Nope. There's no bonuses at Amazon (at PE/SDE levels at least), and there are compensation bands for each level. A top-ranked SDE3 that delivered DynamoDB should have similar compensation as a top-ranked SDE3 working on internal tools.
I prefer not to discuss compensation - so will answer this indirectly. Few SDE3s definitely make principal salaries, Principals make millions and so on. I remember there was an ex amazon guy putting up the top end numbers on twitter which seemed more along these lines. It sadly comes down to your managers and VP decisions.
FWIW it is kind of a future investment IMO. You come out with a ton of knowledge and contacts that your future jobs can definitely be highly rewardd if that's what you're going for. Some find joy in the company of like minded peers instead of chasing the gold, everyone unto their own!
I guess I have old school compunctions against discussing it, probably comes from generations of folks not talking about it and considering it impolite.
I also have seen how people react when they realize there might be a huge pay variation for same titles - it's not good for anyone. I avoid conflict as much as possible nowadays, so it makes me more reticent. I pretty much redirect direct questions even from family because of that. None other than me and my wife knows how much I make - that's the max comfort level I'd ever get to I suppose.
I'm generally of the opinion that the tradition of never discussing salary is entirely pushed by management to prevent underpaid workers from asking for more.
If nobody knows how much they could be making, they can never really be sure of what they are worth.
At a company that size, it probably saves Corporate billions, while serving the average employee not at all.
If it was "entirely pushed by management" then most employees would ignore it, especially those making several hundred thousand or millions a year. On the contrary, a lot of employees at all salary levels discuss their salary.
Management absolutely has an incentive to hide salary writ large so that is definitely part of it. But employees who earn more than their comparably-titled peers also have an incentive not to disclose their salary. If position X gets paid, at the median, $200k a year with a $20k SD, and you get paid $275k a year in position X, the only things that will happen by you publicly discussing your salary are: 1) you'll be called a liar; 2) your peers will get jealous; 3) the best peers who may have been content prior, will either negotiate a higher salary and leave less in next year's budget for you, or leave for other positions making more money, resulting in a brain drain from your team.
Salary discussion overall only benefits low and mediocre performers. High performing ICs have very little incentive to discuss it.
#3 is called "fairness." It's the part where the rest of your team -- especially the women, who, statistically, are almost certainly making less than the median -- realize what the median is and have the opportunity to demand that they are paid for their contributions. Yes, that might come at a cost to you personally, if you were making more than others on your team who were adding similar value. Would you rather scam more money from the system for doing the same work as your peers?
I'm not trying to convince you to reveal what you make, but I don't think "it's not good for anyone" is right. It might cause a bunch of conflict and I can definitely see wanting to avoid that, but that doesn't mean the outcome isn't ultimately beneficial...
I see things the other way - if it's all in the open, there is no possibility that it can cause issues down the line.
The absence of this allow employers to employ people below their true value, which is not only unfair working conditions, but also unfair in that some people get paid vastly more for equivalent (or worse) performance, depending only on awareness of worth and negotiation skills.
Public pay figures will not only tell you what you can expected to be worth, it will also tell you what the company truly values and rewards (as opposed to PR bullshit). Opening up salary figures means a company must face its own contradictions, if any.
I'm contrary on this. I see salary level as a negative, not a positive. I want to be paid comparably to my peers.
I don't think I'm unique. I think just about all workers want to be paid comparably to their peers. They get upset if they discover others doing the same stuff with the same levels of skill and experience are making more than they are. (And here I mean a lot more, not just "been with the company longer and got regular raises".)
Value is relative. Something is worth what someone else is willing to pay for it, and that includes the workers labor. And focusing on pay can be misleading. I saw an IT salary comparison a while back. An IT staffer in San Diego might make more than double what a staffer doing the same job in Wheeling, WV made. The reason was simple. It cost far more to live in San Diego. Employers there had to pay far higher salaries so their people could afford to live there. And the chap in WV might actually being doing better, relative to peers in San Diego, because even at half the salary, his living expenses were a lot lower, and more of what he made was disposable income, instead of just covering his rent.
