[keeptrying]

At Amazon you get paid when you create whole new businesses which you used to pitch to Bezos.

Incremental improvement was rewarded through the regular stock and pay process.

Thus no one cared enough to quickly switch to LLMs.

Suoer interesting how org design - even when brillaint can be severely lacking.

[orwin]

And I think they're better for it.

We use both azure ans AWS at my current org. We recently had an internal 'hackathon' to try Llms in both orgs (Claude for AWS, ChatGPT4 for Azure) on our knowledge bases.

Clearly, we couldn't differentiate them on response quality, not in 3 days, but on how easy and integrable the LLM was, AWS was superior, even for our mostly Azure teams, weirdly.

[laidoffamazon]

I don't know if that's really true - I've heard people who spin up successful teams can get bonuses (which basically don't exist at Amazon) for doing so. In that sense, incremental improvement isn't really rewarded at all - there's very little to no pay-for-performance as a concept at Amazon.

[malfist]

We're one of the few companies that count stock growth against you during comp reviews.

[keeptrying]

LOL - seriously? Nice.

In NYC they do this all the time. They'd also nitpick the hell out of your work.

You'd feel like a complete loser after your review. Pretty hilarious when thinking back about it.

[malfist]

Yeah, we do yearly comp reviews not with stock grant numbers, but with total comp targets.

So if you do mediocre one year and get a mediocre grant, then kick it into high gear next year, but the stock grew in the meantime, you're told "tough luck" and not rewarded for the extra effort. Or at least stock growth is deducted from your effort reward.

It's absolutely insane, but Amazon is the easiest faang to get into

[jedberg]

The truly insane part was that if the stock went down, they just said "too bad that's the risk you took with stock comp". They didn't true up if the stock price went down unless you were lucky enough to get part of the small pool of stock your director got to spread around for top performers.

They basically set aside your stock when you start, and you the employee absorb all the risk of downside and get punished for upside.

[malfist]

"you're an owner" is very much Amazon's "heads I win, tails you lose"