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The unwritten rules of negotiating with Meta

150 points by leeny 3y ago

crooked-v 3y ago
And here I am as some sap who hasn't even gotten past the screening interview because I didn't spend a couple of months first memorizing Leetcode problems.
arsh4151 3y ago
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megan_ 3y ago
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Vistoria 3y ago
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gia4151 3y ago
[flagged]
beckthompson 3y ago
Interesting article! I didn't realize the choke hold Meta has on hiring at the moment. Sounds like they are really abusing it...
pompino 3y ago
>Meta vs. other FAANGs, and that lets us guess (pretty accurately) how much hiring is actually happening at these companies. What is the data to support this?
- leeny 3y ago
  Author here. We sell mock interviews at interviewing.io, in the styles of specific companies. Sales data lets us see what's popular, which in turn, let's us gauge how much hiring is happening there. 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-predictions-for-2024 https://interviewing.io/blog/when-is-hiring-coming-back-pred...
  - pompino 3y ago
    Okay, thanks for replying. I know its probably hard or impossible to come by the actual hiring numbers, so I was curious.
jackblemming 3y ago
I don’t know why you would want to work for a company that treats you like this. I guess some people will put up with a lot for money.
- saagarjha 3y ago
  Is it a lot? You’re looking at hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars for a one-month interaction, of which the time you actually spend is a few days at most. Why wouldn’t you put up with it? Especially if your other options are not generally much better.
  - jackblemming 3y ago
    I didn’t get into software to chase money. If I did, that’s a pretty dumb decision as there’s way more profitable careers. And working at Facebook seems pretty hellish.
    - ifyoubuildit 3y ago
      I also didnt get into software to chase money, but I'm curious what those careers are, and what the cost of entry is for those careers? 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.
      - csmiller 3y ago
        Finance, consulting, some kinds of real estate-adjacent jobs.
        ifyoubuildit 3y ago
        Finance seems like a fair enough answer, although it always sounded a bit like a meat grinder, and how many of these jobs are there? 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.
saagarjha 3y ago
I’ve never really found it useful to hide the fact that you’re interviewing elsewhere from a recruiter. If anything, it often lets you align timelines and indicate your time constraints to them beforehand, rather than them trying to send you an exploding offer for no reason. And it often skips them giving you a garbage, below-market offer because it makes no sense to do that and then have you walk immediately when someone else offers $100k more.
- leeny 3y ago
  Author here. The main reason not to share is that if you share at the beginning of the process, they will inevitably ask you how things are going with Company X, Y, and Z. Let's say you get rejected from a few of them. It's going to be increasingly hard to hide that, and now you lost leverage. Better to share when you control the flow of information. 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-before-even-start https://interviewing.io/blog/sabotage-salary-negotiation-bef...
  - saagarjha 3y ago
    I mean, you don’t have to tell them the exact details. Just tell them you’re in the loop with other companies, and you plan to have offers start coming in around $DATE, and would like to align things so you can evaluate them together. Of course if you end up not getting any other offers that might be a problem but if they understand that you are actively involved in multiple options I find that recruiters will move things for you. I think this is true even if they’re secretly trying to hurt you (e.g. by running their process faster and hoping that you take their offer first) because if you’re firm about your timelines (and you commit to it!) nobody really wants to be in a process where they string you along for a month and get you to the offer stage and then miss signing you on because they didn’t want to wait a few days to get extra information from you (about, say, how you’d really love to join Meta if only they bumped their comp $20k).
    - leeny 3y ago
hacker_newz 3y ago
God this process sounds awful. Why would anyone want to work for a company like that?
- throwanem 3y ago
  For the hope of retiring at 35.
  - burningChrome 3y ago
    There are plenty of other ways to retire at 35 without having to put yourself through that clown show.
    - theossuary 3y ago
      Like what?
      - burningChrome 3y ago
        [flagged]
        marssaxman 3y ago
        > doesn't take much to retire at 35. All you need is about $5-$8M You live in a rarefied world, my friend.
        emestifs 3y ago
        You quite delusional about a number of things. It's not even worth pointing them out.
        matkoniecz 3y ago
        For start, day trading is effectively gambling. Your advise is horrible and will harm people taking it seriously. And earning 8 millions as "social media influencer" by age 35 is so unhelpful advise that gambling would be more effective...
leeny 3y ago
Author here. I said this in the post, and I'll say it again here. If I hear from any reliable sources at Meta that I'm wrong, I'll gladly retract and issue a public apology.
- nicolashahn 3y ago
