A friend at Microsoft was an intern a few years back and (savage) got together with all the other interns to track their offers. They made a google sheet and once someone received an offer from Microsoft they updated what their offer was on the sheet. They would then include the details of their negotiation and finally, add the details of the final offer they accepted. My friend was one of the last to get his offers and, by looking over all the negotiations, he knew exactly what their max range would be in salary, equity, and sign-on bonus. When it came time to negotiate he went all in on the max equity someone else got + 5k and he got it 🎉 When thinking about this, negotiating offers is still one of the biggest pain points for a candidate. People just aren’t sure if the offer they got is the best one, even with Glassdoor and levels.FYI. I think it’s because when you’re interviewing at a company, you don’t know any of the other candidates. You can’t talk to them, ask what their offers are, see how negotiations went, etc. You can only look at past final offers posted elsewhere. What if we build a place that allows candidates to talk to each other and accomplish what my friend at Microsoft did - track their offers, negotiations, and final results in real time? I suppose candidates would also want to talk about other things like what questions people were asked in interviews, etc. - we can allow that too. But that probably wouldn’t be the main purpose. Is this a bad idea? Let me know what you think :) Also, not exactly sure how this would make money yet so if you have ideas, feel free to comment. UPDATE: lots of people are asking what’s different between this and blind / levels.FYI. The difference for me is that you can’t communicate with anyone from levels.FYI about their offer, how negotiations went, etc. And blind just bombards you with everything in this anonymous form - there’s not really a dedicated space for this, it’s just kinda spread out. On this app, if I started interviewing at Qualtrics, I could join the Qualtrics page and set myself to the “undergoing interviews” status. I could see that 112 others are also in this status and we are given access to post in the Qualtrics “undergoing interviews” channel. Anyone can read the channel and comment on other peoples posts, i suppose you could also set yourself to undergoing interviews even if you weren’t and if that’s how you roll, then you do you. Then there’d be an offers section formatted similar to levels.FYI but with sections like “original offer”, “negotiations”, and “final offer” you could comment under these, ask more questions, etc. TC $120k #software-engineering #startup #equity #idea
How is blind different?
Standard Amazon - why and why not
Well this is what we do on blind. It’s almost like a personal advice. Post your offer and verify from others. I see a lot of people saying you can get more stocks or the max base is 123k and so on. They also look at yoe & help you out. But what people tend to forget is that your offer range also depends on the interviews. If you were not exceptional, you might not hit the max band. But if it was, they can easily go over that.
This only works if you can validate the offers. With friends you have trust, how do we trust this platform? Also, levels.fyi does this right?
Isn’t that kinda what blind is for and why people ask for TC and YoE on the threads? But I get it. You want to build something primarily focused on comp + negotiation. My guess is it would get difficult to make people post accurate information if you don’t design it correctly. The good thing about blind is that has already been established as a cultural tenet, and is followed religiously on these forums.
Yeah a bunch of snowflakes get annoyed by TC or GTFO nowadays but it’s the only way we all get value from this community
Lol exactly. I marvel at the dumbness of those folks…
The main issue is that it can't be anonymous, and everyone needs to trust everyone else. Like the opposite of blind. Or, if still anonymous, then sourced from a trusted intermediary, like h1bdata.info, but that only has base salaries.
It’ll be full of bullshit just like much of blind
levels.fyi has already monetized something like this.. https://www.levels.fyi/services/?from=home_page_below_nav
$540 for negotiation help seems high. Do you know if it’s worth it?
I bought it and got me +100k total in RSU and +35k sign on. That being said, this was my first time negotiating an offer and I wouldn't buy it again since I know what to do now
Levels.FYI way ahead of you
Good idea, but moderation would be a huge challenge.
That's literally the mission objective of levels.fyi
A crowdsourced community for offers and negotiating, good idea. How do you keep fake posters or other bad parties out?
Make them post offer letters with names redacted out, maybe only keep the first letter of first and last name for verification, you could have even write an image ML algo to do this for them ;)
You can do an online video coding interview, given them a medium, that will filter 99.99% of the bad parties