Thanks, this made things clear. I was seriously considering joining until the responses in this thread. Its better to wait for another offer for few more months rather than suffering for the next 2-3 years.

I think it really depends on the team you're on at Amazon. (well, the vesting, free drinks etc doesn't).

I never found the NYT article to be even slightly representative of my time at Amazon, and the group I was in at the time made additional changes to help improve morale that really worked. I believe you can find a good, or bad, team to work on at Amazon, and I assume the same is true of other big companies too (I have worked at another big company and it was true there too).

If anyone here honestly believes free food and office decor stack up as benefits right alongside retirement benefits and vesting schedules, please take a step back and evaluate your life. I'd rather live on a software developer's salary with no 401k access and a 6 year vesting cliff than live on 2/3rd the salary with immediate vesting and a generous 401k match.

What's your math?

In year 0-6, I would think the latter case comes up better, assuming (which is definitely true at like, all large tech companies) that yearly stock + 401k match (not even touching tax benefits) is better than 1/3 of your salary?

I would think stock + 401k > 1/3 salary basically (this was true for me at Workday, anyway)

I'm curious as to what level you're at. I hear that there is a pretty hard line between Principal engineer and SDE, in that Principle engineer is a pretty good gig.

Principal engineers write more docs than code. It’s a good gig depending on what you want to spend time on.

I'm curious, does this apply to all of Amazon globally? I was considering Amazon Dublin and would be interested to hear what it's like there.

I interviewed for a C# dev job at their new Dublin offices in the old Irish Nationwide building. I had to attend a recruitment open day watching presentations about why Amazon is so great and then come back a few days later for a surprisingly easy technical and HR interview.

Despite being refurbished their work space looked very basic and clinical, but at least there were good views on the higher floors. No free food, just tea and coffee.

The package they offered me was pretty poor. Salary was above average for my skill level, but zero perks. No share options, no flexi-time, and a PRSA pension scheme instead of a real one.

I asked about perks only to be told they weren't offering such generous packages at that time. I found this odd as I didn't contact them, they found my details on LinkedIn and approached me. In those circumstances I would have expected some perks to sweeten the deal.

I declined the offer.

> their new Dublin offices in the old Irish Nationwide building

Amazon also have a new build office block on Burlington Road which they are currently moving into.

A colleague of mine moved to a senior position in Amazon Dublin about 3 years back. He quit in less than a year after being fed up with the ultra conservative attitudes of the people calling the shots there. He also mentioned they're pretty frugal when it comes to employee perks. Also you had to be on call two weekends a month. But it's a big company so maybe he just had a bad experience.

Apparently the same here in Germany. Everybody leaves sooner or later.

One minor but important correction: some of those companies you mentioned don’t even have a 1 year cliff anymore.

I know some amazon employees that work in a WeWork office. Free beer & food regularly

I heard FB starts vesting monthly right away these days, which imo is absolutely the way it should be. Google, take notice.

Google has done this for at least 6 years now, I don't know when they started doing this. Source: Spouse works at Google

No they haven't. There's always been an initial 1 year cliff. This changed in the past year. Source: I joined google less than 6 years ago and had a 1 year cliff.

Hmm, maybe different people have different contracts. In our case, the 1 yr cliff was about the signing bonus, not the vesting.

That's a very unusual deal. Most Google offers were (up until I think August/September 2017) structured as base + target % annual bonus + cash signing bonus with first/second paycheck (which you would need to pay back prorated if you left before a year, but this isn't a cliff) + equity with a 1 year cliff before vesting on a schedule that depended on the exact amount, but varied from annually to monthly.

This was true for new grad offers as well as for most experienced hires. I believe I've heard of different structures for cases where Google was doing essentially an equity buyout, but those were absolutely the exception, not the rule.

Are you sure you are remembering correctly?

Google is also doing this now, fwiw.

Didn’t know. Then, Microsoft, take notice. :-)

Microsoft starts vesting immediately at 20% every 6 months. Amazon, take note.

