Negotiation Q&A and Videos

Hi all. I have a verbal offer for a contract role. The recruiter said that they are going to send the official offer letter tomorrow. This company moved really fast and based on how fast they moved, they probably expect me to sign same day as receiving the offer.

I am in the final stages for a couple of other companies. I sped up the interviews as much as possible but I can't imagine they can get me an official offer tomorrow.

How should I handle this? I would like to finish these last interviews and see if I get an offer but the timeline is not lining up well.

These are questions for Rahul since he put together a great negotiation course that I completed the other day.

I recently skimmed the Design Guru's course on negotiation, and two questions came up

1. How/when do you negotiate? - Live on a phone call/in-person right after the interview, after the interview via email or via phone? What is the most ideal? Design Gurus said email is the best mode.
2. What do you do if they explicitly ask you what your salary # amount is? - They actually asked via email (hiring manager at Meta) before my phone screen what companies I was interviewing at (to name them). Is there a script to be able to not disclose this?

Hi, I am at the team match stage at meta for E4 (MLE) role at the bay area loc. What could be a decent TC range (checked levels, I know avg is around 300k?)?

Also, how could I maximize it considering I don’t have a competing FAANG level offer at the moment, but I do have an offer from a tier 2 company of ML in terms of comp? note, I believe I did pretty well in all the interview rounds, the team I am hoping to join has a member who was my labmate in my Phd group and recommended me to the hiring manager, who is quite interested to hire me (as mentioned by the hm himself). Furthermore, I already have my green card, so the company doesn’t need to spend for my immigration. How (if at all) can I leverage these to negotiate?

I have looked at Taro's course on , but looking for more case-specific suggestions, thanks in advance.

Now that PSC for the first half at Meta is nearing an end, do you think it makes sense to ask my manager for a raise in our next 1:1?

Or, given that Meta is a big tech company, are raises purely based on rating?

Hi folks, I need your help to understand if any action can be taken from my side here.

I gave Stripe interviews recently for SSE (Bangalore) and here is the feedback I received.

Round1 (LLD) - Strong yes

Round2 (Bug Squash) - No

Round3 (Integration Round) - yes

Round4 (Systems Design) - Strong yes

Round5 (Manager Round) - yes

I am aligned with this feedback except Round 2 (Bug Squash). I thought I had a strong yes in that. I was very easily able to navigate the code, find out the bug, fix it, and explain it. We were left with 15 more minutes so she gave me another bug to solve. I reached halfway on that, was able to partially figure out the bug. Didn't solve it but I think the expectation is to solve just one bug.

I have communicated the above with HR with a positive outlook.

Also, I felt that the interviewer wasn't very present and interested from the beginning so I think that the interviewer hasn't given much thought to this.

Current status: They have sent the case to the hiring committee for SSE but the HR mentioned that I might get downleveled. But I have been pretty vocal that I want to be considered for SSE only. Another factor she mentioned is I have a borderline work ex of 5.5/6 years so that might also contribute to this.

I asked the HR if I could reinterview for this round but she mentioned that's not possible and is not part of company policy.

Anything that I can do here?

Hello folks, hope to get some advice on my current situation.

I have started my job hunting process and a recruiter reached out to me with a open SWE role recently.

We had an initial chat and the compensation range for that role was lower than what I had asked for but the recruiter encouraged me to just go ahead and try anyway. I agreed to it, as I wanted to chalk up some interview experience, and managed to make it through the interview stages.

Today I was informed that I got the offer. However, the compensation is too low for me (which is expected). There's not much room to negotiate a substantially higher compensation because it is the budget given for that project (it's a contract role). The recruiter is still trying to encourage me to take up the role and potentially coming across as kinda...pushy. Any advice on how best to reject them? The recruiter has honestly been really helpful and friendly (eg. giving me tips on what the interview could ask etc) so I will still hope to be able to get the help of this recruiter for other roles, but at the same time i really don't want to offend him or make him think that I'm a picky candidate etc.

It's my first time job hunting so would really appreciate advice! Thank you so much

I have 3 years of experience working as a backend developer.

I rejected 2 offers because the salary rise was about 12% and I expect at least 30% salary rise.

And this brought a doubt in my head. That is, if at this moment should I be looking for more money or more knowledge, expand my network, or what should I be prioritizing.

Please, help.

Hello! I'm in the final stages of my interview process at a few companies. I heard two days ago that I'd be getting an offer from a public company and just today a Series B company said they were going to extend an offer. (I have 30 minute chat with a Series A CEO tomorrow and an offer seems likely) The Series B company today gave me their comp range for Staff, but did not make a specific offer. The recruiter asked me to come up with what I wanted my comp to be now that I know the band for Staff. It felt odd not getting a specific number.. but I suppose I can consider for the purpose of negotiation that they are offering the top of the range and I can negotiate from there? The recruiter did say I was their best interview (!) so I feel like I have a fair bit of leverage here to potentially get an offer well above the stated band.

This is a bit further complicated however by the fact that I disagree with the methodology the recruiter used to value their options & tokens. I.e. if I agreed with their valuation the TC at the top of their range is what I am targeting, but according to my calculations the TC at the top of the range is 35% too low. So I'd probably need them to double the equity/token package to make this worthwhile. The top of the range for base is also below my base target, but not that dramatically. . . more like 5%.

Am I better off asking for a Sr Staff leveling or just ask for comp that's above the band for the Staff title? I imagine bands are more strict at public companies than they are at a Series B.

