You should almost always avoid working for low-margin businesses. Sure, if they are new and growing, there's an exception, but if their whole growth plan is premised around being low-margin, it's not going to be a great place to work and advance your career. Expenses such as compensation are always on management's radar.
I actually didn't get a job at Amazon because my pretty normal base salary requirements were higher than most of the execs in the company.
The deer in headlights wide-eyed look on my recruiter's face (after I had finished all the interviews) when I told him what I currently made in a smaller metro and what I was looking for is something that will be seared into my memory forever.
I can't remember if the word "salary cap" was used or not, but it was definitely implied.
I offered to accept a lower base with alternative compensation options (even vacation days), but it was already too rich for their blood.
I think they gave it some serious thought, but I got a call a week later that they simply couldn't do it.
I'd describe AWS pay as "competitive". Most all gigs provide you a decent signing bonus and stock grants. This lowers your base salary as all these items together are taken into your total compensation, which I believe is pretty much the norm up in Seattle for AWS/Google/Microsoft.
Your signing bonus is pro-rated and you pay it back if you quit before one year, and your moving expenses are also paid back over two years if you quit before then. Your stock grants vest heavily in the back-end over four years. Every year you get a review and new grants are included in your total compensation package as your "salary". It's a sort of lock-in system that helps keep you invested in the company as you keep earning stock etc, but that was my perspective. Nothing exorbitant, and that fits with the Amazon ethos of "frugal".
Yeah, that jives with what I was told. I think the stock grants mature over 4 years? I think the schedule was kind of interesting as well but I don't remember what it was, it wasn't 25/25/25/25 either.
To be honest, I think it was a miss-match in positional terminology. I was going for a PM role, which in my current career path is basically the CEO of a specific project or program for part of a company. (These programs can be very big, the largest program I ever worked on as part of the PM staff was north of $130m/yr. but for a wide variety of reasons I prefer the smaller $5-20m work, much more fun to run). Typical compensation is a base salary + specific performance bonuses + contract win bonuses (+ large option grants as bonuses in the kinds of companies that do that sort of thing).
I got the sense that at Amazon PM roles are much lower down the totem pole positionally and act more like coordinators in the organization and don't have as much agency as I was assuming. I was honestly just looking for a change of pace and probably would have accepted whatever they offered even if it was quite a bit lower than what I considered my market rate, but I fouled it up early on and didn't recover well.
If they're like PM roles in the rest of the Internet industry, then yes, they are basically CEOs of a specific project or program for part of a company. The problem is that in most large software companies, projects are generally quite small. So a PM might be in charge of an engineering team of 4-6 engineers that are working on one tiny widget on the page. The product as a whole is usually the responsibility of a VP.
Anecdotally, Amazon's pay scale is only competitive with other companies in the area if you ignore on-call and only look at starting salary/bonus (including stock compensation).
In silicon valley, they just pay a silicon valley wage, which belies the fact that they are in the south bay. Consequently, managers here have constant trouble convincing San Franciscan talent to work there - they just aren't very competitive. I have not seen anything spectacular in terms of a signing bonus, either.
Furthermore, they don't increase your salary over time, so after a while, that OK starting salary drops below the average.
That doesn't refute the original argument. Amazon might very well be a low-margin business that pays competitively (they gotta attract that talent) while working at a "grinding pace" (as in the article).
