I can’t but agree with the hilarious sentiment of the author. Marketing is not the forte of AWS (or Google). Their strength is their APIs and continuous unrelenting investment in their infrastructure.
I would poach someone from say Apple than AWS for marketing purposes.
I have no idea where most of you guys work, but to claim that Google and AWS have bad marketing seems to me to be totally insane.
I've been at a company with bad marketing. Even though we were a unicorn with 10s of millions in revenue including almost of financial services, insurance, and publishing companies as clients, basically no one knew who we were or what we did. Our sales people would have to invest months and months of effort to sell. We struggled to gain any developer community support at all.
On the other hand I've had AWS consultants tell me that they walk into meetings without having to sell at all. Their clients are already eager to leverage AWS in any way they can. Nor do they have the slightest fear of putting mission critical and sensitive data in the cloud.
> Nor do they have the slightest fear of putting mission critical and sensitive data in the cloud.
To be fair, it makes more sense for many companies to leverage AWS and other cloud providers, other than trying to do a job they do not understand and may not understand enough even to hire for it.
> I mean, think about it: What’s the secret sauce he’s going to take with him? “Release a bunch of things with terrible names then market them incredibly poorly to infrastructure engineers?”
Presumably, in the same vein that salespeople bring a “Rolodex” (i.e. a set of established personal relationships with clients) with them when they switch companies, wouldn’t a marketer bring along with them a Rolodex of channel partners, advertising-agency higher-ups, etc.?
>>This was way more interesting & entertaining that I thought it would be!
I don't know Corey Quinn personally, but if you peruse the rest of the blog entries you'll see that all of his posts are entertaining. He has a flair for this particular style.
Product marketing usually does not include PR, advertising, channel, communications,strategy type roles in org of AWS size.
It focuses more on how a product is packaged, priced, how is it positioned to a customer, who is the customer even - this is actually quite hard, for a cloud product like AWS it could be CEO/CIO/ VPoE,VP-Ops, Head-R&D, Engg lead, DevOps/SREs, PMs, architects etc, depending on who all you target the material you need to generate is very different.
Targeting VP/CXO's could mean gartner type material, targeting actual developers could mean just accessible documentation, examples and easy to use self-service portal, for somewhere in-between perhaps make influencers like Corey from lastweekinaws who wrote this article to promote your product.
Product marketing is perhaps closer to product management than what traditionally what we think of marketing .
If this guy has any sense, he disclosed the existence of the non-compete to Google in the hiring discussion and made them agree to indemnify him in the event of a suit. There will be a settlement, and Google will end up parking him somewhere for 18 months, with pay, until he is free of the contract.
Googles lawyers would always use an outside firm. Corporate in-house counsel are for creating corporate legal policy and coordinating with other lawyers for the actual lawsuits. They rarely litigate themselves.
If I was Google's legal team I'd throw this guy to the wolves to demonstrate to every other current Amazon employee what their employer will do to limit their career.
> Second, what Brian was reportedly told when accepting the job by Ariel Kelman (at the time, AWS’s VP of Global Marketing) was to the effect of “oh, don’t worry; AWS has never enforced that non-compete clause against someone at your level/in your role/in this department.”
My standard response to this is "great, then you won't mind if I strike it from the contract".
EDIT: Reading on, I agree with the article: This "oh don't worry" is standard to get you to sign, so act like they will definitely enforce this in your case and plan accordingly.
“In 2019, Hall earned well in excess of one hundred thousand dollars per year, annualized.”
This was shocking to me - I'd expect a VP to be making much more, but if they were, then you'd expect it to be included in the complaint.
Is Amazon's comp really this low? Or is "VP of Product Marketing" similar to "VP" at an investment bank (lower rung of middle management, rather than an exec title)? Something else?
Amazon salaries are capped at $160K for everyone. Obviously his total comp (with RSUs) would have been much higher. I don’t know whether the law takes total comp into account.
The reference to Hall’s annual salary being “in excess” of $100k is in response to a modification of law passed recently, and addressed in the linked Geekwire article:
> A new law passed by Washington state last year put restrictions on non-compete agreements, with a series of exceptions, including a provision that allows such agreements to be enforced in cases when an employee earns more than $100,000 a year. Hall earned “well in excess” of that amount in 2019, and was projected to surpass that in his 2020 compensation, as well, Amazon says in its suit.
> The suit shows that the legislation “has done nothing to stop this abusive labor practice by the state’s most influential employers,” said angel investor Chris DeVore, managing partner of Founders’ Co-op and the former managing director of Techstars Seattle, who has been outspoken against non-compete clauses.
Amazon lobbied heavily for that carve-out specifically because it wants to hang non-competes over its employees’ heads.
(The law was passed in response to some fast food franchisees hanging non-competes on their hourly employees but, in its original form, would have barred almost all of them. Obviously Amazon could not stand for that so bought itself an exemption.)
Wow! So do high level employees have to sell shares to pay their mortgages and credit cards?
Everyone I know pins their lifestyle to base and saves near 100% of equity. Some don’t sell at all. I’m guessing that would change with a hard cap on base.
That’s a different kind of exposure, not just to long term performance, but day to day volatility, and specifically during open trading windows.
> So do high level employees have to sell shares to pay their mortgages and credit cards?
Employees at this level tend to have a pretty high level of financial management services to manage scenarios like this. I have two associates, not close enough to call them friends but close enough to have some insights, on the edges of this world. What they do:
- Other investments provide so-called passive income and that cash flow plus base salary is used for minimum expenses.
- Spending on larger-ticket items and services is budgeted out and is drawn from a variety of lines of credit secured against things like stock or the underlying holdings of those earlier investments.
- Most spending is planned in advance, either annually or quarterly, based on past income and future expected income. How much is added on the "future" side is financed by (often very inexpensive) leveraged debt and is calculated based on the risk tolerance of the individual.
Securing the debt with assets makes that debt screamingly inexpensive. Paying a handful of percent on debt that will only be borrowed for a few months at a time is, of course, seen as a reasonable cost to smooth out cash flow and leave the other money invested at a much higher return.
One other person I know who is not a higher-level employee but structures his spend very rigidly goes one step further and prepays all of his non-housing bills out of his annual bonus and one of the stock awards during the year. His annual salary and any other stock awards pay for housing, food, and savings.
> Paying a handful of percent on debt that will only be borrowed for a few months at a time is, of course, seen as a reasonable cost to smooth out cash flow and leave the other money invested at a much higher return.
It's not just that. They also get to avoid paying capital gains taxes on their shares. So they can borrow against those shares to buy income generating assets that more than cover the interest costs and they can do so while avoiding having to pay the taxes on those gains (especially important when those gains are still short term capital gains where they would be taxed as income).
> Employees at this level tend to have a pretty high level of financial management services to manage scenarios like this.
I think you're seriously overestimating how sophisticated the financial management is of your typical software engineer, who could very well be spending beyond the cap with none of those things you mentioned.
In my experience, most Amazon employees just put everything on a credit card, and then they sell stock to cover the credit card payments if their salary doesn't cut it.
That's pretty much the extent of their financial planning.
That's how a lot of the executives budget too though. You'd be surprised how unsophisticated even high level software engineering VPs are when it comes to finance. Their expertise is in software, not finance.
As a case in point, we had to spend a lot of time educating people at Netflix how stock compensation worked, including a lot of VPs. They just didn't care, it was of no interest to them.
Money goes into bank, money comes out. ETrade account has a big number, yay! That was about it.
Of course some of them were much better than that, but just because they are engineering executives doesn't make them good with money.
I have a lot of friends who do or have worked there, and we swap tax strategies. Much like me and my Netflix coworkers, they don't get a lot of help internally because most of their coworkers don't look into it.
I see from your profile that you work there. Curious if you agree with me or not.
I don't have enough data to say either way. My upbringing prevents me from talking about money on a personal level with friends or colleagues.
I assume my colleagues are capable of managing their finances wisely. I could be wrong.
In any event, I'm not sure a tax strategy discussion is enough to make an overarching conclusion from about someone's financial competency (or, for that matter, an entire group of people's). You can suck at tax optimization strategies without being a reckless overspender.
Tax strategy usually moves into general finance since they go hand in hand. :)
We discuss salaries and total compensation too, so we are better prepared for our own negotiations.
