[rohitnair]

The comments in the original blog post suggests a gap of 60k with the offer. Your comment makes sense only if he was interviewing for a Principal Engineer position or something, but instead was offered an SDE-I position. Plus I'm pretty sure very few (if any) non-Principal SDEs at Amazon actually get 200K in the first year.

[mturmon]

Yes. If you can be promoted directly from SDE-I to SDE-II, there should not be a ~60K gap between. I've had the described thing happen (start interview by assuming level 3, but hire at level 2), and the gap is more like 20K. In other words: they should have known better.