> When Warren Buffett studies a company, he doesn’t see a checklist of mental models he has to apply
He's probably trying to explain the guidance from Farnam Street. The most popular answer on their internal forum on how to use/apply mental models was to treat mental models as checklist. I was a Farnam Street member until last year.
...and it's not always simple to practice/apply mental models after reading them in a list. I used to be a member of Farnam Street until last year. Most of the members weren't sure how they could apply the mental models per their internal forum. The top answer was to use the list of models as a checklist.
It does matter because a company's valuation is driven by EBIDA and multiple, both of which depend on the type of business (e.g. SaaS, Cloud Services, Real Estate etc). In fact, Amazon's valuation jumped significantly starting 2015 primarily because of AWS, which is a pure tech play, not so much by its retail business. (In 2015 Amazon started reporting AWS revenue and margins)
In 2014-2015, if you were a PM / SR PM at Amazon/Google/FB and moved to Bangalore, you would've gotten a Director (at large tech companies) or VP role (at mature startups) easily and would've made the about the same comp as you were making the US. Not sure what the situation is now.
Have heard many Amazon stories around review being used by managers as a revenge tool. A true incident - a friend of mine and his coworker (same level) didn't get along. Their manager left and this coworker was made the manager since he had longer tenure. My friend received a PIP in 2 months flat and ended up leaving the company rather than put up a fight.
There could be issues around how to interpret this data, especially around stock. Those with a few years of experience are probably reporting a significant vested stock as part of the comp. Alternatively, there could also be cases where folks added the whole stock options that they were granted, even if they've not vested. The package that I got at Amazon as a fresh grad school graduate more than 5 years ago would've been $360K if I added everything... but that was not my ANNUAL comp. When I talk to folks at Amazon, they typically don't report the annual number, which is lower.
Agree, I'm a PM at a top software/internet company and engineers with half of my experience make greater package... Amazon is a mixed bag but FB, Linkedin (prior to acuisition), Google, Netflix all skew towards SWEs making higher packages when experience & performance are comparable