I have an interview with Amazon next week. My primary motivation for this is to make significantly more than I do now, and a hope that my division/role would be different from those that produce the horror stories. I'm seriously considering cancelling though...

This is probably worth reading too: https://www.lastweekinaws.com/blog/aws-compensation-explaine...

That article was misleading (at best) when it was first written, and hasn't aged especially well, given Amazon's recent pay band adjustments, which seem to have increased the ceiling at L5 and L6 by at least 100k. Even taking into account the fact that Amazon doesn't have equity refreshers (by default, like a lot of tech firms; they do still give them out to a small % of top performers on a discretionary basis), top-of-band L5 and L6 Amazon offers are now extremely competitive on an annualized basis when compared to other top-paying firms. L5 can stretch up to 400k, which is more than Snap pays its mid-levels (though admittedly Snaps L4 band is much narrower, so the average Snap offer is still probably much better than the average Amazon offer at that level). I've seen L6 offers over 600k, and 500k seems to be totally unremarkable (nearly 50% of the new offers at this level posted on levels.fyi in the last 3 months have hit this number).

Don't get me wrong, it's not like it's impossible to do better, but nowadays I'd be more surprised to see Google beat an Amazon offer anywhere above entry-level rather than the reverse.

The bottom end companies are completely drained of talent right now. You have people getting hired for jobs who could be out performed by someone with 6 months training/practice.

So the top end companies with VC money or huge bank accounts get a wealth of talent while everyone else is thankful they have a web developer who knows the difference between margin and padding or what responsive design means.

> At what point does the candidate pool simply run out of experienced people for these companies to hire? There's always going to be new grads and junior engineers entering the market, ready to sacrifice the prime years of their lives for the good of the company, but the demand for experienced engineers and other staff has never been higher. Where are they finding these people that aren't aware of the toxic work environment? Or are they aware and that fat TC is just too great to ignore?

There are a fair number of people out there who are either not careful or who think that somehow "things will be different for them" (e.g. assume they're some better-than-average person who can make it work, and that most of the horror stories are from people who just weren't as good as they are).

> I can't believe that the leadership of these companies fail to see the damage to their brand amongst potential employees. They're treading a very fine line between "How do we force the most out of our employees for profit?" and "What do we do when we can't get anyone to work for us any more?" I think we're starting to see the scale tip toward the later.

There a lot of things that work well until they suddenly don't. Maybe they're falsely reassured that since it hadn't caught up to them yet, so it won't catch up with them ever. Sort of like people who believe in technological progress, know about a lot of cases where technology pulled a rabbit out of a hat and saved the day (e.g. the Green Revolution [1]), so downplay alarm over threats as insufficiently optimistic because they assume a rabbit will be found in a new hat before the threat manifests itself.

Also, a company culture can be extremely difficult to change once it's established itself.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Revolution

At what price?