Relocation bonus would have had to have been repaid in full if I had left during my first year.
From the perspective of not taking advantage of the financial irresponsibility of recent grads, this is an improvement over the structure described in TFA, but the right solution is make sure that recent grads know what compensation agreement they're signing and can resist the urge to spend it all, that can't be left to employers, whose every incentives push against that. Big lump sum payment right out of college are very useful as emergency slush funds even if you can't responsibly do much with them for a few months.
I was made an offer for L5 at Amazon earlier this year. For compensation, it's like you suggested: the offer is structured such that the first two years weigh more heavily toward cash (a separate signing bonus for each of the first two years, which IMO was pretty good and _does not_ need to be paid back, it's just combined with your normal bi-weekly paychecks) and then the latter two years are where you get the majority of your RSU rewards, which wind up being worth the same or more than the cash bonuses of the first two years (assuming I suppose that the stock price continues to be stable and/or increase from what it was at time of signing).
A note about the signing bonuses, the offer letter details basically do not say anything about needing to pay them back for leaving early. If your employment is terminated (by yourself or Amazon itself), then you just end with the prorated portion for the current pay cycle and that's it, you don't get any more of it (fairly obvious anyway if you leave a place).
Two things about it: it's not feel-good bullshit like the parent said. That makes it real. And another: so many principles are at direct odds. Do you "Insist on the highest standards" and delay the launch or do you "Deliver results" now? How do you "Think Big" while also obeying the mandate for "Frugality"? There is a lot of tension in the principles which matches real-world choices. It's not the shallow corporatese of most mission statements.
You're right. The proportional compensation is something I was very wrong about.
At the time, I was also in debt due to being straight out of college and having been dumb AF with money (student loans, car, & credit cards) and so owing anything would've been bankrupting.
It was so easy to be stupid with money when you're making an engineer's salary.
Not shifting blame, I did that debt to myself and I dug myself out of it after educating myself.
Just giving more context.
Customer Obsession is "do no evil".
I think there is a real tension between customer obsession and 'do no evil'. Serving the individual needs of consumers can come at the expense of the public good. I think example of that are the amount of waste that Amazon packages generate by shipping as fast as possible and the amount of environmental damage AWS can quietly cause via their datacenters.
On the other hand at the end of year 2 when you have gotten used to the monthly payments I guess the we told you so is it bit harder to agree with.
I think talking about the Leadership Principles as a 'typical corporate motto' is unfair. Amazon lives their leadership principles far more than the other companies I've seen. They don't include things they don't actually care about, like most corporate mottos do (you'll notice the lack of 'we care about our employees' or 'do no evil' LPs).
At least in my experience, you only need to pay back Amazon proportional to (2 years minus duration employed) so it really isn't that bad (maybe that wasn't the case when this was written).
Maybe it's changed, but the signing bonuses I saw were essentially increased salary until your stock starts vesting seriously. It gets paid out and vests every paycheck so there isn't anything you need to pay back.