If the salary you make is your main focus, I think you are doing it wrong. Money is a means to an end. Having money lets you buy things you need. Having more money lets you also buy things you want. If all you have is money, you have problems. You can't eat it, wear it, or live in it. All you can do is exchange it for food, clothing, and shelter.
And if your main focus is salary level, you are like the character played by James Garner in a film called The Wheeler Dealers. Garner was a Texas entrepreneur, buying and selling, being followed around by a breathless female financial analyst trying to understand what he was doing. He stated it very clearly. "It's a game. Money is how you keep score." If that's the game you like to play, you probably shouldn't be in IT.
I had an interchange a while back with a chap elsewhere who was folding a startup that had not proved out. That's the normal outcome for a startup. Most fail. Too many people think "Oh, I'll go work for a startup! I'll put in 90 hour weeks for shit pay. But the startup will succeed and IPO and I'll get filthy rich" No, you won't. Even in a startup that succeeds and IPOs, only the founders are likely to get rich.
If you found a startup, the goal shouldn't be getting rich. You should be doing something you love to do, and will continue to do regardless of whether your startup succeeds and you IPO. If the startup succeeds, you may get filthy rich, but that will be a side effect, and not the point of the exercise. The chap I was talking to agreed completely with my notions.
The OP's complaint wasn't money, it was inability to make a meaningful contribution. The company was too big, with too many little cubbyholes where folks could get tucked away and not have an opportunity to contribute. His challenge was to find another place in the company where he would have an opportunity to make a contribution, or to find another company to work for that would provide the opportunity. If I were him, I might even accept a starting salary that was lower than my current one, simply because I could do stuff that made a contribution, and I saw potential for growth and making more money later.
This isnt true. Top performers on top products always have larger compensation. Its not discussed openly, but guaranteed they are receiving bonuses in the seven figures. If you think this isnt happening, you are naive or havent been on an inner circle at a large corporation.
Whoever told you theres no bonuses at Amazon is not a top employee
Is there any actual evidence of this, though? Whenever software engineer salary comes up on HN, there are always one or two people who come out of the woodwork to share this oh-so-secret information. "Despite the pay bands that all big companies have and some even publish, there are secret squirrel individual contributor software engineers who make $600K and get million dollar bonuses! Trust us, it happens, guaranteed!" But nobody ever actually produces evidence of this, and none of these unicorn engineers ever post to confirm it. Inevitably, someone will point to one of those online self-reported surveys and one of the rows will show some ridiculously huge salary. But that's the only thing I've seen that even remotely looks like evidence that there is this secret cabal earning millions as employees writing software.
Yes there actually is "secret squirrel" business going on. Secrets are a thing, especially around money. It's a fact some computer programmers get profit sharing and it is not advertised.
You think the people inventing the critical algorithms behind amazon s3 and aws in general are line of business employees making what everyone else in their band makes? A trillion dollar corporation is going to let that guy walk out the door to save instead of chipping him an extra million?
This isn't about people who get their work done fast and execute on projects well.
I have no idea--that's why I'm skeptical and would love to see evidence. In some of these companies, veteran outlier high-performers end up getting promoted several times to things like "Distinguished Engineer" and have enormous staffs of engineers reporting to them. They are executives in all but title, so I'd expect them to be in the executive pay bands and get executive salaries. Those aren't the people we're talking about. We are talking about regular "top performer" individual contributors (write code as their job, no direct reports). Why would a company artificially keep them at some low promotion level but pay them as if they were multiple levels higher?
Do you think a multi-billion corporation would pay a low level employee an extra million just because they can? You may overestimate the value of individual engineers, big corporations don't. That's how they become big. The money they make is the difference between the value of your work and the money you make. The smartest and best connected people in the company are working to make that gap as wide as possible.
Yes, but if this engineer's achievements are well known, competition between companies is what drives crazy comp because they are seen more like a strategic asset rather than another engineer. They wouldn't quite be a low-level employee, these unicorn ICs often report directly to middle management or above. I'm surprised how little industry experience some of these commenters seem to have given that it's HN.