And also, spending on the credit card and then selling stock to pay it off isn’t necessarily reckless or overspending. Imagine if it were all cash. Would you say they’re overspending because they pay out half their paycheck each month saving the other half? Given that for many amazonians their stock is more than half their compensation, selling some stock isn’t really overspending.
Not necessarily, but at least for me, I've never needed to spend a dime of my stock to cover my living expenses (and them some). The salary cap is more than enough to live on for most people - and I count the Bay Area, too, where I live. I personally think that if you're already at the salary cap and are selling stock to cover basic living expenses, they are probably too high, and I suspected you thought the same.
I don't intend to sell my stock except to diversify my portfolio. I intend to live long beyond retirement, and I'll need it.
Let's run a quick budget for a family of two adults and two kids.
The median home in the US is 2,300 sq ft. To get that in the Bay Area in a good school district will run you about $2.3M. Assuming you put 20% down, you'll need to mortgage $1.84M. At today's rates, that's about $7,360/mo in mortgage, and about $2,100 in property tax.
So we're already at $113,520 a year just for housing.
You'll also need to pay taxes on your total comp, including the RSUs that you vest in, whether you sell them or not. Assuming you make $250K a year in total comp, and let's say you have a ton of deductions to get a crazy low tax rate, you'll still pay about 30% in taxes between Federal and State. So that's 75,000 a year.
So just in housing and income taxes, we've already spent more than the Bay Area salary cap (you've spent $188K).
And we haven't even talked about insurance, cars, food, or daycare.
I can easily see a middle class family spending more than the base salary.
If you're trying to live large--which, in the Bay Area, is trying to live like a middle-class American in the midwest--you're obviously going to spend a lot more. A single person without kids is going to obviously spend a lot less (you can get a decent 1BR in Oakland for < $3k/mo and pay no property tax). And a double-income earning family is the norm for married couples, so you might not have to dip into stock if you have enough cash income.
Obviously it depends on your circumstances. But I would not attempt to live like what you describe in the inner Bay Area. That sort of lavishness--which I know is not particularly lavish elsewhere by American standards--is reserved for the truly wealthy here, or someone who bought their home long ago (even 15 years would suffice; less if you bought in Oakland).
I would imagine you'd take out loans backed by those shares, if you're betting on the shares increasing in value, to get cash while not losing equity.
At the very least, some method exists to produce liquidity without actually losing equity, or the whole $1-salary but compensated purely by stock CEO model wouldn't make any sense (if they're just immediately selling what they get, then it might as well be a performance-based, or stock-based, bonus)
Holding on to equity grants after they vest is probably a bad idea. It's precisely equivalent to using a larger salary to buy stock in your company. Is that what you'd do if you got a raise?
You should evaluate what your ideal investment mix is (keeping in mind that you already have a lot of exposure to the company where you work and have unvested equity) and always rebalance towards that. The source of income is immaterial.
Thought experiment. If you got paid the same amount in cash that the company gives you in stock - would you use the equivalent amount of money to buy the company’s stock?
What's really amazing is that people that don't make $160K/yr aren't eating their own children to survive. I don't have kids so I have no choice but to use extreme willpower to exist on my barely 6 figure comp.
> Wow! So do high level employees have to sell shares to pay their mortgages and credit cards?
They give new employees a bonus in their first two years to make up the difference before they start vesting.
After that, yes, they need to sell stock if their expenses exceed the cap. Which is fine as long as Amazon stock keeps going up.
Another side effect of this is that if Amazon's revenue drops, they don't have to move to layoffs so quickly. Everyone's salary will naturally go down, since the shares they get each month are worth less, but it will feel better because "no layoffs and no pay cuts are necessary".
>Everyone's salary will naturally go down, since the shares they get each month are worth less, but it will feel better because "no layoffs and no pay cuts are necessary".
Leaving aside share buybacks, they're still paying the same salary and are still distributing shares from the same allocated pool.
On the other hand, if there is a big share price drop, a lot of your employees have suddenly taken a big compensation hit. (And they may have already paid taxes based on a higher share price at the time of vesting if they didn't immediately sell which is another argument not to hold onto a lot of RSU shares after vesting.)
AFAIK there's an exception for some geos like the Bay Area (and maybe NYC?) where salary can go as high as $180k (or maybe $185k.. I don't know the exact number). That might be why levels.fyi reports higher than $160k (or it could just be lies) but the general gist is correct. Amazon has a hard cap on their salaries. Any pay over ~$180k (or whatever the number is) is given out as either cash bonus or as stock.
Sure, no arguments here about the existence of a top end — that’s moving the goalposts though. There is not a hard cap at 160K.
As an aside, is this materially different than any other FAANG? All the offers I’ve seen when browsing tools like levels.fyi scale much faster in stock/bonus compensation than in salary.
In general yes. This cap goes up to the VP+ level at amazon. At G/FB you can get base salaries in excess of 300K at that level. At Netflix, salaries can break 500K since stock is handled differently.
And yes, there is a hard cap at 160K. The hard cap apparently changes based on geographic region, but that doesn't really matter for the people in Seattle (the majority of Amazon's employees) who are under a 160K salary cap.
Just as a point of comparison, an L4 at Google could have a 160K salary.
It isn't "moving the goalposts". GP was correct about there being a hard cap at 160k (including the geo we are discussing in this thread). You found an exception to that cap, likely due to it including geos other than the one being discussed here, and I explained to you why that might be.
The point of the entire thread is that "Glassdoor says this person makes 170k" is misleading because Amazon is unique with these salary caps. Even executives do not make higher than 160k (or 185k in SF) salary, so looking at that number on Glassdoor or levels.fyi doesn't tell you much. If you are trying to determine an Amazonian's compensation (as this thread was trying to do) you need to be aware that the salary number alone is not an indicator of total compensation.
It is materially different from other FAANGs, because AFAIK other FAANGs may give high proportions of their pay in stock, but they do not have a hard cap for salary. At Google, when promoted to VP level you may still get a 10% salary bump along with your 50% stock increase. But at Amazon, after you reach $160k you will never get a salary bump again. This leads to confusion for people that aren't familiar with the stock grants because if they are comparing Google vs Amazon pay, they may go to Glassdoor see that a Senior Developer at Google makes $300k salary while an Amazon Senior Dev makes $160k, and not understand why there is such disparity.
It was just an example, not referring to an actual position. There isn't even an actual title called "Senior Developer" at neither Google nor Amazon. If you want a real job title to go look at, look at the pay for an L7 SDE at both G and Amazon. At Google: $270k salary, at Amazon: $160k salary (according to levels.fyi)
I swear half the comments on this site are just nitpicking "nuh uh you are wrong about this tiny one word in your comment" while ignoring the actual point of the discussion.
There's Senior SWE title. I assumed that was what you meant. They comprise the bulk of Google's engineering, and their base is about $180K. Everything else depends on performance or lack thereof.
That's fair. I meant it more of an abstract "a developer who is in a more senior position at the company" rather than explicitly someone with the title "Senior [Developer/SWE]", but I can see why my comment was confusing.
So this is a thought that I see, and I feel like I have a different definition of "lobbying". The lobbying that I'm aware of is just paying people to go bother Senators. What am I missing that would make that illegal?
Exactly. This is how legislation is passed: you send people to talk to the lawmakers about your issue and convince them to do something about it. Like everything else in this world, having money to spend helps.
Of course, because we're talking about money and people and relationships, there's inherently some corruption that seeps through, but most of the laws (and lobbying) is pretty boring stuff. Without lobbying most lawmakers would have no clue about some issues. How could they?
Lawmakers could seek out experts to ask for advice, rather than the experts coming to them. They could read papers, or have their staff do so. They could send staff to talk to people about the issues they're facing.
>Lawmakers could seek out experts to ask for advice, rather than the experts coming to them
I guess they could spend all their time researching random problems, but lobbying helps vet important issues. They are representing a constituency, after all.
And, in reality, good politicians do do their own research, and many even write bills and promote policy that they genuinely believe in (even when it agrees with lobbyists).
The nuance is in where the ethical line gets crossed for "go bother senators". Having a meeting with a senator? Entirely reasonable. How much does it cost get that meeting though? Senators are very busy, y'know, so maybe they'll agree to meet after a donation to their campaign fund.
Senators are people though and they have to eat, so maybe having a lunch meeting with the senator would be okay? Paying for a reasonably priced lunch for the senator? Say $50? Each? How about a $300 lunch? At the country club? with a round of golf after? Dinner? After dinner entertainment? And what if that entertainment "happens" to be strippers and cocaine?