Finally, I'm wondering what people think about adding acceleration & severance upon termination w/o cause as a negotiation lever. Given the volatility of the cryptocurrency market I am concerned about job security in this role, so some security that would be provided by an acceleration upon termination clause in my contract would help me swallow the somewhat low base & illiquid equity that they are offering. Do Series B companies ever provide that to non-VP/C-level hires?

Hi There,

I am based in the UK and have been offered a staff computer vision engineer position at a growth-stage startup. The offer has already been finalized, but the company's CTO has requested my previous employer's recent payslip. This is unusual in my experience, as no one has ever asked for my payslips before.

I initially thought they might use the payslip to determine my compensation, but that has already been decided and communicated to me. I negotiated a signing bonus based on my expected salary expectations and a "made-up current salary (range )" because the base salary offered was not appropriate for the market rate.

During the interview process, I mentioned my current salary, which was not the exact real number (as per Rahul's advice). However, now that they are asking for my payslip, it will reveal my actual salary. I am concerned that this might leave a bad impression and create trust issues with the CTO, potentially affecting our working dynamics.

I love the team and the project, and everything else seems promising. However, I am unsure about how to proceed with this situation. The recruiter mentioned that the payslip is required for administrative purposes, but I am still hesitant. Any advice on how to handle this would be greatly appreciated.

Hi my friend’s abilities exceed his years of experience. He passed the interview criteria for a senior level at Microsoft but they’re trying to lowball his salary based on years experience / their arbitrary choices.

They elected to interview him anyway in spite of that so it seems like they’re just flexing their leverage after-the-fact since he’s H1B. What can he do to negotiate? He shouldn’t have to accept a pay cut… I know people from more brand name schools and companies who got treated better and just appropriately compensated by MSFT…

I received an offer from a Big Tech company for a contract Data Eng role. Whoot!

While I'm happy to have gotten the offer, I'm nervous about it being a contract role and in particular I'm nervous about the nature of the team.

My mentor told me to reverse-interview the hiring manager:

His message to me was:

Ask: I’d like to get a better sense of what I’ll be working on and how that work fits in with the rest of the team - I’m curious what lead to the need to open up this role?
Then based on what they say, you usually follow up with where do you see this position and work fit in after the initial 6 months.

So he says to ask the hiring manager about:

1. what work I'll be doing
2. how the role opened up
3. possibility of extending or converting to FTE

I'll add my own question which is how much am I working solo vs. with others? In my convo with the hiring manager, he indicated that this role is to maintain Paid Marketing Pipelines which the team he manages is not focusing on. He said there's a lot of work to be done cleaning up tech debt, which involves migrating SQL pipelines scheduled with Airflow to dbt. That sounds like bread and butter Data Engineering, although it's definitely not the cool and shiny work.

I have 5 questions, 2 here and 3 in the first comment because of the character limit:

1. Any other quick thoughts about what to ask about? There are lot of great questions , , and questions like and . I plan on going through those, but if there's anything I should def ask about, it'd be great to know!
2. In talking to the Hiring Manager, should I negotiate before or after Reverse Interviewing? My mentor says to negotiate after learning more about the role which seems intuitive to me as I want to make sure I want to accept it before negotiating. But Gergely Orosz says very much the opposite . What gives?

I am working with AWS and I was just promoted from L4 to L5 SDE role. I am yet to have the revised compensation discussion with my manager and was thinking if it is possible to negotiate the offer. During the annual PCS conversations, it was mentioned that the managers have more leverage for salary negotiations during the promo review. I want to understand what parts of the compensation I can negotiate upon. Does anyone have experience with this?

Thanks!

Hey folks,

I'm currently facing a tough decision - whether to ask for a raise at my current company. I am unsure if it's the right time to do so or not. Here's a little context to help you understand my situation

My timeline in the company:

• In 2023
  • I joined the company as a Sr SWE II (L4)
  • I joined the company nine months ago on August 23'
  • I made it to the second review cycle of the year (mid-October), and I got a "Consistently meeting expectations." My manager then said that he was very impressed that I managed to get so much done in that short time and that he could see strong signs of a Staff Engineer (L5) in me.
  • I shipped the most important project in Q4, 2023, on time. I even ended up as the technical lead of that project (the Staff engineer in that project got pip-ed, but that's another story)
• In 2024:
  • I mentored a Sr SWE I (L3) on her first project as a lead.
  • I'm the lead of the web working group
  • I'm interviewing candidates almost on a weekly basis
  • I'm one of the owners of the Design System initiative
  • I just got a "Consistently exceeding expectations" in our current review cycle. I've been praised for how easy it is to work with me, my technical quality, my communication skills, and my thoughtful PR reviews. And that I should keep working on my influence across the organization.

How things are right now:

• My previous manager quit to join another startup, and I got an interim manager (we're hiring another manager for my team)
• I ended up talking about salary adjustments with my previous manager the other day (there, I didn't ask for a raise; it was just a casual conversation). He told me that the company does a compensation review every January and that I wasn't considered for the one that happened in January 2024 because I didn't join earlier than July 2023.
• The next performance review will happen in mid-Oct 2024.
• I will be leading a new tiger team (6 engs) until the end of Q2.

Questions I have right now:

• Is this the right time to ask for a raise?
• I've never asked for a raise.
• I know for a fact that an L3 has a pretty similar (<5%) salary to me, and I know that another L4 has a >5% salary than me.
• Should I wait until I finish this new project, the next performance review, or my first anniversary?
• We're in the hockey stick growth stage.
• I also really like working here, and the market has been bad lately.

Thanks!