  I'm a SWE at Meta and do technical interviews. I'd say you're right on most things except down-leveling. There are some very specific things interviewers are looking for in the behavioral and system design interviews and I believe they accurately predict how an engineer will perform at a given level within Meta, which may be different than how they would at the "same" level at another company. In my experience and from speaking to other FAANG engineers, Meta expects engineers to do a lot more than just code past E4. E5+ ("senior") should be able to do some of what a PM does, generate impactful projects on their own, and be able to be a team lead (although that's usually for E6+), plus some more stuff. I know at least I was definitely leveled fairly, and even struggled a bit to get used to the expectations when I first started out.
  - leeny 3y ago
    Thank you for responding! Would you say the leveling criteria has changed in the last year? I ask because, while the current criteria could very well be legitimate, candidates weren't down-leveled nearly as often until the downturn.
    - nicolashahn 3y ago
      There's no official policy or guidance that has changed on the expectations for the behavioral/sys design interviews I know of, which is fairly transparent. I saw your stat for 55% self reported down-levels, do you have a stat from before the downturn? 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.
maxfurman 3y ago
So, to get decent (market rate) compensation from Meta, you need 1-3 job offers of similar prestige and comp level. But if you have those, why would you ever take a job at Meta?
- cloverich 3y ago
  The same reason as any other, the mix of WLB, compensation and career growth. But notably the article isn't stating Meta will meet other offers, they may also beat other offers. Its merely saying they won't be compelled to offer in their upper range of compensation if they don't believe you have any leverage, i.e. why would they negotiate if they don't need to. Also unspoken is that both the lower and upper are still high -- I wouldn't be surprised if the lower is higher than a majority of other companies' median or even upper brackets.
photochemsyn 3y ago
Funny how people still call the corporate conglomerate tech outfits 'FAANG' apparently because 'fang it, bro' sounds tough and cool and predatory in the comic-book sense - but really they're steadily transforming themselves into their monopolistic predecessors (e.g. Ma Bell), so a new acronym - MAMAA (Meta/Amazon/Microsoft/Alphabet/Apple) - is needed. Also, 'Homo sapiens' should be renamed 'Homo ignis'. Sign the petition.
- xboxnolifes 3y ago
  > 'fang it, bro' sounds tough and cool Has anyone ever uttered those words?
- Traubenfuchs 3y ago
  Team FAGMAN all the way! (Facebook Apple Google Microsoft Amazon Netflix)
jobs_throwaway 3y ago
> You might say, “Aline, why can’t I just make up offers?” We could never, in good conscience, advise that. It’s unethical, and though I’d argue that while Meta’s negotiation practices are also unethical, that’s not the way to win. Outside of ethical considerations, while the risks of getting caught are low, they’re not zero. Lying about offers, in our mind, is the last refuge of the incompetent. Yeah I'm just gonna take my chances on that one
- Jcampuzano2 3y ago
  I like how they argue that its unethical and for that reason you shouldn't do it, while also stating they know that Meta itself is unethical in their own negotiation. 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.
  - saagarjha 3y ago
    Ok, and then Meta hands you an offer and then when you go to sign it suddenly becomes $100k less. Do you not think there are generally agreed upon standards that people negotiate with?
    - jobs_throwaway 3y ago
      I don't think 'we're going to lowball you by $50-100k / year unless you can show us a competing offer' is an agreed upon standard, no.
      - saagarjha 3y ago
        You think wrong, then. Making an offer that is out of the market range is very standard in a negotiation (even if you don’t think it’s very fair).
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- 3y ago
smrtinsert 3y ago
Hilarious, glad I'll never need to work for them.
chatmasta 3y ago
There is some really excellent, concrete advice in this post. This is definitely a company that is on the side of candidates it works with. 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.)
JohnMakin 3y ago
I honestly thought this was all common knowledge, but I guess that's from friends having gone through meta process and myself as well. The only way I've seen people get super big starting packages at any of these FAANG's is by leveraging multiple faang's against each other. But good lord, that's a lot of work.
- diarrhea 3y ago
  A single process is already demanding, especially while holding a 9-5 job. Two simultaneous ones I can see. For three or more, I don’t reckon working full time at the same time is possible. 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.
LudwigNagasena 3y ago
Is it really a lowball offer if you can’t command higher compensation from any other company?
- tarxvf 3y ago
  There might be a difference between having an offer right now versus being able to have an offer later (or having had an offer earlier). Especially when everything about the processes involved is trying to shorten the period the offer is actually open.
- bradly 3y ago
  This is why the author says it is critical to have other offers.
- zug_zug 3y ago
  Well it may be, if the work expectation at meta is say 40% higher than the other company (and likelihood of being laid off is 40% higher too).
- maxvt 3y ago
  All offers get weighed against WLB, perceived bureaucracy, perceived reputation of the company, perceived alignment with role and level, perceived value that the company derives from the position, and the expected competition for the role. The combination of all of these could lead someone to reject or negotiate the highest dollar value offer.
- smrtinsert 3y ago
  I guess market rate isn't a thing? Time is a limiting factor with regard to getting offers. What this is saying is don't waste time on making Meta your first offer.
- distrill 3y ago
  from an eng pov, of course it is. from any rational business pov, of course it's not.
- lokar 3y ago