The senator needs to get re-elected though. So in addition to political donations to their campaign directly, donations could be made to "totally definitely not coordinated" SuperPACs supporting them.
That's before getting into the fact that lobbyists have no obligation to present a fair and balanced picture of the situation. It's easy to sell a narrative that doesn't reflect reality if there's no one to challenge you; you can just leave out any and all inconvenient facts. Additionally, huge corporations are able to threaten layoffs of the senator's constituents.
To be clear, some of this stuff is highly regulated. Eg we couldn't bring doughnuts to a morning meeting with NASA because they're government officials and that could amount to bribery. Lobbying just has a very complex set of laws to skirt - and if you're a professional lobbyist, figuring out how to skirt those laws in order to buy influence is literally your job.
It's also important to remember that most lobbying is not taking a Senator to lunch, it's emailing/calling their staffs with information about a particular piece of legislation. Staffs of these politicians deal much more with lobbyists day to day than their bosses.
Personally I think the more interesting question is "where on earth is such lobbyism legal".
Clearly in the US. I have the idea that in at least some European countries, it's less prevalent and definitely less public / blatant. Not entirely sure though, eg we Dutch like to think our country isn't very corrupt but somehow we just don't seem to notice when our ex ministers get cushy jobs at the bigcos they helped to deregulate.
I think the US is kind of unique in how obscenely public the corruption is. Elected judges who fund their campaings with money from companies they help win trials, super PACs, the list seems endless. No wonder y'all are libertarians.
I was definitely much more communist/socialist leaning when I was younger. The more I experienced how corrupt government systems can get, the more libertarian I became... been registered LP for a long while now.
I now believe that the best way to reduce government corruption is to reduce government. I also feel that government support for corporations should also be limited, and corporations should be carved out as a "non-living entity" class separate from personhood.
I'm more pragmatic that the more an-cap side of things, I feel that the government should at least orchestrate essential infrastructure, and that should include internet, telecom and roads/highways. Most of that PoV is rooted in domestic security.
I know you asked another user but figure I'd offer some input as someone who sees themselves as more libertarian in belief structure. I agree with you on healthcare needing to be essential infrastructure.
However, it's a bit of a sticky, dividing part for a lot of libertarians - especially the more dedicated believers. You get the ones that are just so driven to "gub'mint don't tread on me!", and you get the ones that understand that any mindset or belief is not bulletproof in theory and/or in practice and need to build safeguards in place.
In an ideal, perfect world to a lot of libertarians (again, this is subjective) - there wouldn't be a need for any government ran programs. That will never, EVER happen in my opinion. There will always still be people who just are not educated, intelligent, lucky, skillful, advantageous (whatever qualifier anyone picks to use) enough to succeed or to be able to have an acceptable standard of living independently. We need to have some sort of safety net in place. What that net is, I'm not educated enough to offer an opinion or thoughts on specifically.
Rest assured that there's a LOT of libertarians that understand that "shit happens" and there should be systems in place to handle these edge cases.
As another non-OP libertarian leaning commenter taking your off-topic bait, no, I don't think it's essential infrastructure. Healthcare didn't even exist 100 years ago beyond what you can find in any first-aid kit today, and we certainly aren't anywhere close to having a surplus of it available.
As I've commented before, people regularly oversimplify this problem as socialized vs private healthcare without considering why American healthcare is so broken. If you look carefully at the problems, you see that they won't go away if the government replaces private insurance and expands Medicare for everyone.
These problems include a tremendous shortage of doctors [0]. Even Canada and the UK have more doctors per capita, and they are known for extremely high wait times (the jokes of the socialized medicine countries, so to speak). There are a number of possible reasons for this, most notably the hassle of occupational licensing (12-14 years of expensive college + 'indentured servitude' residency in the US).
Nonetheless, American healthcare science is still ahead of the curve and subsidizes socialized countries -- ~60% of all new drugs between 2001-2010 were invented in the US, and foreign dignitaries of socialized medicine countries often still get important procedures done in the US [1]. It would be interesting to see how the R&D dynamic plays out if America loses its market incentive to innovate in the space, and no other developed countries have the financial incentive left.
Pragmatically speaking I have a few thoughts that would generally improve things without raising spending, and decreasing government red tape...
1. I would like to see the spending the government currently does regarding healthcare (govt employees, elected officials, medicare, medicaid, va, etc) rolled into a non-profit healthcare corporation. It's important to include the government officials and staffing here, as they get the same as everyone else to discourage tiered services.
2. From there, I would make it a requirement that Insurance Corporations act and negotiate as a fiduciary on behalf of their clients. One of the serious lapses in the Obamacare legislation that has let insurance companies largely not try to negotiate prices down in order to raise the oceans in terms of costs/profits.
3. I would seriously reform/eliminate extension patents. (competition)
4. I would make dual-sourcing a licensing requirement from the FDA. (security + competition)
5. I would make 50% US production for all medications a requirement for FDA approved use (security).
6. Any company can purchase coverage policies from the Non-profit insurance corp that covers govt employees and current welfare coverage programs.
7. Require no more than a 20% pricing variance between customers in a 15 month window for a given procedure by a medical provider. (no dual-books for insurance covered and private pay)
While there are other steps that can be done... part of it is to merge and adjust spending directly based on current spending, but having a non-profit corp that also covers govt employees is a baseline. By breaking it off, you can allow for a stronger level of competition of services.
Reducing patent protections, and making dual sourcing and partial domestic production requirements you again encourage competition. The requirement for dual-sourcing is partly security and partly to ensure competition.
Now, this is emphatically not a Libertarian ideal, and would not cover everyone, but what it would do is expand competition and reduce incentives for poor behavior. It should have the side effect of lowered costs over time. From there, individual states could create their own expansions or services beyond this, as could specific cities.
Over time, I'd prefer to see the FDA shrunk and sane guidelines in their place... Allowing for input based on relatively trusted testing to allow/disallow certain medications and reduce the incentives to produce less-good drugs only to expand patent exclusivity.
NOTE: I've posted this list multiple times and written all the congress-critters, but never really receive much if any response. They're specifically incentivized by one of the largest contributing blocks to political campaigns...
It would take a groundswell of support for such actions.
> we Dutch like to think our country isn't very corrupt but somehow we just don't seem to notice when our ex ministers get cushy jobs at the bigcos they helped to deregulate.
I don't think that's necessarily an indication of corruption. Being a minister (or other high-level official) gives you a lot of fairly unique experience and knowledge that could be quite valuable to a corporation.
Of course it absolutely can be corruption, I just don't think that ministers moving to industry can be taken as evidence on its own.
What's the fundamental difference between a lobbyist for a cause you like "save the whales" and a cause you don't like "make noncompetes enforceable"? There will always be those acting to corrupt and change the system -- the important part is to have a system that is designed to resist corruption (with things like fundamental rights like the Bill of Rights and courts to analyze and rule on the validity of laws) and attempting to elect politicians that don't introduce legislation that goes against those laws in the first place.
>What's the fundamental difference between a lobbyist for a cause you like "save the whales" and a cause you don't like "make noncompetes enforceable"?
The difference is money. Lobbying is effective for groups that have a lot to spend. So for almost any pro-business issue lobbying can have a strong effect. That might be ok, but there's no similarly effective mechanism to push issues that don't result in direct profits to the people that care about them.
There are countless issues that are very important and should be addressed, but that don't have any direct financial beneficiaries and so are often ignored in US politics.
The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution protects, among other things, the right to peaceably assemble, and the right to petition the Government for the redress of grievances. Being able to get together and ask for the Government to do something is core to the American identity; and it protects the rights of Black Lives Matter supporters as much as it protects the rights of a company to request laws be enacted or changed.
(Disclaimer: I work for AWS but my opinion is my own and does not necessarily reflect the views of my employer.)
That's not quite fair. Fast-food employees and highly paid professionals who work deeply in trade secrets have significant differences in their employment situation vis a vis non-compete agreements.
There are still non-disclosure agreements and trade secrets laws. Non-competes are not needed for that. Non-competes only exist to discourage employees from being able to leave a company.
Since pretty much everyone in this site (at least in the US) makes over $100k/year ... are you okay with not being able to work for a year and a half without pay?
edit:
Since you make over 100k, you're also considered a white-colar employee...
