The unwritten rules of negotiating with Meta
interviewing.io
interviewing.io
I found the whole process pretty dystopian – no idea what product you'll be working on, they first give you a generic interview and then you get matched; the people you interview with are clearly very detached from you as a person (I'm sure it's great to reduce bias in hiring, but it feels very weird) because they know they're unlikely to ever interact with you again whether you get hired or not.
Also didn't like that there was no talk of compensation range, so I wasn't sure if they could even match my salary (I know they pay very low comp in the UK compared to US)
What else did you expect? US wages in UK/EU? They don't pay higher wages in the US out of the goodness of their hearts, they pay it because the US market forces them to. They'd gladly pay European wages or below in the US if they could get away with it.
As the OP says in the article, I was also worried there was no clarity on what level I’d actually be, so I was worried they’d try to demote the role to M0 which on levels.fyi is lower than my comp was.
If you're already highly paid by your local market standards and you're also happy with your current job, it's not worth the hassle going trough a six stage interview as you've probably already reached the point of diminishing returns.
* bad recruiter, communicated poorly, mishandled scheduling
* interviewer was ice cold when I started performing poorly, could not hide is impatience to end ASAP
* ghosted
I get the impression the top tech companies also have the worst recruiting practices.
Looking at you, Amazon...
6 rounds of interviews is insane. a law that said that prospective employees must be paid for their time to interview at a rate equal to the published salary or wage would go a long way to cutting this kind of bullshit.
Personally I've found that the companies with intensive interview processes pay twice as much as everyone else, so in the long run I'm compensated for the extra time.
Spent around 4 hours doing a coding homework, followed by 7 interviews, then ghosted for a few days. Chased, and it was then a "thank you for your time, no ta" email.
The market was quite different back then.
Salary is unrealistic to discuss early when they don't know which specific role you will be filling, and how much they want you.
That said, for more experienced people the process tends to be much more personalized, to the point where the very first person you talk to may be the hiring manager or their superior.
The actual interviews were actually very well thought out, great no-bs questions focused around my experience in specific scenarios, and my approach to people management. Just very impersonal.
Does this mean that this kind of hiring process is not feasible in states where listing the salary in job postings is mandatory?
And you didn't even go to the office and see the Orwellian "MOVE FAST AND BREAK THINGS" and "WHAT WOULD YOU DO IF YOU WEREN'T AFRAID" posters, or the internal newsletters put over the urinals, so you can read about HHVM while taking a leak.
The main takeaway is with any negotiating, its all about the information. Meta is trying to get as much information out of you and you're trying to hedge that information in order to gain a favorable position.
I think the article points out some very good and effective means of managing the information to gain leverage to maximize your offer from Meta. There are some very good techniques outlined in the article which can be parlayed not just in your interactions with Meta, but any big company looking to hire you. The scheduling of interviews and time table for your offer are both techniques I've used in the past to gain a better offer from companies looking to hire me.
https://interviewing.io/blog/when-is-hiring-coming-back-pred...
But "FAANG" is an obsolete acronym...
Google => Alphabet, Facebook => Meta, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Netflix, Nvidia => to be added?
This yields "MAANNA"... if you are hired, of course. ^_^
One thing I have noticed is that in my experience (around 70 interviews total since I started giving interviews in 2021) the average performance on the coding portions dipped sharply around the time that our stock did. My theory is that the more talented candidates focused on companies with a better outlook and so it was weaker candidates that were making it to the technical interview stage. I've noticed that in the last few months I'm seeing candidates do better on the coding interviews which supports my theory.
That's a cool hypothesis. I think we can actually pull something similar: grab average performance in Meta-themed mock interviews on interviewing.io over time and graph it against the stock price.
There's something there... but it's not a very strong connection. Of course, mock interview performance isn't necessarily in lock step with how all candidates are performing in real interviews at Meta.
You meant taking interviews?
> Getting those offers doesn’t start when you’ve received your Meta offer. It starts months before. Make sure that you get enough initial conversations with other FAANGs, FAANG-adjacent companies, and late-stage sexy startups to end up with at least one other offer, ideally at least two.
This is insane. This is literally months of work, just for the chance to maybe get a job, maybe with a team you'd like to work for, maybe with a salary that reflects the work you'll be doing.
How badly do people want to work for Meta?
They pay pretty well and their stock is going up. Getting a job like that, where you could get promoted even higher, can easily be life changing.
The uncertainty of joining an unknown team is a little annoying, I'll give you that. But for a 350k - 700k do you really expect their interview process to be a couple of softball calls into an offer?
Thats life changing money, and I'm sure many people would be willing to put in a month or two for that. If your insensitive to compensation and more sensitive to the type of work you'll be doing, sure there are better options.
from any rational business pov, of course it's not.
I wrote a bunch about why sharing doesn't make sense and how to avoid it, while still managing your timeline: https://interviewing.io/blog/sabotage-salary-negotiation-bef...