crazygringo 3y ago
The author calls Meta's process "reprehensible", but they seem to be acting like any large company when there are lots of people competing for fewer jobs. It's pretty standard with FAANG (or whatever it's called now) that they simply won't negotiate over their offer unless you've got another better offer in hand. 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.
- leeny 3y ago
  Author here. We have a whole section on timing, including specific advice about how to control it (slow-playing team matching, delaying interview scheduling, etc.)
- Jcampuzano2 3y ago
  Yeah I hate how companies abuse this crap regarding having other offers on the table. It's built to make candidates lives as stressful as fucking possible and create a sense of urgency since now you have to handle all of this in a short timeline, while potentially working another job at the same time and trying to not come off as completely aloof there. And you need to convince the companies themselves to delay in which time the given position could slip away while you went to interview elsewhere.
  - 3y ago
burningChrome 3y ago
Great article. 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.
- heresie-dabord 3y ago
  I also found the "predictions" article interesting: https://interviewing.io/blog/when-is-hiring-coming-back-predictions-for-2024 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. ^_^
  - jprete 3y ago
    Clearly should be MANANA.
    - jasonm23 3y ago
      it is most obviously the MAAANN
  - occz 3y ago
    Given the rate at which companies change names or lose their top spot, maybe it's best to just refer to it as Big Tech?
tomcar288 3y ago
I like the fact that the author gives so many valuable tips on how to play this situation. 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?
- loaph 3y ago
  > Musk has shown that you can profitably run a software company with 80% less staff Is this a fact? Now that x is private do we know if they are profitable or not?
  - burningChrome 3y ago
    Musk didn't buy Twitter to make it profitable. He bought because he felt freedom of speech was being cratered by the previous owners and moderators of the platform.
    - astrange 3y ago
      He offered to buy it because he was mad at one of his kids for changing their gender, and then got stuck because he couldn't get out of the offer. Freedom of speech then got worse because he fired all the legal team.
- cr__ 3y ago
  Is Musk turning a profit? And is he required to share honest numbers?
  - jhp123 3y ago
mpeg 3y ago
Last year in a moment of career uncertainty I applied for a job at Meta, I think it was a M1 role in data engineering – I ended up giving up a few interviews in when I realised I still had 3 more interviews to go, I think for a total of 6, the recruiter didn't really explain the process very well. 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)
- FirmwareBurner 3y ago
  >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.
  - jprete 3y ago
    I'm guessing the GP expected them to tell them something useful about compensation earlier in the process, so that neither party would waste time evaluating a deal that couldn't possibly work.
    - FirmwareBurner 3y ago
      I agree, that's pretty shit to not mention the salary range at the start, but Meta and FAANG wages in general are quite well documented already on levels.fyi, even for Europe, so it's normal to expect something in that ballpark as you go into the interview process.
  - lokar 3y ago
    Lower UK pay was not the complaint. Knowing if they would be competitive to the current (UK) job was the issue (as I read it).
hcks 3y ago
The FAANG dream truly is dead
andrewmcwatters 3y ago
So, what’s the process like for an experienced engineer (say over a decade in the industry) who has wholesale avoided FAANG and FAANG-likes and stuck to other S&P 500s because they wouldn’t tolerate the dysfunctional interview process at these tech companies in the past? And can you even get one of these jobs outside of California? I would not leave Arizona as a home owner for this nonsense.
pavel_lishin 3y ago
> Team matching. This can take days or weeks, depending on how many teams you speak to and how many conversations you have with the people on each team > 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?
- dekhn 3y ago
  Not badly enough to respond to the recruiter who keeps nagging me about "ML infra" role there. I went through their process before and it was even worse than Google's.
- boshalfoshal 3y ago
  Meta outpays pretty much all of FAANG right now, and thats saying a lot when FAANG companies are already in the top [0-5]% of compensation in the US. 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.
- derwiki 3y ago
  > 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.
mloncode 3y ago
Good article
fatnoah 3y ago
It's interesting to see how things have change. Granted, my sample size is 1 for negotiating with Meta a few years ago. In that, I had competing offers, but let the recruiter know up front that I wouldn't share exact details other than company and level. The initial offer from Meta was greater than my asking, and after asking for more to get closer to parity with other offers, they went above that number as well. Of course, that market looked nothing like this one.
RagnarD 3y ago
First step: realize that Meta is an incredibly lousy company producing fantastically terrible products and coasting on momentum of the past. There was never a product as ripe for competitive disruption as Facebook, for example.
DonsDiscountGas 3y ago
So much "negotiating" advice just boils down to "get a lot of companies interested in you". Which is certainly good advice, and maybe will encourage people to take a lot more interviews than they would have otherwise, but for most people it's just not that helpful.
bunchandrew 3y ago
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150 points by leeny 3y ago