Your boss has decided the work-week is now 60-hours a week, and you don't get paid extra for it.
Oh, and if you don't perform, you're fired.
And if you try to work for a competitor, you will be sued and a protective injunction against you being able to work for the new job will be given.
And that's all a-ok by you, because you make what most would consider to be a wealthy lifestyle.
> They’re never nicer to you then when they’re trying to hire you. If they mock your concerns about the non-compete? RUN.
This is so true, I hope if you take anything out of this its that during the initial negotiating stages is really the only time you have any authority to negotiate. It is expensive for a company to adjust contracts to you however it's also expensive for you to defend yourself against them so don't be shy and when negotiating and everything has a value. So, for example, you could say the non-compete clause is inconvenient and restrictive as a result, you want an extra $20,000/ year (i.e if you get 3-4 years that is 60k) to cover potentially being unemployable for 18 months. Apply a monetary value to all of these irritating inconveniences. You only live once no point being enslaved by a contract.
Years ago I took a job that was headquartered outside of my state. Did a phone interview or two and then got a offer letter by email that I accepted. A couple of weeks later they flew me out to the HQ for my first day paperwork and to meet everyone. When I arrived they had a number of contracts that I had to sign as a condition of employment, I was in a position to agree with them but made a mental note that in future I should get a copy of any contracts that I am going to be required to sign on the first day before accepting a offer. It would be terrible to give notice at a job and then on the first day at the new role be given a contract that you have concerns about.
I ask "Before I accept a offer of employment, would it be possible to see any contracts, employee handbooks, etc I would have to sign on my first day?" and you would not believe the push back I get from that question. I often hear "We don't share our employee handbook" or things to that effect. I explain that it is impossible to evaluate a offer that has terms I can't see and often the interviewer shrugs their shoulders and tells me that's just how it is.
I guess it works to weed out the jobs with bad terms. However I have a hard time seeing how any of this is enforceable from a legal perspective.
This is an interesting dynamic that I only learned about when my current company expanded to the US.
Here in Germany you generally sign a contract. The contract for a full time job covers a lot of ground, I think mine is about 12 pages long. Some highlights of the top of my head:
- my title
- my salary
- my location of employment (can‘t change that without a new contract/my consent)
- IP assignment (I negotiated different terms)
- non-compete during employment (I don‘t have a post contractual non-compete but it would have to be covered here as well)
- vacation
- my willingness to travel
What‘s not covered:
- discretionary benefits
- anti-herassment policy
- the right to use my image (this is an optional thing I signed later)
First thing I did after I got the contract was the call up a lawyer focused on employment law and have him review it for me so I know what footguns to press back on. Fairly easy and no bad surprises.
Yes, in the UK we have a similar "baseline" contract and there is such a thing as an unenforceable contract due to stricter labour laws and the potential for a contract to be unenforceable due to this.
NCs are hard, and to Corey's point it's not like an employee can leave and go to any industry while fully utilizing their skillset. I'm sure Brian could go into something completely not related and do well, but would still not do as well as he could if he had stayed in the same field. Agree mostly with Corey on this one (trust me, agreements are rare), but as always he ends the post with
> If you think I’ve gotten it wrong, okay: make your case on Twitter!
Absolutely NOT. Twitter is a cesspool where the Twitter mob will attack any well-meaning and well-intentioned argument and is the last place anyone should use for any meaningful discourse of any kind. Twitter has been around for how many years? What problems has it really solved other than giving morons a platform to announce their superiority.
Author here. I agree; the trouble is "sound off on a random HackerNews thread that may or may not even be created in the first place" is a bit more hit-or-miss.
I have seen blogs where the author will submit their own post to HN, and then put a link to that at the bottom of the post, thereby using HN as a comment section.
> I'm sure Brian could go into something completely not related and do well, but would still not do as well as he could if he had stayed in the same field.
Amazon is also involved in quite a few industries now via both AWS and their storefront, that I imagine the company wide NC would have _quite_ a bit of coverage.
I think saying that marketing isn't AWS's strength misses the point. As the VP of product marketing he most likely had access to revenue by porduct line. As a result he would know which segments of the product suite are growing quickly, showing promise, and which others have missed the mark.
That information is extremely valuable to a competitor that is trying to catch up to AWS'. This information can also be passed along verbally and be 99% as a effective as having an up to date detailed revenue breakout spreadsheet.
So in this case he is taking some "secret sauce", which can be disclosed without ever being able to prove that it was.
Imposing an 18 month window where that person can't work at a direct competitor is sufficient enough to make that information somewhat stale and no longer as effective.
I'm personally against non-competes, but I did want to point out that there is cause for concern here. Also, as the VP of product marketing, he could have gone on to any job he wanted in any other cloud provider that wasn't a direct competitor, such as say Slack, Twilio, Box, Dropbox, I mean the list is pretty long. So it's not like his hands were tied in the job market. And certainly he signed the agreement originally, and should have modified it before hand if he was concerned. So it is possible that his boss at AWS is a bit irritated that he did not live up to the agreement that was signed. And as a VP you can't really claim that you "didn't know" about the non-compete since you will be doing a lot of hiring and imposing that very same clause on all of your hires.
That line of argument is mostly a joke based on Corey's history of griping about AWS's terrible marketing.
The key argument to that point is made later in the piece. The boss of the person who's now being sued also left Amazon for Google recently, also for a similar position. He also had all of that same knowledge. But he was based in California, so Amazon couldn't sue him. But if this is really such a critical factor worth suing over, why would Amazon allow someone in that position to be based in California at all?
Also, to say that Slack, Twilio, and Dropbox aren't direct competitors is absolutely wrong. The way the non-compete is written, Amazon could sue over him going to almost any other company, because Amazon competes with literally everyone these days.
In any case, given that his hiring boss told him it was not a big deal, and given that HR knew where he was going and didn't warn him off, your suggestions that he "should have known" ring hollow.
Yes, the key point is AWS actually tries to enforce these non-competes. If you are past a beginning engineer you'll be in terror of amazon suing you if you leave. All my friends (who are experienced) have lived in worry after they left. Noncompetes are a terrible, horrible idea.
The Washington state legislature considered legislation blocking them. They got noncompetes removed for sandwich makers (companies literally made people making minimum wage sign non-competes!), I think the threshold was 100k or something. But amazon pushed very hard. Tell your wa state leg rep that you want to end noncompetes.
Does the NC span the gap between AWS and Amazon? It should be pointed out that AWS is a different company than Amazon, with a different CEO, corporate structure, etc. They roll up to Amazon but I'm not sure if the NC will span that gap. So maybe really identifying the bounds of where the NC can apply would be helpful.
But to your point if it does that's just down right dangerous. Amazon competes with just about everyone either directly or indirectly.
Verbal agreements carry legal weight. He should definitely put the hiring manager on the stand. Then the hiring manager needs to choose between perjury and admitting he said the non-compete will not be enforced.
Same way every other company does. They just need to provide enough evidence to justify discovery, at which point they get access to internal emails and other normally confidential information if they can demonstrate they may contain relevant evidence.
They'd need evidence that a breach occurred. Right now they can instead imply that a breach might occur, without producing any solid or even circumstantial evidence.
Put otherwise: they are using the non-compete to try and achieve the ends of an NDA, without the hassle of proof.
If a company bars you from working for a competitor, it should be forced to continue to pay your salary during the blockade.
That way, the non-compete actually costs the company something, so they don't just apply them as a blanket, and the employee doesn't have the risk of not finding a job due to the non-compete.
Don't work at amazon, because of non-competes. These almost always getting dismissed - they are only to intimidate employees from leaving. There are other reasons to work or not-work at a company, but this one is pretty clear, amazon uses them for intimidation. In Wa state, google, microsoft, facebook etc hasn't enforced them in my experience at all like amazon.
A VP at Amazon is likely making seven figures, has a hand in directing decisions about high-level strategy, and has access to highly sensitive revenue data. If all of that is the case here, then I actually think a non-compete is reasonable.
That said, non-competes without 100% garden pay during the term should be unenforceable. Also, trying to enforce a blatantly unenforcable non-competes should have criminal penalties.
No, I'm actually okay with non-competes. But they should be illegal if they don't come with >100% total comp garden pay for the term of the non-compete.
