How I Negotiated My $350k Facebook Offer (software engineer salary negotiation)

what's up everybody how's it going so a little over a week ago I posted a video where I shared exactly how much I made as a software engineer at Facebook if you haven't seen that video I'd recommend that you check it out I'll put the link in the description below now after I posted that video I started getting a lot of messages from people telling me that the offer I got or the compensation package that I had was pretty high for my level and asking me you know how I did it how did I get such a high compensation package did I negotiate my offer and so on and so forth so I figured that I would make a video on exactly that to share with you some of the things I did share with you some of the techniques that you can do both before you actually get your offer and after you get your offer during the sort of negotiation process and hopefully this will help you get the best offer that you can get from a big tech company or from any tech company or at the very least maybe it'll help you get an extra ten twenty even thirty thousand dollars in your offer so if you haven't seen the video about how much they made it's Facebook spoiler alert I know that to divulge that because we need these figures as a reference point for later on in the video so basically I had a total compensation package from my first year at Facebook because it included a sign-on bonus of three hundred and forty eight thousand seven hundred dollars that was a hundred and sixty seven thousand in the form of a base salary then there was sixteen point seven thousand as the baseline annual bonus the ninety thousand dollars per year in the form of stock and finally seventy five thousand dollars for the first year as a sign on bonus oh and I was an e4 engineer in New York City so the mid-level engineer so now that we have all the relevant information about the offer let's actually look at what I did to get this offer so the first thing that you can do to maximize your chances of getting a high offer and this really isn't rocket science is something that you're probably all aware of at this point but it's to do well on the coding interviews it's no secret I've said this many times on my channel before that the coding interviews of these big tech companies are the number one deciding factor of not only whether or not you get the actual offer but also of how good your offer so really do your best to prepare for the coding interviews I remember my interviews at Facebook were some of the best if not the best interviews that I've ever done I remember walking out of them feeling very confident I remember thinking I would be very surprised if I didn't get an offer because I just felt like I had done really well but seriously I can't stress enough how important these coding interviews are at the end of the day your performance on the coding interviews is gonna be the most powerful signal that these companies have about you and about your abilities and your performance so the better you do there the more they're gonna think that you are an amazing candidate that they don't want to miss out on and the more willing they'll be to give you an amazing offer and so of course here I'll recommend I'll go expert my company I'll go expert do we just released eight new questions on the platform and we're working on a lot of new content and a lot of new features so go check it out if you want to do really well on those coding interviews and maximize your chances of getting a high offer and on that note these past two weeks we've been getting so many messages from algo expert customers who've gotten offers from either Amazon or Google I'm not sure what it is about these two companies but we've been getting a particularly high amount of people who have used her platform and have gotten offers from either Amazon or Google either as full-time employees or a sophomore as interns so just an exciting little fact okay so that was the obvious stuff about doing well on the interviews but what about after you've done well on the interviews when the companies are ready to extend you an offer that's where the real negotiation starts to come into play and so here I'm gonna divide this part into two things knowledge and leverage they even rhyme the knowledge part is about being informed of what the best possible offer that you could realistically get is the leverage part is about actually getting that best realistic offer so for the null explosion the first thing that you should do is to figure out what level you're gonna be coming in at at the company that you're going for all of these big tech companies have levels for their engineers and also for most of their other funds but for engineers they have levels and the canonical examples are going to be the Google levels which are l-3 for the entry level l4 for the mid-level l5 for senior l6l 7 and so on and so forth and then all of the other companies have very similar levels for Facebook it's identical except it's an e instead of an L III e4 e5 e6 blah blah for Amazon it's as d1 as d2 as d3 you get the idea now the reason it's so important for you to figure out the level that you'll be coming in at is because these companies have actual defined compensation ranges for these levels so for example if you're an l4 engineer at Google your total compensation per year might be anywhere between X dollars and Y dollars and the range or the difference between x and y might be pretty big so you could fall at the very lower range or lower end or the very upper end so to actually know the level that you're gonna be coming in at you can either ask your recruiter flat-out hey what level is this position for and they'll likely be able to tell you or you can pretty easily guess it for instance if you're a new grad just out of college or maybe you have one year or less of work experience you're gonna be an l-3 engineer or the equivalent if you've got a few years of work experience you'll likely be ml4 engineer or the equivalent maybe you'll try to shoot for l5 so that's where it can get a little bit tricky but you're likely bl4 overall you should be able to estimate for yourself depending on your situation what level you're gonna be bucketed into once you know your level you want to figure out what the total compensation range for that level is and you want to start becoming familiar with the types of base salaries of bonuses of stock awards that you could expect for that level so the best tool to do this by far and away is this website called levels fYI they aggregate compensation figures or compensation data from engineers like you like me who give the data voluntarily and they provide it on their website such that you can see it bucketed by levels by company by location it's a really useful tool and we've we've done a lot of partnerships with them in the past with algo expert we're currently advertising on their website with a little expert but I would definitely recommend that you check it out now I'll show you how I used levels when I was negotiating for my offer at Facebook I was almost sure that I was gonna be coming in as an e4 engineer at Facebook I had recently been promoted from l3 l4 at Google I was maybe gonna try to push for an e5 at Facebook but I knew that it was more likely that I would end up as an e4 engineer so I went on levels FYI and I started looking at compensation data for afor engineers at Facebook so right off the bat well you can see the algo expert ad right now but you can see the average total compensation package that you can expect as an e4 engineer at Facebook roughly two hundred and forty six thousand dollars you can see the base salary the stock and the bonus as a side note and this is gonna be a feature request for the guys behind levels I've noticed that when you drill down into actual compensation entries on levels the bonuses are kind of all over the place it seems like most people consider the bonus the annual bonus which I think this is