Competitors are also multi-billion corporations. I do work for one of those big multi-billion corporations, it's my second, and I've also worked for others not so big. Only newbie engineers fresh out of college believe the myth of the genius engineer who gets grossly overcompensated because they're so smart. You can find 10s of thousands of brilliant engineers in any of these companies, that's the bottom line. Not a single one of them is, on their own, irreplaceable. Specially valuable individuals get awarded distinctions like "fellow" or "distinguished". They're valuable, more than anything else, because of their contacts and rapport within the industry. It's never technical competency; not that they're technically incompetent, but most of their underlings will likely be more technically competent than them (if they're smart, after all, they will do the technical work). If you haven't figure this out yet, don't worry, you'll get there.
You clearly don't work for one of the ones that grant 7 figure salaries. I'm not saying they're common or that any engineer can aspire to achieve one, I'm saying they exist, I've seen it first hand, and I don't understand why it's so hard for you to accept they exist. Nothing in your comment constitutes novel insight to me, and neither of us have a good measure as to which of us have more credibility than the other, but I suspect you're just judging based on your own narrow experience.
Edit, just for more context I'm speaking of FAANG level companies here and very rare individual unicorn engineers who have been specifically hired into these kinds of positions for past achievements that have impact across the whole industry. I would agree with your general skepticism in any other context.
As I said, I'm on my second FAANG. The "very rare individuals" you mention are hired L9 or above. That is, distinguished engineers+. You don't get to L9 with "a valuable technical contribution", you get there because people know who you are, you have strong network of connections within the industry, and you are in a position to make strategic decisions. It's very much not a technical position, it's borderline executive. Let's put it this way, the people with that kind of compensation, you know who they are. It's never an anonymous whizz kid who's very good at solving technical problems, it's the guy who hired them and/or knows how to direct their work.
As you said, you don't know me and I don't know you, so I don't have a reason to doubt your word. If you say you've met engineers who get that kind of compensation, I'll give you the benefit of the doubt. Everyone I've met or I've known to be in that level of compensation were the people I already knew were making that kind of money.
Getting special bonuses is more about being part of an inner circle than being a "top performer" or inventing critical algorithms for s3. Yes, the people truly behind a lot of the important stuff are standard engineers making within band compensation (possibly out of band only due to stock appreciation).
People who see it happen don't even have enough hard details to confirm it to themselves aside from the fact that they're witnessing it firsthand. The best I can do, for example, is to say that at FB I worked with someone who was very well known as a very highly ranked IC, and that the comp in the band he was known to be in is astronomical (1m+ annually). Another factor is that we don't want to dox ourselves by giving out biographical details that would otherwise have built a case. This particular engineer had built foundations of particular unprecedented things within industry with enormous current relevance, even to laymen, before acquiring their current rank. I can't get more specific than that, but $1m is absolute peanuts compared to the size of the market sectors these engineers have a hand in shaping.
Whoever told you there's no bonuses at Amazon is not a top employee.
So that's how Amazon works - people can't even get a straight answer from management as to the existence of a bonus structure (let alone how it works)? They need to whisper it to each other offer coffee, or... go on Hacker News to find out what the actual deal is?
Sometimes not even management has the whole picture knows. I know someone who was a former employee (top performer) at FB. He would have his end of year (or half year? Not sure what the cycles were) with his boss, receive his bonus and salary increase. Then his boss's boss would pull him aside and give him another bonus, that his own boss was completely unaware of.
I mean just think about it. You write some critical piece of Amazon S3, generates massive value for the company. Amazon knows they cant lose you, how are they not paying you a ton of money? Individual employees can get into situations where they have massive bargaining power over large corporations. Your average or even regular top performer is not getting this, but people definitely are.
The bonus structure works like this.
1.) You provide massive value, maybe move the needle on the bottom line
2.) Someone way high up who probably doesnt even know you wants to know whos responsible.
3.) He tells HR, give that guy an extra million and let me meet him
I've seen bonuses like this at Amazon. You forgot the detail where some clown who has been taking credit with no technical understanding of the project gets the bonus while the people who delivered the actual value are ignored.