Also, attempting to enforce a blatantly unenforcable non-compete should result in criminal charges for whoever made the decision to push enforcement, disbarment for their legal team, and substantial civil liability. The bar for that should be very high, but the choice to enforce a non-compete should be one that's only made when the legal team is damn sure there's a compelling argument that the non-compete is legally enforceable. Too many people are handcuffed by definitely-garbage non-competes because they can't afford the legal fight.
With >100% garden pay terms, I would personally prefer limited/short term non-competes over infinite/long term NDAs, for example. I've explicitly made that choice in the past.
Oh well - the damage is already done. To AWS. Not because Corey may know some stuff, but because any new recruit will scrutinize their employment offers from AWS for the non-compete clause and - given this precedent - deny it. It will certainly become more difficult for AWS / Amazon to hire true talent, especially from competitors. And I would be surprised if any industry insider would not have a clear perspective on what is going on at his competitors. Job postings, talks with salespeople from suppliers, local newspapers, discussions with industry analysts — the whole stuff a proper marketeer will do to be good at his role. And: Google will (as AWS) have a development roadmap that is probably well planned for the next 12-18 months. IMHO Corey would not be able to change the course of GCP and their marketing is certainly better than AWS. And don‘t even get me started on the different target audiences of both platforms... So in short: AWS made a big mistake but Corey will have to pay the lawyers.
To be clear, I'm Corey. They're not suing me (though I haven't checked the mail yet today, so that may be premature); I'm just writing the post and calling them out.
I don't think Amazon cares about getting "true talent." They seem to want to hire cogs in a great code making machine. The new graduates that grease the gears certainly aren't savvy enough to know why a non-compete is bad.
Yeah, but at some point, upper-level talent and management are important in an increasingly competitive market, particularly if they keep leaving to your direct competition.
Particularly in areas in which AWS is already weak -- like, as mentioned in the article, marketing.
This article just seems to be a guys making snide comments about AWS, a company he already decided to hate. I'm not defending NCs. I just find it really off putting the author needs to make believe there is a plot here and amazon can't even plot right. Sounds to me like he didn't do his homework and produce the article he promised and instead pooped out this filler crap...
The article gives the impression he hates the place. Again, maybe that’s justified. I’m happy to admit he’d know them better than me. But why write an article about how much you hate AWS and pretend it’s “breaking news”?
I do like AWS--a lot. I snark, but that's my personality. If I genuinely hated them, this level of focus on their business would be something pathological.
AWS hires amazing people, and build incredible things. I'm a customer, and a happy one. Actions like this demonstrate a base level of being unworthy of those amazing people that they've hired, and get my hackles up something fierce. It's one of the few ways in which AWS unequivocally Is Wrong, A Lot.
Thanks for replying here and sorry for being rude above.
I guess I missed the subtlety in the article :)
Mind is I ask: are all large corps in this space the same or are Amazon particularly bad? It seems to me that get a bad wrap in retail more because they have no PR than because they do things more harshly than other retailers...
I see he responded above, but as someone who follows along on Twitter: he doesn't hate AWS, actually he gets the word out about a fair number of AWS services. I spend more on AWS than anything else for my company, so I think I know a thing or two about them.
If I want the official AWS view on things I can consult their blog page, follow their guys on Twitter (which I do), and read their press releases.
I don't really want that, though, and neither do most people, because I want to know when I'm being led astray, when AWS is pushing my trust a little too far. If some service looks cheap or easy to implement but has a lot of gotchas, I want to know that. I want a friendly-but-independent perspective, and that's what he offers.
Serious question: why does anyone work for Amazon?
Everything I've heard is that it's a toxic work environment, with below-average pay and draconian employee agreements. And that's not even getting into the ethical issues. What in the world makes someone take a job there instead of pretty much any other tech company?
Every tech job pays well compared to most of the economy. But the OP described Amazon's salaries as "frugal", in that context. My point is just that I don't see any shining positive that makes all the downsides worth it.
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.
When I started working, Amazon stock was at ~$750 a share. When I started working, Google stock was at about the same. Google would have granted 100-120K in stock, Amazon closer to 50K. Google gives annual refreshes of ~50K, while Amazon would not until the initial grant is mostly vested. So at the end of this year, when both vests would be coming to a close, a Googler who kept all their stock would have 160 shares from their initial grant, as well as 25-40 additional shares from their refresh grants.
So that's ~180K in AMZN at today's prices vs. 230K in GOOG, plus another 40-60K in refresh grants. And the Google employee has a better salary and bonus structure. Facebook is equivalent or superior to Google in pretty much every aspect of this comparison (base pay, bonus, equity grant, equity growth, equity refresh).
Poor pay? Amazon has created tons and tons of millionaires. If you work 15 years at your local retail job - you are lucky to own a house. If you worked 15 years at amazon as an engineer - you can retire in a very nice house. The stock performance has been very good over 15 years.
"At Amazon, a Seattle operations engineer on an $840k salary had his/her renewal application denied in February."
"a level III program manager in Seattle earning a salary of $1.3m"
The article was mixing up compensation elements, but people are paid well above US average wage at Amazon.
Amazon pays more than everyone except the largest tech companies and some unicorn startups. You have a very distorted view of what the tech industry actually pays.
Seriously, there are help desk techs and IT techs in ohio and idaho who would think $1.2 million per year was fine money. These are NOT poorly compensated folks. They may be badly treated though - I could believe that.
I worked for Amazon because they recruited from my University and it was my first after graduation job. I'd had some internships, but I didn't have a large network or a lot of options.
I've heard people on the more MBA side of tech refer to Amazon as an "executive factory."
Dev managers at Amazon leave to be CTOs at startups. Senior engineers leave to be architects. It's one of the best possible resume items you could get, particularly if you're moving to another cloud company -- although, obviously, that in particular seems to be a bit of a dangerous move if you don't wanna get sued.
Amazon can't be that toxic. The innovation in areas like data services (S3, Dyanamo, RDS, Redshift, Aurora, etc.) has been astounding. It's clearly a productive environment for getting big ideas done.
> I’d be in favor of a model wherein if AWS chose to enforce the non-compete, they’d be required to pay the former employee their full compensation for the duration of the restriction. That’s how it works in Europe, for instance.
And at the new company's salary too. If a company truly believes they need to stop someone from working, then they should be willing to pay dearly for it.
Fun fact: Non-competes in Germany are legal only for up to two years and only if the previous company pays at least 50% of the previous salary for the duration of the non-compete.
What happens in cases like AWS where the Base salary is 170k and Bonus is in Millions of dollars - will the previous company only pay 85k and get away with it ?
>Brian is taking the exact same job at Google! This is what non-competes are for!
No, that was never the initial intention of non-competes. There is only one situation where non-competes make any amount of sense at all. No one should ever sign a non-compete except for the following situation, you are selling a BUSINESS to someone else. That's it. There is no good reason outside of that to ever sign a non-compete. It is reasonable when buying a business to want some insurance that the seller won't turn around and open a competing business across town and steal all their old customers. It is NOT reasonable to say, "Hey, we want you to work for us. But if things turn south you aren't allowed to work anywhere else in your field."
The California non-compete law has a carve-out for exactly this case. I signed one of these after selling a company in California in 2014. It was pretty reasonable--restriction from doing something substantially similar to the business for 3 years or for one year after leaving employment at the buyer.
The reason is to get a job at Amazon where you will earn $. It is part of their offer and lots of employees take it because the salary is worth the risk of impact down the road.
>>As mentioned previously, I’d be in favor of a model wherein if AWS chose to enforce the non-compete, they’d be required to pay the former employee their full compensation for the duration of the restriction. That’s how it works in Europe, for instance.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 194 ms ] threadI would poach someone from say Apple than AWS for marketing purposes.
I've been at a company with bad marketing. Even though we were a unicorn with 10s of millions in revenue including almost of financial services, insurance, and publishing companies as clients, basically no one knew who we were or what we did. Our sales people would have to invest months and months of effort to sell. We struggled to gain any developer community support at all.
On the other hand I've had AWS consultants tell me that they walk into meetings without having to sell at all. Their clients are already eager to leverage AWS in any way they can. Nor do they have the slightest fear of putting mission critical and sensitive data in the cloud.
If that isn't marketing I have no idea what is.
To be fair, it makes more sense for many companies to leverage AWS and other cloud providers, other than trying to do a job they do not understand and may not understand enough even to hire for it.
