Probably increased salary and switch to permanent remote. Amazon is notorious for their frugality and they recently doubled their maximum salary cap to 350k. They would only have done this to stay competitive in the current job market. This implies that many of their existing employees are underpaid relative to their peers at comparable companies and they've likely seen a large uptick in attrition. Not to mention attrition begets more attrition, especially if it's "influential" employees who are leaving.
It’s just a little amazing to imagine that people doing the same work in different places of the country have such huge gaps in salary caps. I think the national average for a high-level software engineer is less than $150k per year.
Things are bigger anywhere. My colleagues and I thought we’re hot shit managing 5-7k applications and infrastructure. Amazon probably runs 20,000 orgs like mine.
Also, times are good and rates are crazy. Even at VARs, you can make a lot of cash. I have a buddy who went from $150k to $600k. The guy paid off his mortgage and is at a point where he could burn out and work at Home Depot if he needed to.
A lot of institutional knowledge in these massive tech corporations is disappearing and we're starting to reach the tipping point.