Recent comments in /f/technology

EnchantedMoth3 t1_j9drga4 wrote

Reply to comment by VelveteenAmbush in Amazon Corporate Workers Face Pay Reduction After Shares Slip by brooklynlad

Stakeholder > stockholder. We need market reform. 85% of the markets are owned by 10% of people. When workers perform well, and their company makes profit, the company uses those profits to buy back stocks. Effectively, the value of labor is funneled to the top in our current system. To fix this, we need fiscal policy that focuses on workers, rather than capital. I’ve no issue with people investing in companies, and getting rewarded for the success their capital helps create, but it should more of a risk than it is today. In this iteration of our system, all of the risk has been outsourced to the workers. Wall-Street doesn’t lose, the American tax-payers are always their to bail them out, whether we want to, or are even told about it, or not. So, the people providing the labor, creating the value, and taking all the risk…those people should be able to own homes, afford health care, afford to raise a family, to dream, and work hard to achieve that dream. But that’s not the current reality in our shareholder first markets. Eventually, this devolves into oligarchy, or some form of autocracy, most likely to play out via fascism…especially if you allow outside money into politics, because the working class loses power, they lose economic equality, which all other equality follows, and governments fail, due to caring for only a single group.

You talk about other systems that end in autocracy, and/or misery but capitalism does too. All economic systems trend towards the consolidation of power and wealth. It is the end-stage of all economics. A lot of older civilizations would reset their economies every x years, due to this.

That is the result of the introduction of humans into theory. It’s the result of the types of people who seek money and power. Greed is just another addiction, no different than heroin, and different people are more susceptible to it. It is the the role of your chosen governmental system to hold this trend back. Ultimately however, it falls on the workers, the citizens, to hold those in power responsible. Capitalism has killed just as many people as communism, don’t kid yourself otherwise. Capitalism is to blame for immense global suffering, and I’ll remind you, America has backed nearly every authoritarian dictator globally…hell, we sat most of them on the throne to further capitalism, and enrich a few. War is a racket of the rich. We export a lot of the consequences of our system, from pain and suffering, to pollution. Out of sight, out of mind.

That being said, I do think a form of capitalism is probably the best choice for a society, with some aspects of socialism sprinkled in. The answer ultimately lies in regulations, and making economic equality the top priority. You cannot allow a certain group to amass wealth untold, or else you increase the number of those in society who can be bought, because they have no chance of ever earning the amount they’re offered.

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darwinkh2os t1_j9dr3jh wrote

Reply to comment by Longjumping_Worry184 in Amazon Corporate Workers Face Pay Reduction After Shares Slip by brooklynlad

It does suck - luckily for the L4s and L5s it's not that bad - 50% RSUs is really at L6 and/or manager roles. Levels.fyi accurately shows fairly up-to-date compensation.

It "sucks" for the VPs, which I suspect - like another commenter here - is why they raised the max base pay up significantly last year. They raised that cap in Feb 2022 just after the first post-Covid slump (which followed earnings the VPs would have known about).

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darwinkh2os t1_j9dq5jr wrote

Reply to comment by nrfmartin in Amazon Corporate Workers Face Pay Reduction After Shares Slip by brooklynlad

I've got a bit under a year left of sign-on that pays out monthly before the monthly-take-home cliff. Then I will take home base pay and will have to risk twelve months of work without RSUs to get the year-three RSU pay-out. And that's if I don't get laid off or face a fun set of MBRs and COEs in that interim.

So I'll have this year of still-cash compensation and decide in that year what to do for next year.

It has been very very hard to not think of my current inflated compensation as "salary." But I'll try to lower my expectations again.

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ThePrince14 t1_j9dp6cm wrote

Reply to comment by gqreader in Amazon Corporate Workers Face Pay Reduction After Shares Slip by brooklynlad

Ya all these people complaining have no clue how these sorts of compensation packages actually work.

If someone is dumb enough to think their yearly RSU compensation is set in stone and uses it in their budgeting/financial decision making, that’s on them. Everyone I know just lives off their base and counts bonuses/RSUs as an investment/gravy for the future.

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