Presumably, in the same vein that salespeople bring a “Rolodex” (i.e. a set of established personal relationships with clients) with them when they switch companies, wouldn’t a marketer bring along with them a Rolodex of channel partners, advertising-agency higher-ups, etc.?
"It’s only for 18 months! That’s a long time in cloud. GCP may well be deprecated before then!"
This was way more interesting & entertaining that I thought it would be!
I don't know Corey Quinn personally, but if you peruse the rest of the blog entries you'll see that all of his posts are entertaining. He has a flair for this particular style.
It focuses more on how a product is packaged, priced, how is it positioned to a customer, who is the customer even - this is actually quite hard, for a cloud product like AWS it could be CEO/CIO/ VPoE,VP-Ops, Head-R&D, Engg lead, DevOps/SREs, PMs, architects etc, depending on who all you target the material you need to generate is very different.
Targeting VP/CXO's could mean gartner type material, targeting actual developers could mean just accessible documentation, examples and easy to use self-service portal, for somewhere in-between perhaps make influencers like Corey from lastweekinaws who wrote this article to promote your product.
Product marketing is perhaps closer to product management than what traditionally what we think of marketing .
None of this excuses this practice.
My standard response to this is "great, then you won't mind if I strike it from the contract".
EDIT: Reading on, I agree with the article: This "oh don't worry" is standard to get you to sign, so act like they will definitely enforce this in your case and plan accordingly.
This was shocking to me - I'd expect a VP to be making much more, but if they were, then you'd expect it to be included in the complaint. Is Amazon's comp really this low? Or is "VP of Product Marketing" similar to "VP" at an investment bank (lower rung of middle management, rather than an exec title)? Something else?
> A new law passed by Washington state last year put restrictions on non-compete agreements, with a series of exceptions, including a provision that allows such agreements to be enforced in cases when an employee earns more than $100,000 a year. Hall earned “well in excess” of that amount in 2019, and was projected to surpass that in his 2020 compensation, as well, Amazon says in its suit.
> The suit shows that the legislation “has done nothing to stop this abusive labor practice by the state’s most influential employers,” said angel investor Chris DeVore, managing partner of Founders’ Co-op and the former managing director of Techstars Seattle, who has been outspoken against non-compete clauses.
Amazon lobbied heavily for that carve-out specifically because it wants to hang non-competes over its employees’ heads.
(The law was passed in response to some fast food franchisees hanging non-competes on their hourly employees but, in its original form, would have barred almost all of them. Obviously Amazon could not stand for that so bought itself an exemption.)
Everyone I know pins their lifestyle to base and saves near 100% of equity. Some don’t sell at all. I’m guessing that would change with a hard cap on base.
That’s a different kind of exposure, not just to long term performance, but day to day volatility, and specifically during open trading windows.
Employees at this level tend to have a pretty high level of financial management services to manage scenarios like this. I have two associates, not close enough to call them friends but close enough to have some insights, on the edges of this world. What they do:
- Other investments provide so-called passive income and that cash flow plus base salary is used for minimum expenses.
- Spending on larger-ticket items and services is budgeted out and is drawn from a variety of lines of credit secured against things like stock or the underlying holdings of those earlier investments.
- Most spending is planned in advance, either annually or quarterly, based on past income and future expected income. How much is added on the "future" side is financed by (often very inexpensive) leveraged debt and is calculated based on the risk tolerance of the individual.
Securing the debt with assets makes that debt screamingly inexpensive. Paying a handful of percent on debt that will only be borrowed for a few months at a time is, of course, seen as a reasonable cost to smooth out cash flow and leave the other money invested at a much higher return.
One other person I know who is not a higher-level employee but structures his spend very rigidly goes one step further and prepays all of his non-housing bills out of his annual bonus and one of the stock awards during the year. His annual salary and any other stock awards pay for housing, food, and savings.
It's not just that. They also get to avoid paying capital gains taxes on their shares. So they can borrow against those shares to buy income generating assets that more than cover the interest costs and they can do so while avoiding having to pay the taxes on those gains (especially important when those gains are still short term capital gains where they would be taxed as income).
I think you're seriously overestimating how sophisticated the financial management is of your typical software engineer, who could very well be spending beyond the cap with none of those things you mentioned.
In my experience, most Amazon employees just put everything on a credit card, and then they sell stock to cover the credit card payments if their salary doesn't cut it.
That's pretty much the extent of their financial planning.
As a case in point, we had to spend a lot of time educating people at Netflix how stock compensation worked, including a lot of VPs. They just didn't care, it was of no interest to them.
Money goes into bank, money comes out. ETrade account has a big number, yay! That was about it.
Of course some of them were much better than that, but just because they are engineering executives doesn't make them good with money.
I see from your profile that you work there. Curious if you agree with me or not.
I assume my colleagues are capable of managing their finances wisely. I could be wrong.
In any event, I'm not sure a tax strategy discussion is enough to make an overarching conclusion from about someone's financial competency (or, for that matter, an entire group of people's). You can suck at tax optimization strategies without being a reckless overspender.
We discuss salaries and total compensation too, so we are better prepared for our own negotiations.
And also, spending on the credit card and then selling stock to pay it off isn’t necessarily reckless or overspending. Imagine if it were all cash. Would you say they’re overspending because they pay out half their paycheck each month saving the other half? Given that for many amazonians their stock is more than half their compensation, selling some stock isn’t really overspending.
I don't intend to sell my stock except to diversify my portfolio. I intend to live long beyond retirement, and I'll need it.
The median home in the US is 2,300 sq ft. To get that in the Bay Area in a good school district will run you about $2.3M. Assuming you put 20% down, you'll need to mortgage $1.84M. At today's rates, that's about $7,360/mo in mortgage, and about $2,100 in property tax.
So we're already at $113,520 a year just for housing.
You'll also need to pay taxes on your total comp, including the RSUs that you vest in, whether you sell them or not. Assuming you make $250K a year in total comp, and let's say you have a ton of deductions to get a crazy low tax rate, you'll still pay about 30% in taxes between Federal and State. So that's 75,000 a year.
So just in housing and income taxes, we've already spent more than the Bay Area salary cap (you've spent $188K).
And we haven't even talked about insurance, cars, food, or daycare.
I can easily see a middle class family spending more than the base salary.
Obviously it depends on your circumstances. But I would not attempt to live like what you describe in the inner Bay Area. That sort of lavishness--which I know is not particularly lavish elsewhere by American standards--is reserved for the truly wealthy here, or someone who bought their home long ago (even 15 years would suffice; less if you bought in Oakland).
At the very least, some method exists to produce liquidity without actually losing equity, or the whole $1-salary but compensated purely by stock CEO model wouldn't make any sense (if they're just immediately selling what they get, then it might as well be a performance-based, or stock-based, bonus)
You should evaluate what your ideal investment mix is (keeping in mind that you already have a lot of exposure to the company where you work and have unvested equity) and always rebalance towards that. The source of income is immaterial.
Thought experiment. If you got paid the same amount in cash that the company gives you in stock - would you use the equivalent amount of money to buy the company’s stock?
Yes, we can tell sarcasm without listening to verbal inflection.
They give new employees a bonus in their first two years to make up the difference before they start vesting.
After that, yes, they need to sell stock if their expenses exceed the cap. Which is fine as long as Amazon stock keeps going up.
Another side effect of this is that if Amazon's revenue drops, they don't have to move to layoffs so quickly. Everyone's salary will naturally go down, since the shares they get each month are worth less, but it will feel better because "no layoffs and no pay cuts are necessary".
Leaving aside share buybacks, they're still paying the same salary and are still distributing shares from the same allocated pool.
On the other hand, if there is a big share price drop, a lot of your employees have suddenly taken a big compensation hit. (And they may have already paid taxes based on a higher share price at the time of vesting if they didn't immediately sell which is another argument not to hold onto a lot of RSU shares after vesting.)
As an aside, is this materially different than any other FAANG? All the offers I’ve seen when browsing tools like levels.fyi scale much faster in stock/bonus compensation than in salary.
And yes, there is a hard cap at 160K. The hard cap apparently changes based on geographic region, but that doesn't really matter for the people in Seattle (the majority of Amazon's employees) who are under a 160K salary cap.
Just as a point of comparison, an L4 at Google could have a 160K salary.
