Our entry-level hiring is done onto GS positions. Our experienced positions (requiring approximately three years of post-degree employment) are covered under the AcqDemo pay system (https://acqdemo.hci.mil). These experienced positions are generally a part of the NH-03 pay band, which correlates with the GS-12 and GS-13 grades of the General Schedule.
speaking for myself: i stick around because of the my soon-to-vest RSUs and because they gave me an official remote work exception. both of them are ticking time-bombs though.
1. I've got like $110k vesting this November. After that it starts to dry up quickly. $50k in May 2025 and another $50k in November 2025. After that it's basically nothing, unless my PCS next year comes with some re-up.
2. The remote work exception is indefinite, but i'm worried that if I'm one of a few remote employees on a big team that are all mostly in-office, I'm not going to really get as many opportunities otherwise.
Long story short, I think my time at Amazon is coming to an end soon, but I'm still sticking around for now.
Amazon comp is based on your annual performance review (OLR) and your pay band (level + job family). OLR has 5 tiers: least effective, highly valued 1-3, and top tier. Each of those tiers determines your band penetration.
Lets say your pay band is 100-200k. A new hire is theoretically better than 50% of their team, so they join at an HV3 and make 180k. If they receive HV3 at OLR, their total comp target (TCT) remains 180k. If it is their first OLR, they are probably not getting any additional RSUs because the cash-based comp of the first 2 years means they are already at their TCT.
If they made TT, their TCT goes to 200k and they would receive additional RSUs to reach that pay.
If they were HV2 or below, they would not get additional RSUs and their TC would slowly fall from 180k to 160k or below. If it fell below the HV2 level of 160k they would get some RSUs later to bump them back to TCT.
Amazon also assumes the stock will go up 15% year over year, so when RSUs are granted over a multiyear time horizon, you receive less based on assumed growth that would make you reach your TCT.
This past year they didn't do stock refreshers for most employees due to the rise in stock price. They calculate your total comp with an assumed 15% YoY increase in the stock price, and if it goes up more than that they decrease stock awards to keep you within the expected band.
I was rated TT this year and got <2.5% base increase and no stock, though I'm still under 2 years so I have vesting through 2026. It still feels shitty though, and part of why I'm looking to leave sooner rather than later.
Pocket used to be 3rd party for a moment, later Mozilla integrated it in Firefox and enabled integration for everyone by default. Some people didn't like it, but others love it. Pocket now belongs to Mozilla and is covered with the same privacy policy as other products and services from Mozilla (GDPR compliant before GDPR was a thing). There are plans to open-source Pocket the same way Firefox-sync is open-source and can be self-hosted. Some people just still think that browser is a stand-alone app that works without 3rd party code or integrations, they just never inspected network traffic of Firefox or any other browser.
It's still an issue because you can't uninstall it, it's hard to disable completely (and on Mobile the option is buried in various menus and hard to find), and they're removing RSS/Atom feed support which would be fine if it was just to split more things out into addons like they claim, but then they're encouraging that you use Pocket instead. Mozilla encouraging the use of their own proprietary service over an open standard is unacceptable and against their mission, and yet I still have to have Pocket pop up and show me ads every time I reinstall my browser until I can figure out how to stop it from downloading random stories about things.
Mozilla was developing a private Reading List feature based on Firefox Sync when they suddenly replaced it with Pocket. At the time, Pocket was a third party with a business model that included data mining. Mozilla owns Pocket now, but it still requires users to give up some of their privacy.
Mozilla employees denied for months that Pocket paid for the integration. Eventually it came out that there was a referral deal.
Mozilla acquired Pocket in early 2017 and said they would release the source code. That still hasn't happened.
To be fair, Mozilla now owns Pocket. It's not just some random extension. Chrome comes preinstalled with YouTube, Gmail etc. too. It's a bit of cross-property promotion and to be fair, Pocket is indeed quite useful.
They did not own it from the start, but they did have a special privacy agreement with Pocket regarding user data. Also, the acquisition was a result of user feedback, something Google would likely ignore.
You are missing a key apostrophe there, "'", which grammatically means that ambition belongs to fulfillment.
The author is saying that as he ages, the fulfillment he once felt by being ambitious (e.g. writing books, starting a company, learning new things) goes away.
Does that make sense?
I think it's important to keep in mind that this isn't a "factual" piece as much as it is his reflection on aging. It might be true to him but not true to others.
Ambitious people set high goals for themselves. High goals usually take time and energy to achieve. When you're old, you are on short supply of both, and so a person ambitious in their youth can no longer afford to be as such at say 85. You've only got so much time left, it's not worth it to be a prospector.
The author likens this state of affairs to that of an aging athlete who can no longer play the sport they loved playing in their youth. For an ambitious person, settling for a slower pace can be a difficult transition.
Unlike the others, I took it to mean the loss, the gap in one’s life, after their ambitions are fulfilled. If one has led an ambitious, successful life, their early life is filled with problems and purpose. Later years have lost that purpose, even, and perhaps especially, if you’ve been successful.
> Anyone ambitious who lives to be old or even _old_ endures the inevitable loss of ambition’s fulfillment.
I needed the whole sentence to parse that phrase. Here is what I understood: Ambitious persons who live to be old will struggle with the realization that although they remain ambitious (a certain type of stretching into the future this characteristic of _youth_), they lose the ability (energy, focus, commitment) to fulfil those ambitions. Matching those two conditions found inside one's self as the reality of one's self is a terrible struggle and out of that follows an inevitable sense of loss.
My only gripe using Firefox on Linux is that my 1Password doesn't interface with it as well (or at all). Though I guess that's an issue with 1Password than with Mozilla.
in all seriousness, how do you know when it's time to go see a mental health professional? at either extremes of mental health, it's pretty obvious whether you need professional help, but i have good days and i have bad days; most of the time I just "man up" and deal with it at the lows until i bounce back.
