Google L5 Offer

Sep 16, 2020 67 Comments

Recently quit my job at Facebook and will be joining Google soon. Got a lot of good information from the Blind community with regards to interview process, compensation, expectations, etc. and wanted to pay that forward.

E5@FB (ML profile, no masters/PhD, worked there for 6 years)
Base: 190k
Unvested equity: 400k

Interviewed for L6@Google
2 coding rounds
2 ML design rounds
1 Googliness and Leadership (behavioral)

Pretty sure coding and behavioral went great. ML interviews went good-ish. I was optimistically expecting an L6 offer.

Got an offer for ML Engineer, L5@Google (couldn’t negotiate level)

Base: 198k
Bonus: 15% = ~30k
Equity: 558k -> negotiated up to 775k, in return for cancelling loops with Amazon/Twitter
Sign on: ~30k

Humble tips:

- Interviews are not crazy hard, even if you don’t get nowhere in first half of the interview, don’t worry about failing — that way, you might have a chance to get to the right solution in final 15 mins (it’s not easy I know. meditation helps)

- Be honest, in interviews and in negotiation. It does require you to really know yourself, your motivations for leaving, what you’re seeking in a new job, priorities, long term goals — these are good things to know (again, meditation helps); but will make your life easier by smoothing communication + negotiation.

- Try to never give out your current TC or numeric expectations. If you do, set high expectations, like 40-50% more than what you want.

- Don’t lie your numbers. If you do, firstly, inform yourself of levels and pay ranges and secondly, be consistent, write them down, the process might go on for 30-40 days and good recruiters write down *everything* that you might have said to them, *ever*.

- You don’t always need competing offers to negotiate. There are many other kinds of leverages — in my case: (a) my option that I might just stay put at FB (b) enthusiasm of the destination team’s manager (c) the fact that I was considering cancelling interviewing at other places for higher offer.

Happy to answer more questions, and to hear feedback on what I could have done better.

comments

Want to comment? LOG IN or SIGN UP
TOP 67 Comments
  • Walmart / Eng
    tfsJ75

    Go to company page Walmart Eng

    tfsJ75
    How much lcs have you done? Did you move because you love google as a product / what’s the reason ?
    Sep 16, 2020 11
    • @knorox were you a software engineer in the ml teams? I am currently interviewing for one of those roles. In my current role, I work closely with data scientists to help build feature stores, setup training and serving pipelines but never really built a model. Could you let me know if they are going to interview around model development? Any help is appreciated.
      Sep 27, 2020
    • Facebook / Eng
      change42

      Go to company page Facebook Eng

      change42
      Are you from NewsTab team? :P
      Oct 7, 2020
  • Google
    jjcreh4

    Go to company page Google

    jjcreh4
    Why not wait for E6 promo? L5-6 at Google is very hard.
    Sep 16, 2020 3
    • OP
      I wanted to quit my FB team. So my promo efforts would get nullified anyway. 5->6 is hard in FB as well, so I might be up against similar odds.

      Another big factor for me is a manager that can give me thoughtful feedback, and that’s also helpful in getting a promo. I talked to my prospective manager at Google three times, and I got a feeling that he has a good understanding of the path form L5-L6. He has plans to create an open L6 position sometime end of next year, which further corroborates that.

      So I decided to trust that.
      Sep 17, 2020
    • @knorox but no one can say the manager will be with you for long, and probably he/she will quit soon.
      May 31, 2021
  • You say that "interviews aren't hard" but there are many aspects to why an interview could be hard. For some it's LC problems. For others it's communication and clearly explaining their thinking, or behavioral rounds. Which were the most difficult and why?

    While prepping did you:
    Do mock interviews? If so, how many?
    Do any LC questions or similar practice?
    Sep 16, 2020 1
    • OP
      Excellent point. The last thing I want to do is to undermine the difficulty of interviews, but I don’t consider myself a genius and want people to really believe it’s doable (hence my use of phrase 'interviews aren’t *crazy* hard').

      I found ML design interviews harder than rest, because there are many pitfalls: it’s super open ended, easy to digress (especially when you and the interviewer have different pictures in mind and you’re going deep technically). If you wait to check with the interviewer whether you’re going in the right direction it could be read as lacking independence.

      I did no mocks (I was too overloaded with work tbh). I treated interviews as regular closed room meetings with a manager or colleague - I think that imagination took some pressure off me.

      I did ~10 mostly medium LC questions, before the interview. Some more details about this is in the first comment thread.
      Sep 16, 2020
  • LinkedIn / Eng
    kklaj39

    Go to company page LinkedIn Eng

    kklaj39
    Congratulations!
    How were the ML rounds? What level of detail/math was expected in those rounds?
    Sep 16, 2020 7
    • LinkedIn / Eng
      kklaj39

      Go to company page LinkedIn Eng

      kklaj39
      @great wall: Mostly googling and picking literature (papers, survey papers or lectures) that looks reasonable (good amount of citations and easy to follow) to me. DL specifically has a lot of online lectures as well and andres ng's is a good one.
      I am mostly struggling with how much to cover.
      Sep 18, 2020
    • Uber
      great wall

      Go to company page Uber

      great wall
      ✌️
      Sep 19, 2020
  • Uber
    kgAv78

    Go to company page Uber

    kgAv78
    So you have 6 YOE?
    Sep 18, 2020 3