[tjdetwiler]

Amazon actually tells employees that they have a "total compensation" philosophy, which means that when the value of unvested shares increases then Amazon will take that into account when issuing new grants (ex: as part of the performance review and compensation process).

For example, if Amazon thinks you should be paid $250k per year and your total comp for the next year is at $300k based on the value of your granted but not yet vested stock awards, then Amazon will not award anymore stock awards to vest in that year. This is different from most other companies that usually just give you a stock award with a standard vest schedule (ex: 25% vest over 4 years).

Amazon has justified this buy telling employees that if the stock drops below your TC target, then they'll award more shares to make you whole. So the question is are employees going to be down from their TC target, or from an inflated compensation number from during the pandemic when many employees were likely making more than their TC targets.

At least this was how it worked when I was employed at Amazon in around 2017.

[oceanplexian]

Yeah, i worked at AWS and 100% heard leadership make this statement, even heard them make statements that they would issue more RSUs to make employees whole if the TCT dropped too much. Lots of us joked that that would never happen annd TCT was a one-way street- I guess we were proven right.

[loeg]

This was still the case when I was considering an Amazon offer in late 2020.