The point of the entire thread is that "Glassdoor says this person makes 170k" is misleading because Amazon is unique with these salary caps. Even executives do not make higher than 160k (or 185k in SF) salary, so looking at that number on Glassdoor or levels.fyi doesn't tell you much. If you are trying to determine an Amazonian's compensation (as this thread was trying to do) you need to be aware that the salary number alone is not an indicator of total compensation.
It is materially different from other FAANGs, because AFAIK other FAANGs may give high proportions of their pay in stock, but they do not have a hard cap for salary. At Google, when promoted to VP level you may still get a 10% salary bump along with your 50% stock increase. But at Amazon, after you reach $160k you will never get a salary bump again. This leads to confusion for people that aren't familiar with the stock grants because if they are comparing Google vs Amazon pay, they may go to Glassdoor see that a Senior Developer at Google makes $300k salary while an Amazon Senior Dev makes $160k, and not understand why there is such disparity.
I swear half the comments on this site are just nitpicking "nuh uh you are wrong about this tiny one word in your comment" while ignoring the actual point of the discussion.
Of course, because we're talking about money and people and relationships, there's inherently some corruption that seeps through, but most of the laws (and lobbying) is pretty boring stuff. Without lobbying most lawmakers would have no clue about some issues. How could they?
I guess they could spend all their time researching random problems, but lobbying helps vet important issues. They are representing a constituency, after all.
And, in reality, good politicians do do their own research, and many even write bills and promote policy that they genuinely believe in (even when it agrees with lobbyists).
Senators are people though and they have to eat, so maybe having a lunch meeting with the senator would be okay? Paying for a reasonably priced lunch for the senator? Say $50? Each? How about a $300 lunch? At the country club? with a round of golf after? Dinner? After dinner entertainment? And what if that entertainment "happens" to be strippers and cocaine?
The senator needs to get re-elected though. So in addition to political donations to their campaign directly, donations could be made to "totally definitely not coordinated" SuperPACs supporting them.
That's before getting into the fact that lobbyists have no obligation to present a fair and balanced picture of the situation. It's easy to sell a narrative that doesn't reflect reality if there's no one to challenge you; you can just leave out any and all inconvenient facts. Additionally, huge corporations are able to threaten layoffs of the senator's constituents.
To be clear, some of this stuff is highly regulated. Eg we couldn't bring doughnuts to a morning meeting with NASA because they're government officials and that could amount to bribery. Lobbying just has a very complex set of laws to skirt - and if you're a professional lobbyist, figuring out how to skirt those laws in order to buy influence is literally your job.
Were you a government employee? If so were you in a different agency? Can NASA employees bring doughnuts for other NASA employees?
Clearly in the US. I have the idea that in at least some European countries, it's less prevalent and definitely less public / blatant. Not entirely sure though, eg we Dutch like to think our country isn't very corrupt but somehow we just don't seem to notice when our ex ministers get cushy jobs at the bigcos they helped to deregulate.
I think the US is kind of unique in how obscenely public the corruption is. Elected judges who fund their campaings with money from companies they help win trials, super PACs, the list seems endless. No wonder y'all are libertarians.
I now believe that the best way to reduce government corruption is to reduce government. I also feel that government support for corporations should also be limited, and corporations should be carved out as a "non-living entity" class separate from personhood.
I'm more pragmatic that the more an-cap side of things, I feel that the government should at least orchestrate essential infrastructure, and that should include internet, telecom and roads/highways. Most of that PoV is rooted in domestic security.
However, it's a bit of a sticky, dividing part for a lot of libertarians - especially the more dedicated believers. You get the ones that are just so driven to "gub'mint don't tread on me!", and you get the ones that understand that any mindset or belief is not bulletproof in theory and/or in practice and need to build safeguards in place.
In an ideal, perfect world to a lot of libertarians (again, this is subjective) - there wouldn't be a need for any government ran programs. That will never, EVER happen in my opinion. There will always still be people who just are not educated, intelligent, lucky, skillful, advantageous (whatever qualifier anyone picks to use) enough to succeed or to be able to have an acceptable standard of living independently. We need to have some sort of safety net in place. What that net is, I'm not educated enough to offer an opinion or thoughts on specifically.
Rest assured that there's a LOT of libertarians that understand that "shit happens" and there should be systems in place to handle these edge cases.
As I've commented before, people regularly oversimplify this problem as socialized vs private healthcare without considering why American healthcare is so broken. If you look carefully at the problems, you see that they won't go away if the government replaces private insurance and expands Medicare for everyone. These problems include a tremendous shortage of doctors [0]. Even Canada and the UK have more doctors per capita, and they are known for extremely high wait times (the jokes of the socialized medicine countries, so to speak). There are a number of possible reasons for this, most notably the hassle of occupational licensing (12-14 years of expensive college + 'indentured servitude' residency in the US).
Nonetheless, American healthcare science is still ahead of the curve and subsidizes socialized countries -- ~60% of all new drugs between 2001-2010 were invented in the US, and foreign dignitaries of socialized medicine countries often still get important procedures done in the US [1]. It would be interesting to see how the R&D dynamic plays out if America loses its market incentive to innovate in the space, and no other developed countries have the financial incentive left.
[0] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SH.MED.PHYS.ZS?end=2018....
[1] https://xconomy.com/seattle/2014/09/02/which-countries-excel....
1. I would like to see the spending the government currently does regarding healthcare (govt employees, elected officials, medicare, medicaid, va, etc) rolled into a non-profit healthcare corporation. It's important to include the government officials and staffing here, as they get the same as everyone else to discourage tiered services.
2. From there, I would make it a requirement that Insurance Corporations act and negotiate as a fiduciary on behalf of their clients. One of the serious lapses in the Obamacare legislation that has let insurance companies largely not try to negotiate prices down in order to raise the oceans in terms of costs/profits.
3. I would seriously reform/eliminate extension patents. (competition)
4. I would make dual-sourcing a licensing requirement from the FDA. (security + competition)
5. I would make 50% US production for all medications a requirement for FDA approved use (security).
6. Any company can purchase coverage policies from the Non-profit insurance corp that covers govt employees and current welfare coverage programs.
7. Require no more than a 20% pricing variance between customers in a 15 month window for a given procedure by a medical provider. (no dual-books for insurance covered and private pay)
While there are other steps that can be done... part of it is to merge and adjust spending directly based on current spending, but having a non-profit corp that also covers govt employees is a baseline. By breaking it off, you can allow for a stronger level of competition of services.
Reducing patent protections, and making dual sourcing and partial domestic production requirements you again encourage competition. The requirement for dual-sourcing is partly security and partly to ensure competition.
Now, this is emphatically not a Libertarian ideal, and would not cover everyone, but what it would do is expand competition and reduce incentives for poor behavior. It should have the side effect of lowered costs over time. From there, individual states could create their own expansions or services beyond this, as could specific cities.
Over time, I'd prefer to see the FDA shrunk and sane guidelines in their place... Allowing for input based on relatively trusted testing to allow/disallow certain medications and reduce the incentives to produce less-good drugs only to expand patent exclusivity.
It would take a groundswell of support for such actions.
I don't think that's necessarily an indication of corruption. Being a minister (or other high-level official) gives you a lot of fairly unique experience and knowledge that could be quite valuable to a corporation.
Of course it absolutely can be corruption, I just don't think that ministers moving to industry can be taken as evidence on its own.
The difference is money. Lobbying is effective for groups that have a lot to spend. So for almost any pro-business issue lobbying can have a strong effect. That might be ok, but there's no similarly effective mechanism to push issues that don't result in direct profits to the people that care about them.
There are countless issues that are very important and should be addressed, but that don't have any direct financial beneficiaries and so are often ignored in US politics.
(Disclaimer: I work for AWS but my opinion is my own and does not necessarily reflect the views of my employer.)
edit:
Since you make over 100k, you're also considered a white-colar employee...
Your boss has decided the work-week is now 60-hours a week, and you don't get paid extra for it.
Oh, and if you don't perform, you're fired.
And if you try to work for a competitor, you will be sued and a protective injunction against you being able to work for the new job will be given.
And that's all a-ok by you, because you make what most would consider to be a wealthy lifestyle.
This is so true, I hope if you take anything out of this its that during the initial negotiating stages is really the only time you have any authority to negotiate. It is expensive for a company to adjust contracts to you however it's also expensive for you to defend yourself against them so don't be shy and when negotiating and everything has a value. So, for example, you could say the non-compete clause is inconvenient and restrictive as a result, you want an extra $20,000/ year (i.e if you get 3-4 years that is 60k) to cover potentially being unemployable for 18 months. Apply a monetary value to all of these irritating inconveniences. You only live once no point being enslaved by a contract.