That also doesn’t account for all the factors outside one’s control, such as speed of the processes. One might finish with an offer on the table weeks before others do, even if initiated at the same time.
But the advice of this article to "make sure you have other offers" is pretty much impossible to pull off in practice. If you have offers from startups, they're generally going to be for less than Meta is offering in the first place. And if you have better offers from the rest of "AANG", then the whole point is you can just take one of them. But this article starts with the premise that they're not doing much hiring right now, so I don't know how you're supposed to get those offers.
And all of this ignores the fact that coordinating the timing of offers, so that you have an open offer from another company, when Meta makes you their offer, is virtually impossible. You have no idea, when you start interviewing with another company, if they'll make you an offer in 3 days or 3 weeks or 2 months. And they generally give short deadlines as well.
So I don't really get what this article is trying to achieve. What Facebook is doing is pretty standard for corporations in a powerful hiring position, and the advice to try to counter it is nearly impossible to pull off. This is just how capitalism and labor markets go.
But, this article is definitely useful so people know how the process is working right now.
Sometimes the exploding offers are real, because a specific team or startup needs a single new employee with a very specific skillset yesterday, and if you don't take it they're going to make an offer to their next best choice -- and by the time you decide you're ready to take it, the position is filled.
And sometimes they're totally made up, to try to get you to take a lower offer because they want a decision in the next 3 days and the other company you're interviewing with is going to take another 3 weeks to decide. When the reality is that if you came back 3 weeks later, they'd still totally hire you, despite everything they said previously. "I swear we never do this, but with your interview performance, we'll write up a new offer letter."
So it's always just a gamble.
But at the same time, you can also do it to companies -- I did once. I had an offer from one company that was exploding at the end of the week, and I went to the company I wanted to work for that had been delaying scheduling interviews, and said here's the deal: if you want to consider hiring me, you've got 2 days to interview me and make a decision. That lit a fire under their butt, I interviewed the next day, and they made me their offer at 4 pm Fri, when my other offer expoded at 5 pm. And so I got the job at the company I did want, faster than I ever would have otherwise!.(And possibly for more money, but I'll never know -- they simply matched my other offer which was pretty high at a really boring terrible company.)
I would really encourage people that don't mind big companies to study for the interviews and just get the job. I promise you that you'll someday run into the algorithms questions you studied in real life. And you'll grow your software engineering career and make a lot of money. Dismissively writing it off feels cool, but you're really missing out on a good experience.
(I don't work for a FAANG anymore, but I did once, and it was fun. Super smart coworkers. Interesting work. Great pay.)
Of course, that market looked nothing like this one.
Software seems like a pretty clear winner when it comes to compensation and what you have to do for that compensation.
Edit: Medicine and law are the only close competitors I can think of, and I didn't need to bury myself in debt or do 10 plus years of specialized training to get paid to build software.
Consulting seems like something you need ivy league status and/or the right connections to get into, and probably requires lots of travel, and again, how many of these jobs are there?
If you're half decent at some corporate friendly language, you can have a pretty above average salary without needing to work all that hard. Current market notwithstanding, there are loads of people employed doing this, some of them entirely from the comfort of their own homes.
Consider the possibility of permanent damage to your health - mental and/or physical.
Not op, but I’m guessing the answer is because Meta is showing that they are more than willing to be the abuser in an abusive relationship if/when the labor market gives them the leeway to do so.
Maybe this is some sort of hiring strategy to select extremely compliant employees, but if so, I imagine it will backfire over the long term since overly compliant employees typically just do what they are told and don’t really lead or innovate.
I’m guessing a lot of this behavior is driven by internal KPIs (esp. at recruiting and hr), some/many of which may not have the incentives aligned optimally with overall org goals.
That said, I would never put up with this sort of treatment, especially from a company with a scarlet letter reputation like Meta.
My “negotiation” rebuttal (after their offer) would be something like “here are the teams I am willing to work with, and here are my minimum total comp requirements”, and most importantly, I would have a compelling BATNA (best alternative to a negotiated agreement).
I’m pretty sure I would never get hired at a place like Meta except via a high-priced acquisition, and I’m totally ok with that. I am very content running my own company.
This is generally how most people approach the negotiation, no?
Definitely not, or if they do, they cave to whatever the counter is.
Edit: I see many people state their preferences in negotiations, but they rarely take non-negotiable stances with large corps when negotiating working conditions. To be fair, I’ve seen the other extreme, where people have non-negotiables that are not feasible or realistic (e.g., reserved parking in a building with no parking, 2x-3x market rate for entry level positions, etc.). That said, I think these are rare, and these excessive asks reveal the wackadoodles fairly efficiently.
I’m guessing a decent percentage of those hired take the team they are assigned to at roughly the total comp that they were initially offered (e.g., maybe a few thousand more rather than 100k more… or maybe just the initial offer).
