"When a teammate asks for help find creative ways to make them look bad." Thanks for this gem, this captures the culture in a nutshell.

When I was there, they weren’t creative. They outright said that doing certain things didn’t help them get promoted.

> When a teammate asks for help find creative ways to make them look bad.

Yep, lots of idea-snatching, not crediting each other, teaming up to not including a particular team member to try to ensure that team member is the one that gets PIP

Regarding your last point, I’ve witnessed two different engineers cry on two different calls because they weren’t getting any support from senior engineers and were at risk of being pipped. It’s that ridiculous. And these were not incompetent engineers. One went to Meta and another went to Cloudflare after Amazon.

> The base is: $284.1K. If you can make it 4 years where the average employment length is a year you can make that $420k. But it will require 16 hour days, luck and some high degree political skills.

This is untrue for Amazon, at least in the US. Your total compensation is guaranteed for the first 4 years. If your total compensation in your offer was 500k, you'll get ~500k per year.

The first two years you're paid in cash so it'll match the offer exactly, the final two years you're paid in RSUs (stock based) with the stock price calculated at the time of the offer. Your salary may vary due to stock price. Historically it's gone up, not down, and this is how people have made 600k+, for example, as a senior engineer there.

Starting from year 2-3, you'll receive new stock grants that will vest in the years after 4 if you stay that long.

Source: I've received offer letters.

Presumably your comp changes if you get promoted in that time though?