> Schnierer expressed frustration at specific HR policies, like one that pauses all pay increases and stock vesting while employees are on parental or medical leave.
Why do they offer parental or medical leave, then?
This is akin to cutting someone's wages when they are on PTO. It's not "paid" time off anymore.
It is a weird nickel-and-dime-ey policy to have though. Like, why specifically those two types of leave? Where does it end?! Why not pause vesting and raises while someone is on vacation? Why not pause raises and vesting on the weekends? I'd better stop before I give them any more ideas.
Could it be that employees that take maternal or paternal (parental) leave are significantly and disproportionately more likely to exit a short time after returning from leave? Or else see some other significant pattern of attrition after parental leave - controlling for the absence and costs of the leave over its duration?
Not commenting on the ethics or legality of this sort of HR accounting...
Idk how things work at Amazon (from what I've heard their vesting schedule is already kinda whack), but where I work freezing stock vesting is basically a 50% pay cut for the duration.
That's only true for vacation and normal sick leave. Most extended leaves (medical and parental) do affect your bonus. This is certainly true at Microsoft and Google and likely many other companies. The exact formula varies - at some places, if you take 3 months of parental leave, you'd get 75% of your target bonus (since you worked 75% of the year). At others there are more complicated formulas that give partial credit or assume that the portion of the year you spent on leave you got an average rating or whatever. Similarly, at most places I've worked if you take unpaid leave (including long-term sick leave) those dates aren't bonus eligible.
I am coming to this post kind of late, so not sure if others will see this, but actually this is something that Amazon policy has JUST changed on, effective as of Dec 31, 2021.
A few RSU related quality of life improvements:
- Before, the vesting policy only allowed for 2 weeks of gracetime if you took any form of leave of absence (and leaves being a wholly legally separate category from vacation or sick days); since parental leave was 6 weeks, that means that your vest schedule would delay by 4 weeks (which I can confirm, my vest dates went from May to June because of this)... From 2022 onwards, the gracetime has been extended to match the parental leave time, so there is no longer this weird 6-2=4 mismatch
- In the rare case an employee dies, their next 2 years worth of unvested RSUs, will automatically accelerate and vest immediately. These accelerated RSUs will vest to the deceased's estate, and the heirs of the estate will get them via the probate process (having a will massively simplifies this). The accelerated vesting cannot be transferred directly to a beneficiary, it has to go to the estate first.
- RSU vesting allows for a sell-to-cover option for tax withholding, but previously only whole numbers of shares could be sold (and the leftover after taxes, is paid to your paycheck direct deposit). Now going forward, you can sell fractional shares to cover tax withholding.
- (couple other minor QoL improvements, but those were the ones I could recall off the top of my head)
I doubt these policy changes were in any way tied to the reporting of these stories or the experiences of these employees, but the timing is somewhat ironic.
It's crazy they stop stock vesting on parental leave, that just seems really messed up to me. I can get medical leave as that one is pretty easy to abuse/string out for a very long time. However it just seems like a disincentive to have children and a definite message being sent by Amazon by doing something scummy like that for parental leave.
> it just seems like a disincentive to have children
people who get paid in stock aren't warehouse employees they are highly paid software engineer types, surely they can tolerate getting by on 200k/yr salary for a few months.
> people who get paid in stock aren't warehouse employees they are highly paid software engineer types, surely they can tolerate getting by on 200k/yr salary for a few months.
Why would anyone be OK with not getting paid their fair, and agreed, share?
I don't understand why anyone would side with a trillion dollar corporation, instead of a worker, regardless of how much he or she makes.
> It's crazy they stop stock vesting on parental leave, that just seems really messed up to me.
The linked article explicitly states that:
"A few days after she sent the note, according to a report in Business Insider, Amazon changed the policy and reestablished vesting during parental leave and for up to 26 weeks of medical leave."
The article notes the backloaded vesting schedule as a contributing factor, but ironically it’s one of the biggest reasons I took a position with AWS late last year.
In a market with sky high tech valuations, a big tech position that’s all cash for the first two years was very appealing since a correction across the board seems likely(note: Amazon offers extra cash for the first two years to keep your comp roughly the same every year).
