Facebook Software Engineer

So now you've got the comp data, are you ready to negotiate? Not quite.

First off, comp data is constantly changing. 2022 numbers are coming in higher than the 2021 numbers listed above, and it’s critical to know the full range for each component to optimize your negotiation. But even more than that, many people think knowing the compensation data is the most important part of a negotiation, but it’s not. You can go tell your Meta recruiter that you read online that top of band is $X and that you want that number, but in 90% of cases that won’t work. So what will?

Companies negotiate when they believe you won’t accept their offer. But, since you just finished a long and arduous interview process with them, they know you are likely to accept the job unless you have higher competing offers from other great companies.

This means you need to create leverage and make it believable that you are considering other options but would prefer Facebook if the compensation is comparable. This sounds easy but quickly becomes challenging if you don’t have other offers or if your other offers aren’t higher than the top of band comp numbers you are targeting.

Even if you are in a perfect situation where you have a competing offer with comp just slightly higher than the top of band numbers you are targeting, the negotiation can still get complicated. For example, let’s say your competing offer is from Stripe. Seems like everything is good (Stripe is a well respected large company), but if you bring that to Facebook, their comp team will discount the equity by 25% since Stripe is a private company. All of a sudden they aren’t willing to give you a top of band number because your leverage has been weakened. There are dozens of rules like this that can completely de-rail a negotiation. Think of the system like a black box where a series of inputs can be reliably turned into a specific output, but you need to know how to perfectly setup the inputs