for the way the situation was handled: the company didn't force the spreadsheet to be taken down (in fact, it's still up as I write this), nobody that I know of was fired for it and it generated a healthy amount of internal discussion. After hearing some stories from the Amazon counter part, I wouldn't expect the reaction to be the same.

Taking action against this would've been a violation of US labor law with steep penalties.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...

I'm not saying Google is this shining company without a single flaw, but I'm definitely impressed with the way they seem to take their employees as adults that have strong opinions that need to be addressed.

Far from trying to apologize for anyone related to that lawsuit, but in my opinion what happened was a set of people thought they could get away with certain stuff because "everyone in the industry is doing it". Kind of the same with making people sign NDAs which are, for all practical purposes, unenforceable in California. They tried it, got tested in court, failed miserably. Good for us, bad for them.

The original creator of the spreadsheet claimed that she was retaliated against in the form of her manager rejecting peer bonuses sent to her.

* Area: Seattle, WA

* Position: SDE

* Base Pay: $90k

* Signing Bonus: $20k immediately, then $17k paid in 12 monthly installments after you reach 1yr in employment.

* Stock Units: $53k (5% at 1yr mark, 15% at 2yr mark, then 20% every 6 months from then on) Note: this vesting schedule is AWFUL.

Needless to say, I rejected this offer and did not work for them. Best decision I ever made.

Your total comp in year one would have been 112.6k which seems about right. The stock price doubled last year, so you would have been looking at at least 125k in year two.

E.g you can easily pull $100k to $110k in base pay from similar companies out of school (think LinkedIn, Twitter, FB, Uber). Even well respected startups pay more than $90k (and that's not including any additional bonuses they will surly pay)

I ended up going to a mid sized startup in SF (50-100 people) that was very very well funded and had a ton of potential along with one of the best teams I've seen. I'm still there and love every second of it and am being given amazing opportunities that I know I wouldn't have gotten at Amazon.

Ironically I got paid more on every single vector (base pay, equity, relocation, sane vesting schedule) from this startup than from Amazon. Just goes to show...

Sites like Glassdoor are useful, but what they don't provide is company-specific detail. I can view Amazon's average SDE salary, but is that figure for a job level 4 or job level 5? (At Amazon, pay is based on job levels. Two people can hold the same position but have different job levels. For example, Area Managers who are promoted from hourly positions start at level 4, but new hire AMs come in at L5).

Other things Glassdoor can't provide:

-Pay increase percentages for internal promotions

-Pay increases and stock award amounts for annual performance reviews based on performance grade

-Compensation data broken down by race, national origin, native language, etc.

-Differences in pay for positions based on team, department, geographic location, etc.

Location : Eugene, OR.

Position: Assistant Professor of Mathematics Tenure: 3 years Base pay (9 month) $72,000 in 2013, increased to about $75,000 in 2016. (minus union dues). Will increase to $82,000 when I make tenure.

Signing bonus: $0

Stock: $0

Pension : keeping my fingers crossed.

Experience when hire. Ph.D plus 5 years post-doc (at Princeton.)

Gender : M Native speaker: Yes.

I now work in a development position at a large tech company for which I'm overqualified. I work about 7 hours a day plus a couple of meetings. I never work weekends, have plenty of free time to conduct research on the side and make well into 6 figures.

Position: Senior Software Engineer (level 5)

Tenure: 4 years, no prior experience

Comp: $300K (160 salary, 40 bonus, 100 stock)

Male, native English speaker

P.S. We're hiring.

$180k/year 15% bonus ~ $30k/year 600 RSUs in the first year = $440,000 400 RSUs in the second year = $280,000 200 RSUs in 3rd and 4th year (assuming no refreshers, and oh boy there will be refreshers!)

Male, native english speaker.

It helps that my prior job had a comp level around $480k/year and also I got hired when GOOG was $550/share.

BTW, the T-5 salary band ends at $180k. So you're pretty close. Its the RSUs that make all the difference.

I don't think I was a highly strategic hire, just a very solid engineer with a lot of experience, prior employment at Google (and Amazon), and a strong salary and stock compensation at my immediately prior job.

So they busted out the competitive offer, and I was very happy. Also the stock went up like $200 a share.

Upon hiring and usually each year thereafter we get grants that vest over the following 4 years, varying in sized based on budgets, level & performance scores.

I started a discussion for Google salaries here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11314449

If you have a chance, can you send the link to your colleagues at Google? (-:

Getting somebody you know at Google to refer you is the best way to secure an interview, but you can also apply online.

http://www.google.com/about/careers/students/

If you get an interview, practice algorithms/data structures interview problems like crazy.

Daily 10K I guess.

Base is $145k. Signing bonus $50k year 1, $40k year 2. Stock 350 shares over 4 years. 5%/15%/40%/40% No promotions or reviews yet.

In summary: about $200k total comp first two years, from then on variable based on stock. I expect about $225 to $250k in 2016.

I had 15+ years of experience before coming here.

Competitive pay offer: $180k /year $50k signing bonus 15% bonus per year 800 RSUs vested equally over 4 years (200/year) 600 RSUs vested in 100-chunks every quarter for the first 18 months.

Counting up, in the first 12 months, pay is about $670,000.

I gotta get seriously bumped at the end of 18 months to keep it up, otherwise my pay will slip to $350,000.

And that is what a competitive offer from a company that values their employees looks like.

I have friends who have totally gotten the $1m RSUs/year for 4 year offers from both Google, Facebook and others. These positions exist.

It helps to change jobs a bunch :-)

I do not remember the details too much, but it was something like $84K for my first year, after stock and all that nonsense. The salary is not much compared to the US, but very good for South Africa. However, the offer was in Rands, which has since collapsed. I would have lost about 30% of my salary when converting to dollars.

I did not take the job for various reasons, with very few having to do with Amazon. The team itself was excellent and I regret not joining, but I am glad I did not partly because of collapse of the Rand.

I still miss Cape Town. One day I will return for another visit.

EDIT: I can provide more detailed numbers if people are interested. Would need to dig up the offer letter. Very few Americans must have applied like I did, so Amazon could very easily figure out who I am. Hey, I loved your team, it just was not meant to be!

While the job market seems to be in favor of job seekers these days (it seems to be practically impossible to recruit developers for small/medium shops, you get pinged by recruiters all the time) the salary does not really reflect this. it's rising but pretty moderately. you get offered $100k jobs once a while, mostly in finance.

Also the air gets pretty thin in germany when you actually want to do technically interesting and challenging things. Most jobs on the market are quite dull and involve enterprisey and/or legacy things. Most developers I worked with, however, do not seem to mind the backwardsness, are happily married to their languages and tools, and tend not to be overly passionate about their work (which might just be the right attitude).

Title : Software Development Engineer (SDE I)

Base : 98,000

Sign on : 50,000 (2 year period)

Relocation : 10,000 (2 year)

Stocks : worth $70,000 (4 years)