Yeah but that correction is happening now — after you signed the acceptance letter which stated the amount of stock you will earn in year 3-4. So you are getting hosed unless they comp you (which is possible considering how things are going there now)
At what point does the candidate pool simply run out of experienced people for these companies to hire? There's always going to be new grads and junior engineers entering the market, ready to sacrifice the prime years of their lives for the good of the company, but the demand for experienced engineers and other staff has never been higher. Where are they finding these people that aren't aware of the toxic work environment? Or are they aware and that fat TC is just too great to ignore?
I can't believe that the leadership of these companies fail to see the damage to their brand amongst potential employees. They're treading a very fine line between "How do we force the most out of our employees for profit?" and "What do we do when we can't get anyone to work for us any more?" I think we're starting to see the scale tip toward the later.
I have an interview with Amazon next week. My primary motivation for this is to make significantly more than I do now, and a hope that my division/role would be different from those that produce the horror stories. I'm seriously considering cancelling though...
That article was misleading (at best) when it was first written, and hasn't aged especially well, given Amazon's recent pay band adjustments, which seem to have increased the ceiling at L5 and L6 by at least 100k. Even taking into account the fact that Amazon doesn't have equity refreshers (by default, like a lot of tech firms; they do still give them out to a small % of top performers on a discretionary basis), top-of-band L5 and L6 Amazon offers are now extremely competitive on an annualized basis when compared to other top-paying firms. L5 can stretch up to 400k, which is more than Snap pays its mid-levels (though admittedly Snaps L4 band is much narrower, so the average Snap offer is still probably much better than the average Amazon offer at that level). I've seen L6 offers over 600k, and 500k seems to be totally unremarkable (nearly 50% of the new offers at this level posted on levels.fyi in the last 3 months have hit this number).
Don't get me wrong, it's not like it's impossible to do better, but nowadays I'd be more surprised to see Google beat an Amazon offer anywhere above entry-level rather than the reverse.
> At what point does the candidate pool simply run out of experienced people for these companies to hire? There's always going to be new grads and junior engineers entering the market, ready to sacrifice the prime years of their lives for the good of the company, but the demand for experienced engineers and other staff has never been higher. Where are they finding these people that aren't aware of the toxic work environment? Or are they aware and that fat TC is just too great to ignore?
There are a fair number of people out there who are either not careful or who think that somehow "things will be different for them" (e.g. assume they're some better-than-average person who can make it work, and that most of the horror stories are from people who just weren't as good as they are).
> I can't believe that the leadership of these companies fail to see the damage to their brand amongst potential employees. They're treading a very fine line between "How do we force the most out of our employees for profit?" and "What do we do when we can't get anyone to work for us any more?" I think we're starting to see the scale tip toward the later.
There a lot of things that work well until they suddenly don't. Maybe they're falsely reassured that since it hadn't caught up to them yet, so it won't catch up with them ever. Sort of like people who believe in technological progress, know about a lot of cases where technology pulled a rabbit out of a hat and saved the day (e.g. the Green Revolution [1]), so downplay alarm over threats as insufficiently optimistic because they assume a rabbit will be found in a new hat before the threat manifests itself.
Also, a company culture can be extremely difficult to change once it's established itself.
The bottom end companies are completely drained of talent right now. You have people getting hired for jobs who could be out performed by someone with 6 months training/practice.
So the top end companies with VC money or huge bank accounts get a wealth of talent while everyone else is thankful they have a web developer who knows the difference between margin and padding or what responsive design means.
Not surprised, I did this a few years ago to travel between 2019-2020. Are they really capping cash comp at $160k after all the recent inflation? Didn't they remove "frugality" from the leadership principles?
The "golden handcuffs" stock vesting is what it is, but I think that when people burn out, they're probably more concerned with their personal situation than a 5-6 figure sum over 2-3 years.
It's also high-pressure work in high-CoL areas. IIRC, they're used to high turnover.
33 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 76.7 ms ] threadWhy do they offer parental or medical leave, then?
This is akin to cutting someone's wages when they are on PTO. It's not "paid" time off anymore.
Could it be that employees that take maternal or paternal (parental) leave are significantly and disproportionately more likely to exit a short time after returning from leave? Or else see some other significant pattern of attrition after parental leave - controlling for the absence and costs of the leave over its duration?