Are you sure? This means the whole grant vests in 2.5 years. Their vesting period used to be much longer than that.

checking myrewards, some are on the 20% schedule every 6 months (for 2.5 year for full vest) and some are on the 10% schedule (for 5 year for full vest), and some are on a 5% schedule every 3 months (for 5 year for full vest).

Perhaps it would be better to actually have knowledge about the topics on which you're commenting?

All of this is _very_ recent.

>no free food/drinks

It's sooooo important.

To each their own. I struggle with compulsive eating and free food at a workplace correlates with weight gain for me.

Of course, that's just me. I'm not saying you should be deprived. I like getting a free beer or two on Thirsty Thursdays but if I were a recovering alcoholic I would hate it.

I believe GP was being sarcastic... That said, while I don't mind free food and drinks, I also don't mind taking care of it on my own. The only difference is if there is a weekly event for all company with food + drink, sort of a gathering. That does wonders for morale.

Yeah, where I am now has after-work drinks on Thursdays and I really like it. We chat, play some video games (we make them so it makes sense), have a beer or two - it's good.

But I would not be shocked if at least some of the people who I know never come do so because there's a not small percentage of the population for whom being around alcohol is incredibly challenging. I'm like that with food - and truth be told, on those Thursdays I tend to eat too much. But eating too much doesn't have the same impact professionally as getting drunk (it's still not great, though).

I agree. Nice to have free coffee though.

Well, it's kind of a signal, see Steve Blank's essay:

https://steveblank.com/2009/12/21/the-elves-leave-middle-ear...

Sometimes financial decisions that are seemingly rational on their face can precipitate mass exodus of your best engineers.

Exactly. Free food is worth ~$300/mo. for me - easily compensated for by ~$5K extra in base pay. But this is a signal to me that the company does not care about employee happiness / convenience.

I don't think Amazon ever had free food and drinks so that's a difference.

It's a cheap perk that makes employees happier. Employee happiness is important.

It also means you don't have to put energy into sorting out your lunch, which I see personally as a huge productivity boost.

It's also generally more cost effective for the company to buy food in bulk compared to passing the cash onto you in your salary for you to buy food on an individual basis.

Plus (and this is dependent on the company handles the providing free food business), food cooked or prepared on site is potentially healthier and tastier than whatever calorific sandwich and chocolate bar you picked up on the way to work. Healthier and happier employees are a win for both parties.

Depending on where your office is, it could be.

My last company was in an office park in the middle of no where and I don't drive. There were no stores within walking distance either. So if I felt like having a snack or something to drink that wasn't water I'd be SOL. So it was nice that we had snacks and drinks available and made working in such a remote spot much more tolerable.

I definitely stay at work, and stay on campus longer because of the free breakfasts and lunches.

I don't understand how this is an argument in favour of free food/drink. You're selling whatever additional time you give to your employer for a rock bottom price. It's not a good deal.

> It's not a good deal.

It is, though, for the employer. I think the GP was trying to say that free food/drinks are a bad place to start saving money.

Without knowing details of compensation you can't really say whether they've given their extra time at a rock bottom price or not.

For most employees, especially those commenting here, every hour above 40.0 is $0. It doesn't get much more rock bottom than that.

I don’t consider myself to be on an hourly wage. I’m on a salary. If I need to work more hours I work more hours, if that’s what it takes to get the job done.

I don't think he is arguing for free food/drinks, nowhere did he say he was arguing in favour.

Spend your free time on work... Very stupid idea.

Depends on the relationship that you have with your employer.

I always (in the past) tried to drink the kool-aid as much as I could ... (until that got abused) ...

If I start a business, one of my main goals is going to be to build a team that does justice to the passion that it's members put in to it.

What can be a passion for business that is not even yours? You want the impossible.

Plenty of people are self aware enough to know they don't have what it takes to [start,own,run] a business. They can still be passionate about the work they're doing.

I have been passionate about working for organizations that were not mine.

Many of the people that I work with are pretty passionate about what they do as well.

it isn't really your free time if it involves going out and finding food

How do you compare Amazon to Microsoft?