And here I am as some sap who hasn't even gotten past the screening interview because I didn't spend a couple of months first memorizing Leetcode problems.

arsh4151 3y ago

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megan_ 3y ago

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Vistoria 3y ago

[dead]

gia4151 3y ago

[flagged]

beckthompson 3y ago

Interesting article! I didn't realize the choke hold Meta has on hiring at the moment. Sounds like they are really abusing it...

pompino 3y ago

>Meta vs. other FAANGs, and that lets us guess (pretty accurately) how much hiring is actually happening at these companies. What is the data to support this?

leeny 3y ago
Author here. We sell mock interviews at interviewing.io, in the styles of specific companies. Sales data lets us see what's popular, which in turn, let's us gauge how much hiring is happening there. 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-predictions-for-2024 https://interviewing.io/blog/when-is-hiring-coming-back-pred...
- pompino 3y ago
  Okay, thanks for replying. I know its probably hard or impossible to come by the actual hiring numbers, so I was curious.

jackblemming 3y ago

I don’t know why you would want to work for a company that treats you like this. I guess some people will put up with a lot for money.

saagarjha 3y ago
Is it a lot? You’re looking at hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars for a one-month interaction, of which the time you actually spend is a few days at most. Why wouldn’t you put up with it? Especially if your other options are not generally much better.
- jackblemming 3y ago
  I didn’t get into software to chase money. If I did, that’s a pretty dumb decision as there’s way more profitable careers. And working at Facebook seems pretty hellish.
  - ifyoubuildit 3y ago
    I also didnt get into software to chase money, but I'm curious what those careers are, and what the cost of entry is for those careers? 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.
    - csmiller 3y ago
      Finance, consulting, some kinds of real estate-adjacent jobs.
      - ifyoubuildit 3y ago
        Finance seems like a fair enough answer, although it always sounded a bit like a meat grinder, and how many of these jobs are there? 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.