Not commenting on the ethics or legality of this sort of HR accounting...
huh? i don't know anyone who gets paid purely in stock.
Their yearly bonuses are not predicated on how many days off they have taken, why would it be any different with stocks?
A few RSU related quality of life improvements:
- Before, the vesting policy only allowed for 2 weeks of gracetime if you took any form of leave of absence (and leaves being a wholly legally separate category from vacation or sick days); since parental leave was 6 weeks, that means that your vest schedule would delay by 4 weeks (which I can confirm, my vest dates went from May to June because of this)... From 2022 onwards, the gracetime has been extended to match the parental leave time, so there is no longer this weird 6-2=4 mismatch
- In the rare case an employee dies, their next 2 years worth of unvested RSUs, will automatically accelerate and vest immediately. These accelerated RSUs will vest to the deceased's estate, and the heirs of the estate will get them via the probate process (having a will massively simplifies this). The accelerated vesting cannot be transferred directly to a beneficiary, it has to go to the estate first.
- RSU vesting allows for a sell-to-cover option for tax withholding, but previously only whole numbers of shares could be sold (and the leftover after taxes, is paid to your paycheck direct deposit). Now going forward, you can sell fractional shares to cover tax withholding.
- (couple other minor QoL improvements, but those were the ones I could recall off the top of my head)
I doubt these policy changes were in any way tied to the reporting of these stories or the experiences of these employees, but the timing is somewhat ironic.
> it just seems like a disincentive to have children
people who get paid in stock aren't warehouse employees they are highly paid software engineer types, surely they can tolerate getting by on 200k/yr salary for a few months.
this is a huge over reaction.
Why would anyone be OK with not getting paid their fair, and agreed, share?
I don't understand why anyone would side with a trillion dollar corporation, instead of a worker, regardless of how much he or she makes.
Agreed? Surely their employment contract included this clause, wouldn't that be plainly illegal to do that otherwise?
> I don't understand why anyone would side with a trillion dollar corporation, instead of a worker,
Because not everyone chooses which side they are on first and comes up with the justification later.
The linked article explicitly states that: "A few days after she sent the note, according to a report in Business Insider, Amazon changed the policy and reestablished vesting during parental leave and for up to 26 weeks of medical leave."
In a market with sky high tech valuations, a big tech position that’s all cash for the first two years was very appealing since a correction across the board seems likely(note: Amazon offers extra cash for the first two years to keep your comp roughly the same every year).
Source - former AWS engineer
I can't believe that the leadership of these companies fail to see the damage to their brand amongst potential employees. They're treading a very fine line between "How do we force the most out of our employees for profit?" and "What do we do when we can't get anyone to work for us any more?" I think we're starting to see the scale tip toward the later.
Don't get me wrong, it's not like it's impossible to do better, but nowadays I'd be more surprised to see Google beat an Amazon offer anywhere above entry-level rather than the reverse.
There are a fair number of people out there who are either not careful or who think that somehow "things will be different for them" (e.g. assume they're some better-than-average person who can make it work, and that most of the horror stories are from people who just weren't as good as they are).
> I can't believe that the leadership of these companies fail to see the damage to their brand amongst potential employees. They're treading a very fine line between "How do we force the most out of our employees for profit?" and "What do we do when we can't get anyone to work for us any more?" I think we're starting to see the scale tip toward the later.
There a lot of things that work well until they suddenly don't. Maybe they're falsely reassured that since it hadn't caught up to them yet, so it won't catch up with them ever. Sort of like people who believe in technological progress, know about a lot of cases where technology pulled a rabbit out of a hat and saved the day (e.g. the Green Revolution [1]), so downplay alarm over threats as insufficiently optimistic because they assume a rabbit will be found in a new hat before the threat manifests itself.
Also, a company culture can be extremely difficult to change once it's established itself.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Revolution
So the top end companies with VC money or huge bank accounts get a wealth of talent while everyone else is thankful they have a web developer who knows the difference between margin and padding or what responsive design means.
The "golden handcuffs" stock vesting is what it is, but I think that when people burn out, they're probably more concerned with their personal situation than a 5-6 figure sum over 2-3 years.
It's also high-pressure work in high-CoL areas. IIRC, they're used to high turnover.