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Comment by Analemma_ | Hacker News Reader

Amazon offers good signing bonuses that pay out over two years, so it's very common to peace out right at the 2-year mark when your take-home pay abruptly goes way down and the grind is no longer worth it. That's what I did, and I noticed it almost everywhere: there's a constant revolving door of inexperienced people. I don't understand how they keep it going with so much turnover, but somehow they've built a system that kinda withstands it, except in frontier AI apparently.

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I think it's coasting on that prestige of being FAANG. People still want it on their resume. I share this from time to time but I interviewed there at the same time I interviewed at Facebook (right before the name change). And the difference was night and day. Amazon truly treated me like cattle. Get in, do the automated Leetcode/HackerRank thing. Canned conversations. Facebook at least _seemed_ like they were rooting for my success the entire time.

Exact same experience.

Amazons interviews were so formulaic and it’s interviewers so robotic it was almost sickening.

They still pay a lot. The comment you replied to is mostly wrong about the 2 year cliff. Year 3 and 4 should be higher comp if you have good ratings.

Doesn't AWS stack rank? So having good ratings has a low relationship with your delivery.

I will say it’s an excellent place to learn on-the-job engineering fundamentals as a junior if you’re ok with the otherwise shitty culture for a year or two. The high turnover also means they’re really efficient at training new people.

If you chart money in your pocket per unit time, it takes a dip around 18 months where your average pay is less than your first month’s pay. (When I was there, using RSU numbers for that time.) Guess when average quitting time was?

HR swore it wasn’t on purpose and I was somehow measuring pay “wrong” by looking at money in my pocket over time; but knowing their HR, I’m sure the valleys in transition from signing bonus to vesting are intentional.

Is this weeding out long termers (willing to wait years to vest) vs the impatient?

This is where Bayes bites in practice: we can know that impatient and long-minded behaviors are correlated to outcomes, ie p(quit | impatient), without the outcome meaningfully informing which case we have, ie p(impatient | quit).

That’s because people are complicated and do things for many reasons, so people quitting when we cut their pay might not tell us they’re impatient.

I suspect the intent is what you say, but I don’t think the outcome is.

Because all humans are 100% fungible with all other humans. So, you can take whatever old humans you have, throw them away (or make them want to leave), and then replace them with all new humans, with zero negative effect on anything. Rinse and repeat.

Human experience means nothing. Anything that does have meaning gets encoded in the system for the mindless humans to implement.

That’s my take on the view from the top, based on my time working at AWS.

Works great for the business too. I recently worked in a business unit with a 2 year vesting model. I loved the work and challenges.

.. and then got let go at 22 months in favour of the AI budget.

Gotta respect the hustle.

How is that a "signing bonus" and not just a pay cut?

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