My company's vesting schedule used to have a 3-year cliff: 0% first year, 0% 2nd year, 75% third year, 25% fourth year.

It's a much more reasonable quarterly vest with a 1-year cliff now.

I think it's brilliant. If you live in Seattle and know anyone who's a mid-level corporate employee at Amazon, you should notice that it's a great way of selecting talent who are committed to the company and who will stick around. Also, contracts are re-negotiated every two years, so if you chain them up, you're getting a pretty significant annual payout.

It's brilliant for Amazon, not so much for the employee and it doesn't matter if you're committed to the company if the relationship is not bilateral (and it's often not). You can re-negotiate your pay and stuff but if the company has a financial incentive not to, there are several HR devices to keep you from doing so. Let's not bring up the regular reorgs which are notorious for wiping out careers.

I've been living in the Seattle area for a really long time and I've heard so many horror stories coming from Amazon that I could fill a book.

Also, I am aware of the 'Amazon is not for everyone' narrative. Yes, I agree, it's not for people who value their work/life balance and expect to be treated as a human at their workplace.

I am also aware of the 'it depends on the team' narrative. That's bullshit. Indeed it does depend on the team but 'generally' (to quote Zuck) it sucks.

I am in no way an Amazon supporter, however I fail to see how any single company can "wipe out your career". As a skilled engineer, you have many options. And incidentally, from the sounds of it, it seems like if they let someone go, they would be doing that someone a favor.

Pretty sure he means to wipe out your career within the company.

Exactly what I meant. And this results in wiping out your unvested stock.

That works in theory, but in practice, Amazon still has shitty employee retention. Top software talent is a seller's market. Most people who have the choice would choose Facebook, Google, or Microsoft over Amazon because Amazon is stingier.

Companies are not committed to employees. The easy example is that they have layoffs, even amazon and microsoft. a committed company would do what microsoft used to do, since they had basically endless openings, if your project was canceled you had 2 months to find another job. and you could always find another job.

The other reason to consider carefully before going there is they sometimes try to scare people by enforcing non-competes. So what are you going to do, deliver papers? Here's a recent article - https://www.geekwire.com/2017/business-personal-amazon-web-s...

edit - here's an example of layoffs in seattle https://www.seattletimes.com/business/amazon/amazon-laying-o...