I think I heard (possibly here) that Netflix actually does stop billing inactive accounts. Never tested that myself though, and the time before being considered inactive may be longer than 1 month.
The longest time I've worked overseas for was 3 months, so it's probably different to your experience. But I found the different content to be good. I had a whole new selection of shows and movies to watch since aside from the originals the content is pretty different between countries.
Interesting to see this exists, I wrote a similar thing for myself which acts like a personal diary. As well as helping with reflection, it's really useful come performance review time. Answering "what did I do this past (year/X months)" becomes just reading the entries you've logged.
Much easier than reading git history, and trying to remember other items that aren't in source control.
I find this vesting schedule being brought up strange (I see this somewhat frequently). On hiring you get a signing bonus, in my case the value of this bonus made my comp almost flat for those 4 years if the share price remained constant. If anything, this additional cash, which was given each month, was a positive when starting out. Vesting is inherently lumpy, and makes managing cash flow a bit more tricky. I also received base increases despite a very large stock price increase.
On 401k, I'm not in the US so cannot comment.
Your other points around timelines and pages don't match my experience, but I assume that in such a large company they do exist. I have certainly heard of a team where the high sev counts were similar to the numbers you give. Perhaps I am lucky to have missed them, or others are unlucky to have experienced them.
> On hiring you get a signing bonus, in my case the value of this bonus made my comp almost flat for those 4 years if the share price remained constant.
Signing bonus is not unique to Amazon. You can get a signing bonus anywhere in the industry, along with a sane vesting schedule of 25% each year or a front loaded schedule to prevent 4 year cliffs.
> Vesting is inherently lumpy, and makes managing cash flow a bit more tricky.
It doesn't have to be lumpy. Google stocks vest monthly here in US. Also, how is it tricky to manage?
I worked with a power company in New Zealand that had load shedding like this (although more for water heaters IIRC). They transmitted signals on the power lines themselves at a much higher frequency than the AC delivery. The end devices also needed to support it.
Plus, you can get great money working at one of the FAANGs that are here. It's not quite at the level of the US, but higher than the companies the GP was referring to from what I've heard of their comp.
Mainly the fact it's extensible. If you have something you do commonly do you can set up a shortcut for it. I use it a lot at work for quickly jumping to specific pages of internal websites, or converting hex codes to decimal. It also replaces spotlight.
