It could simply be extremely small sample size, but I know 5 (!!) people personally who fall into this intersection. All of them are quite talented. All jumped ship from meh-paying start-ups to a high-paying role at AMZN after railing on AMZN the years prior for being an awful company. One of them even took a department leadership role (or whatever the title equivalent is) and cited a 3x increase in TC.

It could be that their disdain for AMZN was disingenuous virtue-signaling (supporting your thesis), or it could mean the money is just simply the trump card to their personal ethics (supporting my thesis).

Amazon is not so far ahead in comp that the type of dev being talked about has to go with them for a given TC. Until the last few months Amazon was barely competitive in FAANG, it's a very recent development that they've started shoveling money into offers.

So you could always go to another company competing with them for talent with a given offer and (assuming you performed well enough to justify it) you'd have no problem getting something similar. If there was a gap in comp after that you'd be talking single digit percentages, nothing near 3x.

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For most people in my circles Amazon is no longer a realistic choice for anything than using as a competing offer at a place like Google (which is known to lowball you without a competing offer).

And it's not even a philosophical or moral issue: Amazon just has a terrible reputation now due to URA/Focus shenanigans, on-call nightmare stories, etc... why go with the "worst-in-class" employer?

If you're good enough to get Amazon to give you some band busting offer, some other FAANG company likely will too and you just go with them. Amazon doesn't even have exciting work or prestige compared to the others anyways, so it's not like you're giving up some intangible benefit...

"Just simply get a competitive job offer from the revolving doors of the top-10 top-paying companies and you won't see a 3x increase" is absolutely true, but only useful if you're talking about employees of these revolving door companies. If your getting a TC of 180k at a startup that gave you options of no value, and you score a high enough position at AMZN (as apparently this ex-colleague of mine did), then seeing total comp over 4 years exceeding 550k/year—while perhaps not the norm—is totally possible.

It could be argued that $180k is not a fair number to judge a 3x increase on for the reason you state, but it is what it is, this is a real salary that real people get paid. Not everybody flocks to FAANG as their first career move.

The whole point is if you're getting a TC of 180k at a startup and Amazon offers you 550k/year, Facebook, Apple, Netflix and Google are all likely to do similar numbers.

You don't have to already be working at one.

In fact a good number of companies are likely to be closer to 550k/year than 180k since they're also aware they need to compete with FAANG offers.

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Meanwhile Amazon is not particularly easier to join than the rest of FAANG (modulo the specific team), they're not particularly more prestigious than the rest of FAANG, the work is not particularly more exciting than the rest of FAANG... meanwhile the culture aspect is a huge negative outlier.

Amazon almost has this cartoonish level of negativity hovering over it ever since things like URA and Focus have slowly come out to actually as real things... between all that and the on-call and the general work you'll be doing, it's just not an amazing choice.

How long are they going to last?

Also, are they working on Java 6?

These are important questions because Amazon pays 300K for Rust. That seems like a combo that makes folks wonder maybe let's give them a shot, right?

This is true, these specific individuals not writing Java 6. Three of the five are doing something along similar lines of what you describe: a cool stack + a cool problem that indeed made them say, "let's give them a shot."

I don't think it has to be one or the other. I know people who wouldn't work at certain companies and a lot who are working at those companies while holding their nose to get their paychecks.

Turns out financial + lifestyle security is a good antiethical motivator