saagarjha 3y ago

I’ve never really found it useful to hide the fact that you’re interviewing elsewhere from a recruiter. If anything, it often lets you align timelines and indicate your time constraints to them beforehand, rather than them trying to send you an exploding offer for no reason. And it often skips them giving you a garbage, below-market offer because it makes no sense to do that and then have you walk immediately when someone else offers $100k more.

leeny 3y ago
Author here. The main reason not to share is that if you share at the beginning of the process, they will inevitably ask you how things are going with Company X, Y, and Z. Let's say you get rejected from a few of them. It's going to be increasingly hard to hide that, and now you lost leverage. Better to share when you control the flow of information. 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-before-even-start https://interviewing.io/blog/sabotage-salary-negotiation-bef...
- saagarjha 3y ago
  I mean, you don’t have to tell them the exact details. Just tell them you’re in the loop with other companies, and you plan to have offers start coming in around $DATE, and would like to align things so you can evaluate them together. Of course if you end up not getting any other offers that might be a problem but if they understand that you are actively involved in multiple options I find that recruiters will move things for you. I think this is true even if they’re secretly trying to hurt you (e.g. by running their process faster and hoping that you take their offer first) because if you’re firm about your timelines (and you commit to it!) nobody really wants to be in a process where they string you along for a month and get you to the offer stage and then miss signing you on because they didn’t want to wait a few days to get extra information from you (about, say, how you’d really love to join Meta if only they bumped their comp $20k).
  - leeny 3y ago

hacker_newz 3y ago

God this process sounds awful. Why would anyone want to work for a company like that?

throwanem 3y ago
For the hope of retiring at 35.
- burningChrome 3y ago
  There are plenty of other ways to retire at 35 without having to put yourself through that clown show.
  - theossuary 3y ago
    Like what?
    - burningChrome 3y ago
      [flagged]
      - marssaxman 3y ago
        > doesn't take much to retire at 35. All you need is about $5-$8M You live in a rarefied world, my friend.
      - emestifs 3y ago
        You quite delusional about a number of things. It's not even worth pointing them out.
      - matkoniecz 3y ago
        For start, day trading is effectively gambling. Your advise is horrible and will harm people taking it seriously. And earning 8 millions as "social media influencer" by age 35 is so unhelpful advise that gambling would be more effective...

leeny 3y ago

Author here. I said this in the post, and I'll say it again here. If I hear from any reliable sources at Meta that I'm wrong, I'll gladly retract and issue a public apology.

nicolashahn 3y ago
I'm a SWE at Meta and do technical interviews. I'd say you're right on most things except down-leveling. There are some very specific things interviewers are looking for in the behavioral and system design interviews and I believe they accurately predict how an engineer will perform at a given level within Meta, which may be different than how they would at the "same" level at another company. In my experience and from speaking to other FAANG engineers, Meta expects engineers to do a lot more than just code past E4. E5+ ("senior") should be able to do some of what a PM does, generate impactful projects on their own, and be able to be a team lead (although that's usually for E6+), plus some more stuff. I know at least I was definitely leveled fairly, and even struggled a bit to get used to the expectations when I first started out.
- leeny 3y ago
  Thank you for responding! Would you say the leveling criteria has changed in the last year? I ask because, while the current criteria could very well be legitimate, candidates weren't down-leveled nearly as often until the downturn.
  - nicolashahn 3y ago
    There's no official policy or guidance that has changed on the expectations for the behavioral/sys design interviews I know of, which is fairly transparent. I saw your stat for 55% self reported down-levels, do you have a stat from before the downturn? 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.

maxfurman 3y ago

So, to get decent (market rate) compensation from Meta, you need 1-3 job offers of similar prestige and comp level. But if you have those, why would you ever take a job at Meta?

cloverich 3y ago
The same reason as any other, the mix of WLB, compensation and career growth. But notably the article isn't stating Meta will meet other offers, they may also beat other offers. Its merely saying they won't be compelled to offer in their upper range of compensation if they don't believe you have any leverage, i.e. why would they negotiate if they don't need to. Also unspoken is that both the lower and upper are still high -- I wouldn't be surprised if the lower is higher than a majority of other companies' median or even upper brackets.

