Some people use the argument "you didn't give stocks back when price was going up". That's true, but there are unique feature of Amazon compensation package that make the current situation... peculiar.
This is a short primer: your compensation is composed of a base salary and RSU, which is calculated as a dollar value and converted to shares. When the RSU vest (twice a year) you get the shares at whatever market value. If they've gone up (as they historically did a lot) you win. If they go down (as the last ~2 years) you lose.
This is fair TBH. When you take part of your comp in stocks, you are assuming some amount of risk.
There are a few problems though.
a) Amazon bakes in a 15% stock price increase when calculating future compensation, and they adjust the amount of shares accordingly. This means that they effectively limit the employees upside. Also, think how ridiculous it is when your salary assumed a 15% price increase and it went down 30% instead.
b) Amazon has compensation bands, and target each employee comp to a certain spot in the band (say 50%) based on performance. If you are above band (for example, due to stock appreciation) you get nothing or a nominal amount. Notice this is different from similar Big Tech which issue "memoryless refreshers" i.e. stock refreshers are independent of previous ones.
c) Amazon issues raises one year out after the performance reviews happen. So say you did a good job in 2022, and you get your performance review in 2023, then they will issue new shares for 2024. I believe it also used to work like that for promotions (i.e. you get promoted now, but you'll see your raise next cycle), but they changes it recently.
d) Unlike comparable companies it doesn't have performance bonus, spot bonuses, or others.
We are waiting for our performance reviews to happen but rumor has they are not giving increases to make up for the lost stock value, meaning many people will be underwater.
Funnily enough this creates a very weird situation due to another quirk of Amazon compensation system. New offers include a 4 year compensation package, with most of the comp as cash for years 1 and 2, and backloaded RSU for years 3 and 4. Afterwards there is a "cliff" and comp is decided on a rolling yearly basis.
So the newest hires are going to be virtually unaffected while tenured employees will lose a big chunk of their comp. This is compounded by the fact that many recent offers have been overpriced w.r.t. existing employees due to the incredibly competitive job market.
At the end of the day this might sound like the world smallest violin coming from overpaid tech workers. In any event it has created huge disparities due to timing and luck rather than skills or value. Curious to see what'll happen later this year and next.