what it refers to but some people will put in their sign-on bonus in that annual bonus and so it kind of skews the data so that's something to keep in mind but so here you have the snapshot if you click on View full details you can actually see much more useful information about efore engineers at Facebook you can look at individual entries and you can start getting an actual idea of what you eat for engineers at Facebook actually make okay some of them get two hundred and thirty six thousand dollars total compensation some of them get two hundred and sixty two thousand dollars total compensation and you can see what are their years of work experience how many years of the company have they been active so this starts to give you a really good idea of the range that you can expect and then here you actually have a salary range chart and you can see that if four engineers are probably gonna be going as low as you know two hundred and ten thousand total compensation and as high as two hundred and eighty one thousand total compensation again this doesn't seem to include the sign-on bonus feature request to the levels dot fYI guys to really add an explicit entry for the sign-on bonus so I started to drill down into all these entries especially for the ones based out of New York and based out of the Bay Area so San Francisco or Menlo Park because these were gonna be the most relevant to my offer as an engineer in New York City so you see what was useful for me was that I could see that on average most efore engineers seem to have a base salary somewhere between the high one 40s and high one 50s there were few in the 160s I saw a couple of like 165 maybe one higher than that but otherwise that's where the base salaries were same thing for the stock the highest that I could find was someone within a hundred thousand dollars per year of stock and then the bonus again for those that weren't skewed values it was clearly just roughly 10% of the base salary so this gave me a great idea of what the realistic highest offer I could get as an e4 engineer would be I was also really lucky because I was working at Google at the time and at Google there's this internal spreadsheet where employees anonymously share their compensation packages they share a lot of details including you know what year they started at the company how many years they've been at the particular level that they're at and so I got an added layer of data to base myself off of and I will say that for the most part everything on levels seemed to reflect what I was seeing internally at Google and by the way I would really encourage you to share your compensation package on levels it's anonymous and it really helps out the community and this reminds me I should do it because I don't think I've done it yet so now once you have that knowledge once they are informed about what the realistic best offer you could get is you can actually strategize around this whole negotiation process because there's an example if you get an offer let's say as an e4 engineer that tells you that your base salary is gonna be only 135,000 then you probably know that here you're on the very lower end maybe makes sense given your circumstances but maybe that doesn't and similarly you know that you shouldn't ask for let's say $200,000 as a base salary because that would just be way above the maximum values that you can expect as an elf or engineer this brings us to the leverage that I mentioned earlier what is going to allow you to command the best offer in that range that you're now informed about first of all competing offers this is perhaps the easiest way to gain leverage in the negotiation if you're applying to Facebook for example and you've got competing offers from Google or from Amazon or from a hedge fund or from uber or some other big tech company then you're gonna be in good shape you're gonna be able to use that competing offer to get them to give you a better offer now interestingly when I applied to Facebook I didn't have competing offers at the time I didn't want to apply to a bunch of other companies I was really only interested in Facebook I had a really good job at Google so I didn't apply to other companies I didn't have competing offers so what I did to gain leverage was I told Facebook very frankly that I had a great job at Google I was performing very well at Google I actually shared my performance ratings with them to give them so those data points that they could use I told them here's where I stand at Google I'm in the top X percent of engineers at my level I'm doing really well I've got a great trajectory I really like it here so you're gonna have to give me something really appealing if you want me to come that was my leverage the last piece of advice that we'll give here which is related to leverage is to never ever ever under any circumstance share your current compensation figures with the recruiters that you're speaking with at the company they are gonna try very hard to figure out how much you're currently making because that's gonna be an additional data point that they can use to their advantage to get you an offer that might not be the best offer but that would be something that you would likely accept and you do not want to give them that information you also don't have to the important thing to realize here is that the recruiters that you're speaking to their job to get you to accept the offer now because they've extended you and offer they've told you that they want to hire you so they definitely want you but they also want you to accept the lowest best offer that they can give if that makes sense they want to sort of minimize your cost so they may very well be very adamant about knowing how much you're currently making and they might phrase it in different ways so as not to be super blunt it's important that no matter how awkward it is you simply tell them that you don't feel comfortable doing so if they ask you for instance well how much stock would you be leaving on the table if you left Google or she left whatever company you're at don't tell that tell them that you don't really feel comfortable divulging this information you've told them about your performance you've told them about your competing offers if you have any and that should be enough for them to give you the best offer that they want to give you and here I'm gonna recommend this really useful guide it's free online that I actually used when I was negotiating with Facebook it's on this website called team candor I'll put the link in the description below it's really useful on how to negotiate with these recruiters at big tech companies anyway that's all the information that I've got for you as far as negotiating an offer at a big tech company to recap do really well on the coding interviews know the level that you're coming in that be very familiar with the compensation range for that level and have leverage whether it be competing offers or your current job or maybe your performance at your current job have leverage and don't tell the recruiters how much they're currently making I really hope you found this video insightful I hope you'll be able to use some of the stuff I mentioned for your own negotiation tactics and as always smash the like button subscribe to the channel if you haven't already and I will see you in the next video

Channel: Clément Mihailescu

Views: 331,069

Rating: 4.8483949 out of 5

Keywords: software engineer negotiate offer, software engineer salary negotiation, software developer salary negotiation, how to negotiate salary after job offer, how to negotiate salary software engineer, amazon salary negotiation, google salary negotiation, facebook salary negotiation, microsoft salary negotiation, google offer negotiation, amazon offer negotiation, facebook offer negotiation, negotiating salary software engineer, salary negotiation tips, tech salary negotiation

Id: DSxhgejP0u4

Length: 14min 57sec (897 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 24 2019