People default to being bad at negotiation, and many aren’t willing to walk when an offer is insulting. There’s some room for discussion about accepting offers and then bolting when the labor market shifts towards labor, but I’m not sure that’s optimal.
There's nothing special or challenging about the programming or system design problem you'd find at a company like Facebook.
The unwritten rule is, we'll pay you generously so long as you surrender your dignity and ethics at the door.
You'll be working on exciting, cutting edge products to;
- divide society
- stoke envy and vanity
- spread disinformation
- drive young women to madness and suicide
- manipulate politics
- sell people stuff they don't need and can't afford
- yadda yadda yadda...
> Is it a lot?
That really depends on what sort of person you are.
The challenge with negotiation is that, like most things, the only way to get better at it is to practice. But a typical employee almost never gets to practice negotiating, other than once every couple years and maybe when buying a house.
Even if you're in sales, or recruiting, and you negotiate every day, it's still not the same as negotiating for your own salary. It's better than nothing though.
IMO one of the best things you can do for your career (and life) is to spend some time in a position where you do a lot of negotiating. Maybe that means founding a startup, or maybe it means working for a car dealership. But the more you can practice this skill - because it is a skill - the more you'll benefit from it throughout the rest of your life.
The best, most generally applicable advice I ever received about negotiating was while raising my first VC round. We got the first offer, so I asked our advisor what to do. He said "make a market. Get another one." If you don't have another offer, you're not negotiating. You're begging. ALWAYS get another offer. Yes, it sounds like "draw the rest of the owl" but it really is the one weird trick to winning a negotiation. Everything falls into place when you've got a market of offers. You can play them back and forth to maximize each of them, and then choose whichever comes out on top.
The other advice is to find the knobs you can turn. In employment negotiation that would be things like salary, equity, company stage, WFH policies. Use these knobs as "justification" when asking for a higher bid (which you might do multiple times as you go back and forth). "Well, they're offering $50k lower but they're WFH..."
Oh and of course, never say yes to the first offer. Everything is negotiable and the sharpest counterparties expect you to negotiate, so if you don't, you're accepting their intentionally low offer.
(The blog post also has a footnote alluding to, and warning against, the sociopathic solution to this, which is to simply lie or exaggerate about your other offers. Personally I would never do this, because it's a small world and you don't want word to spread. But let's say you think you can get away with it or don't mind getting caught. In this case if they call your bluff, you'll either need to fold (and they'll eventually see you didn't end up working somewhere else), or go deeper into the fraud by making a fake offer letter. It's never a good sign when you're going deeper into fraud.)
What is the data to support this?
Our sales data has lined up with previous events like hiring freezes and hiring booms (e.g., when Amazon briefly when on a hiring spree after Google and Meta froze in 2022). You can see more historical data here: https://interviewing.io/blog/when-is-hiring-coming-back-pred...
Yeah I'm just gonna take my chances on that one
Sorry if the company is willing to lie and extort me I have no guilty conscious doing it back. Hell, I'd even argue that it'd be incompetent to NOT do it back for your own benefit.
For the people in the back, being honest makes you, and me, and everyone else undesirable. We've all had moments, days, even weeks of frustration, anger, disillusionment, technical incompetence, days we'd rather spend fighting with a gorilla than showing up for work, but we certainly don't say that when asked, "How do you handle conflict at work?" So I usually lie and present myself as a saint, but in a pragmatic way. I don't want to be perceived as a weak person, after all.
And can you even get one of these jobs outside of California? I would not leave Arizona as a home owner for this nonsense.
Also, 'Homo sapiens' should be renamed 'Homo ignis'. Sign the petition.
Has anyone ever uttered those words?
(Facebook Apple Google Microsoft Amazon Netflix)
There's an even bigger over supply of labor now more than ever. So, META is using this to their advantage. The author states that this strategy is short sighted and will show future attrition from Meta because eventually the industry demand for SWE will recover. I'm just not sure about that last part. Musk has shown that you can profitably run a software company with 80% less staff. I would imagine other companies will aspire to this goal as well, especially now that the days of crazy growth are over. We're no longer in a growth economy anymore.
EDIT: I have not confirmed that X is profitable. And I don't know their numbers. but, I assumed after laying off 70 to 80% of staff, it probably should be right?
Is this a fact? Now that x is private do we know if they are profitable or not?
Freedom of speech then got worse because he fired all the legal team.
Musk would probably be the last person on Earth to admit that X isn't doing so well, so I wouldn't really trust him. The most insightful thing he's said is "Fuck you, Bob Iger" which doesn't sound particularly indicative of advertising success. Meanwhile, he's advertised X payments, X email, etc. and these have not materialized (much like "FSD is a year away" in ... 2017).
For some products, at some point it makes sense to hunker down and go into maintenance mode. Not every business can keep growing exponentially.
I think Elon's vision is to make X an "everything platform" like they have in China. Someone is going to have to type in a lot of code to make that happen.