Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

The bonuses are quite high, is the reason.

Amazon pays competitive salaries.

They are probably a bit below Google or Facebook salaries, but compared to an average SF startup, they pay literally 50-100% more. (the offer I just got from them was 80% more than my SF startup salary).

Some of their behavior is indeed "annoying" ie they have a weird stock options vesting schedule, but if you actually do the math, and think with your head, you see that their total compensation is quite competitive.

The moral of the story is, if you care about compensation, don't work for startups. Even the "less competitive" companies like Amazon, with "scummy" behavior like claw backs, are still miles ahead of the average startup, in terms of compensation.



> 80% more than my SF startup salary

Were you making 100k or something? Or are you looking at total comp?


I was looking at total comp. Total compensation is way high at big companies. And total compensation is the only thing that really matters.

You get RSU stocks that are actually worth a bunch. You get huge signing bonuses, you get great benefits as well as 401K matching.

All that adds up to something like 70k+ a year in "not salary" benefits, even though it just as good as cash (on top of a much higher base salary ).


I've seem most BigCo offers to be a bit lower salary than startup offers (at senior or staff level engineer, excluding Netflix) but total comp is indeed much higher.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: