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Comment by renewiltord | Hacker News Reader

That seems pretty well-optimized, right? The employees value the money more than they value well-being, and the company values the money more than it values their well-being. That is pretty good alignment.

Also, why wouldn't you just work elsewhere and buy AMZN stock if that's all you want. Work at GOOG, sell your stock, buy AMZN stock.

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The reason you wouldn’t work elsewhere and invest is the following: you get hired at Amazon with a total comp of 500k (180 base + 320k in RSUs). You have been in role for 2 years and are completely burnt out. However the stock has doubled, and your total comp (without any raises) is now 820k. That is too much money for people to walk away from. If you leave for GOOG you will get in at the current stock price with no guarantee it will double effectively taking a pay cut.

You're also on a 4 year 5/15/40/40 vest

That’s irrelevant they give you the same amount in “signing bonus” with a 55/45/0/0 “vest”.

But you’re vesting 40% of your initial grant this year was the point, not that you didn’t get the initial “fill in” cash bonus.

Fair but if you decide to invest in Amazon with the proceeds you’re in the same boat. And other companies do frequently at least attempt to match scenarios like this (if you’re smart enough to get better offers).

Except that their competitors are giving you 25/25/25/25 vest with 100/0/0/0 signing bonus.

True, there isn’t a real concept of a bonus of any kind* at Amazon. They definitely lean on the stick more than the carrot.

That makes sense. I wasn't sure if SDEs get x units or y dollars worth of stock units each year. The former is most common, but everything about AMZN is unusual, including the vest schedule.

Amazon does it in dollars. Employees have a target comp figure in dollars, the annual stock refreshers are based on the price of the stock at that time, so if you got 100 units one year, and the stock doubles, all things being equal, you would only get 50 units the next year at refresh time.

In practice this means you can make good money off your hiring grant if price keeps going up, but you will also see your total comp hit a cliff / drop after a few years, since while stock going up is usually good, in Amazon's eyes, you've been lucky to be making more than your target comp those years and they aren't going to keep giving you the same amount of units if those units are worth more.

That logic applies when you joined a while ago. However, with the stock sky high (P/E 66, double GOOG 33), joining Amazon right now may not give you that potential upside anymore. Your managers and long time careers will get a larger portion of the upside. It's already evident by the stock growth of GOOG compared to AMZN in the past one year/quarter. The P/E of Amazon is high, compared with the growth potential vs others in FAANG. Picking a company to join is also akin to pick a stock to invest. Low P/E is not everything, but it's an important part of the equation.

For non-Staff level SWEs, my opinion is that joining a FAANG with lower P/E is better for your future earnings.

Amazon's PE has always been this high

But their market cap hasn’t. Odds are they won’t 5x their size in the next five years as they did in their last five.

That's what people said 5 years ago.

Eventually they'll start being right. Not even Amazon can grow at this pace forever.

Their retail business is still in a tiny portion of the world.

not to mention continued cloud growth, not just as a market, but the AWS share of that growing market.

I’m not seeing estimates of Amazon at 5x larger business (revenue). Estimates have Amazon at ~2x revenue ($850ish B) in five years and earnings growth slower than current levels. Folks think they’ll grow, just not quite as fast.

We’ll see. I think it’s going to be hard to maintain today’s growth rate at this size.

> For non-Staff level SWEs, my opinion is that joining a FAANG with lower P/E is better for your future earnings.

No, because mr. Market has been looking at everything except P/E, more essentially you can't spend P/E. You spend price.

If you want to throw in P/E in the analysis fine, but then you have to throw in every other element which makes the stock move:

1) Cult CEO who is able to sell the narrative

2) Fed policy

3) Macro environment

4) Odds of company being targeted by the DOJ

and all the other trillions of factors which influences the price of a security.

As Druckenmiller reminds us: "There is not a phenomenon in the world which doesn't affect the price of a security in some shape or form, no matter how small"

> The employees value the money more than they value well-being

yeah, if it's that then Amazon is not to blame.

Because the stock comes in a 4 year grant. You can't trade your GOOG for AMZN until vesting.

Grants vest over a period of 4 years, with overlapping grants generally granted each year. So you don't need to wait a full 4 years to begin selling.

Right I know, my point is that if AMZN doubles two years in and GOOG doesn't, the AMZN worker is better off because their entire grant has doubled. The GOOG worker buying AMZN has only doubled half their grant, the unvested portion is in GOOG which hasn't moved.

Fair point - but you aren't getting it at a 15-30% discount (ESPP) or 'for free' via RSUs - so paying market rate isn't as enticing.

Does Amazon have an ESPP? I don't think they do. They also aren't really giving it "for free", they're giving it instead of additional salary, and when it vests you can choose to sell it all immediately to make up the salary difference.

Compare the performance of GOOG vs AMZN over the past 6mo, 1 yr, 2 yr.

Amazon's pandemic growth is leveling out.

I'm not a lawyer.

Please be careful with the advice from the second paragraph. Talk to your financial advisor and lawyer first. Buying a large portion of a competitor's stock may violate SEC laws based on the training I recalled.

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