How common are these huge annual salary bumps at Amazon?
Have other people been so successful using an offer for a raise at your original employer and staying?
The people who stayed basically pulled forward a stock grant that was coming anyway, and increased this year's raise while decreasing it a fair bit for the next two years.
I've always been explicit that this is what's happening; the area under the income curve does end up larger, but not by a large amount. Of course the option value of having a grant vs. hoping for a grant is worth something, too.
DVassallo's $160k bump across one year's W2 is much larger than I've ever seen granted.
I don't think of my wages being $1.2M so much as I happened to get lucky with that equity. (I have also experienced the reverse where > $1M worth (on paper) of stock was worth less than $10K when I could sell it, it isn't all roses.)
My point was that just prior to the dot com crash I had over $6M in "RSUs" (well restricted stock which was a better deal since the number can't be fudged but what ever) and when it "vested" it was worth less than $12K. It showed up on my W2 because I used an 83b election to vest it all up front (and get in on a lower tax rate when it unlocked) only to have it generate losses when it unlocked.
Where I was going was that there is 'base pay' which you are going to get if you show up every day and don't get fired, and there is 'variable pay' which can come in the format of annual bonuses and or vesting equity. The annual bonuses tend to be something of a beauty contest and so can be hard to predict, and the market can swing wildly (hopefully nobody with RSUs today has to experience a 99.9% drop in value that I did during the dot com crash but it can happen, you could have had Theranos RSUs for example).
The original author went out of their way to stick with just base pay and I understood their reasons for doing so as I largely agree with them on the lack of predictability of other remuneration options.
Edit: Put another way - day to day, what are people in such roles working on exactly?