Amazon Compensation

oh no, that might put upward pressure on Amazon employee salary demands!

Amazon will pay more than anyone outside of other large established tech companies. Historically, accounting for stock increases, someone who has spent 4 years at amazon will probably have matched other large tech companies.

Probably increased salary and switch to permanent remote. Amazon is notorious for their frugality and they recently doubled their maximum salary cap to 350k. They would only have done this to stay competitive in the current job market. This implies that many of their existing employees are underpaid relative to their peers at comparable companies and they've likely seen a large uptick in attrition. Not to mention attrition begets more attrition, especially if it's "influential&quo

How common are these huge annual salary bumps at Amazon?

Amazon upped their L5 and L6 pay bands by 100k on the upper end. These companies are having trouble retaining and attracting talent, word has also spread on the internet about poor treatment of employees. 30k a year is nothing when someone else will give you a 150k raise.

Amazon compensates for backloaded equity via large sign-on bonuses which "vest" monthly and don't need to be paid back if you leave. Annualized compensation is roughly stable over the first four years, assuming you believe their stock growth estimates (which are silly, but that actually gives you higher compensation for the first two years than years 3 and 4, not lower).

Amazon is notorious within tech for being cutthroat. The impression I've gotten from the outside looking in and knowing people who've worked for Amazon is that stack ranking and firing the bottom 5-10% every year was and still is standard operating procedure. It may even be that positions get filled by managers explicitly for that person to be fired to protect the rest of the team.On top of that, the vesting schedule sucks (5/15/40/40%) and the RSU value is overstated

True, but misleading. Amazon gives big cash bonuses to new hires in years 1 and 2 in order to compensate for the back-weighted vesting schedule.

Amazon deliberately tries to pay higher initial offers, but they hold back comp increases aggressively. Your friend might have a couple good years, but they won't last.

Could be related to the stock development. My personal theory is that everyone who was hired around 2014 turned out to incredibly expensive, Amazon seemed to be surprised by the stock going about almost tenfold in the next 4 years. That alone made it really hard for that generation of hire to stick around, of the people I know who joined with me at that time I only know of two who were still there (out of a dozen) in early 2018. That ratio is a lot higher for those who joined before or after 201