"… experiments start small and grow over time … Amazon creates a small team to experiment with the idea and find out if it’s viable. Bezos famously instituted the “two-pizza team” rule, which says that teams should be small enough to be fed with two pizzas … new teams get limited funding and clear milestones; if a team succeeds in smaller challenges, it’s given more resources and a larger challenge to tackle.

… Amazon doesn’t spend too much time on internal testing. “They prioritize launching early over everything else,” … Bezos has been fanatical about letting teams operate independently of one another … discouraged the kind of standardization you see at companies like Google and Apple, encouraging teams to operate independently using whatever technology makes the most sense … to make Amazon a modular, flexible organization with a minimum of company-wide policies.

That has made Amazon’s internal culture somewhat chaotic and balkanized. An engineer on one Amazon project can’t easily jump to another the way they can at Google or Apple. Friction between teams with different cultures may explain why some people find Amazon a stressful place to work. But this chaotic culture is also hospitable to innovation. A new team can use the tools and processes that make the most sense instead of feeling pressure to conform to company-wide standards."

> can’t easily jump to another the way they can at Google or Apple.

I've never worked at Google or Apple, but I work in AWS. I see people switching teams, across different organizations within AWS and the retail business. When I first started, you had to stay on your team for 1 year before you could transfer, now there is no such restriction.

I will agree with the

> encouraging teams to operate independently using whatever technology makes the most sense

>Friction between teams with different cultures may explain why some people find Amazon a stressful place to work

It can be incredibly difficult working with other teams, but hat's not unique to Amazon.

Mostly just that in general it's a very stressful place to work regardless of being an engineer or other role there.

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/ryanmac/2016/04/05/jeff-bezos-c...

"Amazon's Next Mission" is just marketing speak.

To their credit, they are willing to invest in expanding their products and finding adjacent markets. That's really hard for companies to do and where Amazon seems a little different in the way they don't seem to care at all about profit. If you don't care about profit you can do a lot of things that otherwise are difficult.

You would work to the bone too if you were getting rich off of AMZN stock options.

You can fuck right off, Benzos.

As well as the annual "bonus." It's not a bonus. It's a stack of money on a string that they'll pull away from you if you leave before the year's up.

Crunch time isn't worth it for half of what Adobe would be paying me.

Obviously there is an additional mystery world of option grants at Amazon that we aren’t aware of.

Ever since G's cronies have been revising the "non-solicitations."

Also your initial stock grant vests 100% after 4 years. 5, 15, 40, 40

Your facts are all wrong

Your stock options will never be fully vested. At around 8 years you'll be nearing 100%. That is, if you're: not fired/dead from exhaustion/dead from others.

You get an annual "bonus" as well. It's not a bonus and it's not called that. It's an advance on salary. It's the justification for your lower-compared-to-industry salary. It's null too if you're gone before the year is up.

So no, sir. Your facts are wrong.

You're still making money off of the vested portion of the options if you exercise them.

You seem to be claiming you're forced to stay since you aren't 100% vested. This sounds more like golden handcuffs than crucifixion to your desk.

Apparently your problem is Amazon stock keeps going up, so you're loathe to leave. Leaving my last job was easy since the stock options were underwater :-) glub glub. Your problem is one I would have liked to have.

New hires get RSUs that vest at 12 months, 24 months, 30 months, 36 months, 42 months, and 48 months after they start. These are 5%, 15%, 20%, 20%, 20%, and 20%, respectively, of the total initial RSU grant. It doesn't change.

You do get more RSUs in future years, but that does not impact the vesting schedule of the initial grant.

There is no annual bonus at Amazon. You get 1/12 of your base salary each month. New hires get additional cash each month for the first two years (usually more in the first year), but that is the sign-on bonus. It isn't an advance.

The only case I know of that does not match the above is for sales reps -- this is a limited set of people and I doubt that many are reading HN.