I ask "Before I accept a offer of employment, would it be possible to see any contracts, employee handbooks, etc I would have to sign on my first day?" and you would not believe the push back I get from that question. I often hear "We don't share our employee handbook" or things to that effect. I explain that it is impossible to evaluate a offer that has terms I can't see and often the interviewer shrugs their shoulders and tells me that's just how it is.
I guess it works to weed out the jobs with bad terms. However I have a hard time seeing how any of this is enforceable from a legal perspective.
Here in Germany you generally sign a contract. The contract for a full time job covers a lot of ground, I think mine is about 12 pages long. Some highlights of the top of my head: - my title - my salary - my location of employment (can‘t change that without a new contract/my consent) - IP assignment (I negotiated different terms) - non-compete during employment (I don‘t have a post contractual non-compete but it would have to be covered here as well) - vacation - my willingness to travel
What‘s not covered: - discretionary benefits - anti-herassment policy - the right to use my image (this is an optional thing I signed later)
First thing I did after I got the contract was the call up a lawyer focused on employment law and have him review it for me so I know what footguns to press back on. Fairly easy and no bad surprises.
> If you think I’ve gotten it wrong, okay: make your case on Twitter!
Absolutely NOT. Twitter is a cesspool where the Twitter mob will attack any well-meaning and well-intentioned argument and is the last place anyone should use for any meaningful discourse of any kind. Twitter has been around for how many years? What problems has it really solved other than giving morons a platform to announce their superiority.
Amazon is also involved in quite a few industries now via both AWS and their storefront, that I imagine the company wide NC would have _quite_ a bit of coverage.
That information is extremely valuable to a competitor that is trying to catch up to AWS'. This information can also be passed along verbally and be 99% as a effective as having an up to date detailed revenue breakout spreadsheet.
So in this case he is taking some "secret sauce", which can be disclosed without ever being able to prove that it was.
Imposing an 18 month window where that person can't work at a direct competitor is sufficient enough to make that information somewhat stale and no longer as effective.
I'm personally against non-competes, but I did want to point out that there is cause for concern here. Also, as the VP of product marketing, he could have gone on to any job he wanted in any other cloud provider that wasn't a direct competitor, such as say Slack, Twilio, Box, Dropbox, I mean the list is pretty long. So it's not like his hands were tied in the job market. And certainly he signed the agreement originally, and should have modified it before hand if he was concerned. So it is possible that his boss at AWS is a bit irritated that he did not live up to the agreement that was signed. And as a VP you can't really claim that you "didn't know" about the non-compete since you will be doing a lot of hiring and imposing that very same clause on all of your hires.
The key argument to that point is made later in the piece. The boss of the person who's now being sued also left Amazon for Google recently, also for a similar position. He also had all of that same knowledge. But he was based in California, so Amazon couldn't sue him. But if this is really such a critical factor worth suing over, why would Amazon allow someone in that position to be based in California at all?
Also, to say that Slack, Twilio, and Dropbox aren't direct competitors is absolutely wrong. The way the non-compete is written, Amazon could sue over him going to almost any other company, because Amazon competes with literally everyone these days.
In any case, given that his hiring boss told him it was not a big deal, and given that HR knew where he was going and didn't warn him off, your suggestions that he "should have known" ring hollow.
The Washington state legislature considered legislation blocking them. They got noncompetes removed for sandwich makers (companies literally made people making minimum wage sign non-competes!), I think the threshold was 100k or something. But amazon pushed very hard. Tell your wa state leg rep that you want to end noncompetes.
But to your point if it does that's just down right dangerous. Amazon competes with just about everyone either directly or indirectly.
Then Amazon should be suing for breach of NDA. In the article Corey points out that these are enforceable in all US states.
(I believe that NCs are net negative, but I'd imagine that it's hard to get evidence of an NDA breach in these circumstances.)
Put otherwise: they are using the non-compete to try and achieve the ends of an NDA, without the hassle of proof.
That way, the non-compete actually costs the company something, so they don't just apply them as a blanket, and the employee doesn't have the risk of not finding a job due to the non-compete.
Would that make senses? Of course not.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reserve_clause
That said, non-competes without 100% garden pay during the term should be unenforceable. Also, trying to enforce a blatantly unenforcable non-competes should have criminal penalties.
Also, attempting to enforce a blatantly unenforcable non-compete should result in criminal charges for whoever made the decision to push enforcement, disbarment for their legal team, and substantial civil liability. The bar for that should be very high, but the choice to enforce a non-compete should be one that's only made when the legal team is damn sure there's a compelling argument that the non-compete is legally enforceable. Too many people are handcuffed by definitely-garbage non-competes because they can't afford the legal fight.
With >100% garden pay terms, I would personally prefer limited/short term non-competes over infinite/long term NDAs, for example. I've explicitly made that choice in the past.
They're suing Brian.
Particularly in areas in which AWS is already weak -- like, as mentioned in the article, marketing.
I find this post really funny.
On a more serious note: I often see people here not catching sarcasm. If this is you, be warned that this post is full of sarcasm and irony.
I do like AWS--a lot. I snark, but that's my personality. If I genuinely hated them, this level of focus on their business would be something pathological.
AWS hires amazing people, and build incredible things. I'm a customer, and a happy one. Actions like this demonstrate a base level of being unworthy of those amazing people that they've hired, and get my hackles up something fierce. It's one of the few ways in which AWS unequivocally Is Wrong, A Lot.
I guess I missed the subtlety in the article :)
Mind is I ask: are all large corps in this space the same or are Amazon particularly bad? It seems to me that get a bad wrap in retail more because they have no PR than because they do things more harshly than other retailers...
If I want the official AWS view on things I can consult their blog page, follow their guys on Twitter (which I do), and read their press releases.
I don't really want that, though, and neither do most people, because I want to know when I'm being led astray, when AWS is pushing my trust a little too far. If some service looks cheap or easy to implement but has a lot of gotchas, I want to know that. I want a friendly-but-independent perspective, and that's what he offers.
Everything I've heard is that it's a toxic work environment, with below-average pay and draconian employee agreements. And that's not even getting into the ethical issues. What in the world makes someone take a job there instead of pretty much any other tech company?
When I started working, Amazon stock was at ~$750 a share. When I started working, Google stock was at about the same. Google would have granted 100-120K in stock, Amazon closer to 50K. Google gives annual refreshes of ~50K, while Amazon would not until the initial grant is mostly vested. So at the end of this year, when both vests would be coming to a close, a Googler who kept all their stock would have 160 shares from their initial grant, as well as 25-40 additional shares from their refresh grants.
So that's ~180K in AMZN at today's prices vs. 230K in GOOG, plus another 40-60K in refresh grants. And the Google employee has a better salary and bonus structure. Facebook is equivalent or superior to Google in pretty much every aspect of this comparison (base pay, bonus, equity grant, equity growth, equity refresh).
But for me personally, it’s simple.
Big Tech salary and working fully remotely for AWS in a low cost of living area.
"At Amazon, a Seattle operations engineer on an $840k salary had his/her renewal application denied in February."
"a level III program manager in Seattle earning a salary of $1.3m"
The article was mixing up compensation elements, but people are paid well above US average wage at Amazon.
https://news.efinancialcareers.com/us-en/3003798/highest-pay...
I worked for Amazon because they recruited from my University and it was my first after graduation job. I'd had some internships, but I didn't have a large network or a lot of options.
Dev managers at Amazon leave to be CTOs at startups. Senior engineers leave to be architects. It's one of the best possible resume items you could get, particularly if you're moving to another cloud company -- although, obviously, that in particular seems to be a bit of a dangerous move if you don't wanna get sued.
It's innovation from the business side of things more than the tech side of things.
This seems fair
No, that was never the initial intention of non-competes. There is only one situation where non-competes make any amount of sense at all. No one should ever sign a non-compete except for the following situation, you are selling a BUSINESS to someone else. That's it. There is no good reason outside of that to ever sign a non-compete. It is reasonable when buying a business to want some insurance that the seller won't turn around and open a competing business across town and steal all their old customers. It is NOT reasonable to say, "Hey, we want you to work for us. But if things turn south you aren't allowed to work anywhere else in your field."
Not true in The Netherlands.