Most of his direct reports at L10 are going to be $M’s and for those with larger scopes, $5M+ is very easily possible. For someone like Dave on the S-team he’s going to be $10M+ and I couldn’t even begin to guess at how much over that.
It isn’t incredibly uncommon for L8 offers to be made around $1.5M USD today in AWS - the market is very competitive for excellent leaders in Seattle. Long-time employees can potentially make more: appreciation of their equity; you have specialized or niche knowledge which commands a premium; retained because AMZN can’t easily replace you.
In summary, senior leadership positions at Amazon are extremely well compensated. It’s very rare indeed to lose someone good to another company over money.
Throwaway because its taboo for an L8 or L10 to be openly discussing $M+ compensation packages.
You were in the Andy Jassy world- Pay is higher.
The Dave Clark world pays less- despite what you hear elsewhere.
Every Large FC has an L8 director... they don't all make 1.5Mil. Smaller FCs are normally lead by lower levels but again... that pay would never scale.
It is usually some combination of consultants using bogus logic, and other executives trying to bump their own pay by hiring very expensive colleagues.
I have never been convinced it is worth paying these kind of numbers. I have looked at all kinds of businesses, I have looked at businesses where productivity is power-law distributed (i.e. one good employee can be worth 10,000+ bad ones) and it never adds up...again, even if you look at situations where productivity is very unequal (which it isn't in almost every business, and very much isn't at Amazon)...it doesn't work.
One particularly toxic part of Amazon is that they pride themselves on only hiring the "elite". Well, if your market cap is hundreds of billions and you hire tens of thousands people a year...you aren't hiring the "elite" (genuinely, there are only three or four CEOs over the past five decades who are truly proven execs). So you have this awful culture where everyone views themselves as this unbelievably valuable "alpha dog". Inevitably, this results in them lighting huge stacks of other people's cash on fire (the real danger isn't hiring the 80 IQ guy, it is the guy with a 110 IQ who thinks he is a 160 IQ guy).
The majority of AMZN's tech employees (ie. average SDE) know they are not elite and often talk about how they consider themselves failures for not being getting into better paying companies.
I didn't say either that employees are elite or that they think themselves to be elite. I said that is the hiring culture, which is something quite different.
There are consultancies that specialize in compensation benchmarking. One is Radford Consulting. They survey companies for pay info. Imagine they also get intel from clients.
It isn’t incredibly uncommon for L8 offers to be made around $1.5M USD today in AWS - the market is very competitive for excellent leaders in Seattle. Long-time employees can potentially make more: appreciation of their equity; you have specialized or niche knowledge which commands a premium; retained because AMZN can’t easily replace you.
In summary, senior leadership positions at Amazon are extremely well compensated. It’s very rare indeed to lose someone good to another company over money.
Throwaway because its taboo for an L8 or L10 to be openly discussing $M+ compensation packages.