photochemsyn 3y ago

Funny how people still call the corporate conglomerate tech outfits 'FAANG' apparently because 'fang it, bro' sounds tough and cool and predatory in the comic-book sense - but really they're steadily transforming themselves into their monopolistic predecessors (e.g. Ma Bell), so a new acronym - MAMAA (Meta/Amazon/Microsoft/Alphabet/Apple) - is needed. Also, 'Homo sapiens' should be renamed 'Homo ignis'. Sign the petition.

xboxnolifes 3y ago
> 'fang it, bro' sounds tough and cool Has anyone ever uttered those words?
Traubenfuchs 3y ago
Team FAGMAN all the way! (Facebook Apple Google Microsoft Amazon Netflix)

jobs_throwaway 3y ago

> You might say, “Aline, why can’t I just make up offers?” We could never, in good conscience, advise that. It’s unethical, and though I’d argue that while Meta’s negotiation practices are also unethical, that’s not the way to win. Outside of ethical considerations, while the risks of getting caught are low, they’re not zero. Lying about offers, in our mind, is the last refuge of the incompetent. Yeah I'm just gonna take my chances on that one

Jcampuzano2 3y ago
I like how they argue that its unethical and for that reason you shouldn't do it, while also stating they know that Meta itself is unethical in their own negotiation. 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.
- saagarjha 3y ago
  Ok, and then Meta hands you an offer and then when you go to sign it suddenly becomes $100k less. Do you not think there are generally agreed upon standards that people negotiate with?
  - jobs_throwaway 3y ago
    I don't think 'we're going to lowball you by $50-100k / year unless you can show us a competing offer' is an agreed upon standard, no.
    - saagarjha 3y ago
      You think wrong, then. Making an offer that is out of the market range is very standard in a negotiation (even if you don’t think it’s very fair).
deleted 3y ago
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3y ago

smrtinsert 3y ago

Hilarious, glad I'll never need to work for them.

chatmasta 3y ago

There is some really excellent, concrete advice in this post. This is definitely a company that is on the side of candidates it works with. 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.)

JohnMakin 3y ago

I honestly thought this was all common knowledge, but I guess that's from friends having gone through meta process and myself as well. The only way I've seen people get super big starting packages at any of these FAANG's is by leveraging multiple faang's against each other. But good lord, that's a lot of work.

diarrhea 3y ago
A single process is already demanding, especially while holding a 9-5 job. Two simultaneous ones I can see. For three or more, I don’t reckon working full time at the same time is possible. 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.

LudwigNagasena 3y ago

Is it really a lowball offer if you can’t command higher compensation from any other company?

tarxvf 3y ago
There might be a difference between having an offer right now versus being able to have an offer later (or having had an offer earlier). Especially when everything about the processes involved is trying to shorten the period the offer is actually open.
bradly 3y ago
This is why the author says it is critical to have other offers.
zug_zug 3y ago
Well it may be, if the work expectation at meta is say 40% higher than the other company (and likelihood of being laid off is 40% higher too).
maxvt 3y ago
All offers get weighed against WLB, perceived bureaucracy, perceived reputation of the company, perceived alignment with role and level, perceived value that the company derives from the position, and the expected competition for the role. The combination of all of these could lead someone to reject or negotiate the highest dollar value offer.
smrtinsert 3y ago
I guess market rate isn't a thing? Time is a limiting factor with regard to getting offers. What this is saying is don't waste time on making Meta your first offer.
distrill 3y ago
from an eng pov, of course it is. from any rational business pov, of course it's not.
lokar 3y ago

crazygringo 3y ago

The author calls Meta's process "reprehensible", but they seem to be acting like any large company when there are lots of people competing for fewer jobs. It's pretty standard with FAANG (or whatever it's called now) that they simply won't negotiate over their offer unless you've got another better offer in hand. 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.

leeny 3y ago
Author here. We have a whole section on timing, including specific advice about how to control it (slow-playing team matching, delaying interview scheduling, etc.)
Jcampuzano2 3y ago
Yeah I hate how companies abuse this crap regarding having other offers on the table. It's built to make candidates lives as stressful as fucking possible and create a sense of urgency since now you have to handle all of this in a short timeline, while potentially working another job at the same time and trying to not come off as completely aloof there. And you need to convince the companies themselves to delay in which time the given position could slip away while you went to interview elsewhere.
- 3y ago

burningChrome 3y ago

Great article. 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.

heresie-dabord 3y ago
I also found the "predictions" article interesting: https://interviewing.io/blog/when-is-hiring-coming-back-predictions-for-2024 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. ^_^
- jprete 3y ago
  Clearly should be MANANA.
  - jasonm23 3y ago
    it is most obviously the MAAANN
- occz 3y ago
  Given the rate at which companies change names or lose their top spot, maybe it's best to just refer to it as Big Tech?

tomcar288 3y ago

I like the fact that the author gives so many valuable tips on how to play this situation. 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?

loaph 3y ago
> Musk has shown that you can profitably run a software company with 80% less staff Is this a fact? Now that x is private do we know if they are profitable or not?
- burningChrome 3y ago
  Musk didn't buy Twitter to make it profitable. He bought because he felt freedom of speech was being cratered by the previous owners and moderators of the platform.
  - astrange 3y ago
    He offered to buy it because he was mad at one of his kids for changing their gender, and then got stuck because he couldn't get out of the offer. Freedom of speech then got worse because he fired all the legal team.
cr__ 3y ago
Is Musk turning a profit? And is he required to share honest numbers?
- jhp123 3y ago

mpeg 3y ago

Last year in a moment of career uncertainty I applied for a job at Meta, I think it was a M1 role in data engineering – I ended up giving up a few interviews in when I realised I still had 3 more interviews to go, I think for a total of 6, the recruiter didn't really explain the process very well. 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)

FirmwareBurner 3y ago
>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.
- jprete 3y ago
  I'm guessing the GP expected them to tell them something useful about compensation earlier in the process, so that neither party would waste time evaluating a deal that couldn't possibly work.
  - FirmwareBurner 3y ago
    I agree, that's pretty shit to not mention the salary range at the start, but Meta and FAANG wages in general are quite well documented already on levels.fyi, even for Europe, so it's normal to expect something in that ballpark as you go into the interview process.
- lokar 3y ago
  Lower UK pay was not the complaint. Knowing if they would be competitive to the current (UK) job was the issue (as I read it).

hcks 3y ago

The FAANG dream truly is dead

andrewmcwatters 3y ago

So, what’s the process like for an experienced engineer (say over a decade in the industry) who has wholesale avoided FAANG and FAANG-likes and stuck to other S&P 500s because they wouldn’t tolerate the dysfunctional interview process at these tech companies in the past? And can you even get one of these jobs outside of California? I would not leave Arizona as a home owner for this nonsense.

pavel_lishin 3y ago

> Team matching. This can take days or weeks, depending on how many teams you speak to and how many conversations you have with the people on each team > 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?

dekhn 3y ago
Not badly enough to respond to the recruiter who keeps nagging me about "ML infra" role there. I went through their process before and it was even worse than Google's.
boshalfoshal 3y ago
Meta outpays pretty much all of FAANG right now, and thats saying a lot when FAANG companies are already in the top [0-5]% of compensation in the US. 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.
derwiki 3y ago
> 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.

mloncode 3y ago

Good article

fatnoah 3y ago

It's interesting to see how things have change. Granted, my sample size is 1 for negotiating with Meta a few years ago. In that, I had competing offers, but let the recruiter know up front that I wouldn't share exact details other than company and level. The initial offer from Meta was greater than my asking, and after asking for more to get closer to parity with other offers, they went above that number as well. Of course, that market looked nothing like this one.

RagnarD 3y ago

First step: realize that Meta is an incredibly lousy company producing fantastically terrible products and coasting on momentum of the past. There was never a product as ripe for competitive disruption as Facebook, for example.

DonsDiscountGas 3y ago

So much "negotiating" advice just boils down to "get a lot of companies interested in you". Which is certainly good advice, and maybe will encourage people to take a lot more interviews than they would have otherwise, but for most people it's just not that helpful.

bunchandrew 3y ago

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