My recruiter wants to know my expected salary for L4. Not sure how to answer this. I want to make the high end of the band. My friend who works at Google has an internal spreadsheet that people circulate with their salaries, like levels.fyi. The salaries on their are a lot lower than on levels. I hoped to make $300k+ (Mountain View), but my friend is telling me I’ll be lucky to make more than $200k. I already make more than that! And I’m interviewing for a director position at Wayfair, and expect that offer to be around $285k. How should I answer this? And what’s the band for L4? Is $200k really high?
Location matters. Where?
Mountain View
I think $300K at L4 would be hard. That's top of L4. I would say $220-250 is reachable.
You are interviewing for a director role at Wayfair and an L4 at google. That seems a bit low.
Exactly my confusion. Either you are seriously down leveled at Goodle or upleveled at Wayfair.
My initial recruiter was bad. The current recruiter wants to bring me in for another round to up level to 5. Nervous about that...
Director = people manager track. Google is IC? Still confused and cannot connect one with the other. What is your current role? Are you a dev or a manager ?
Currently a manager.
Don't take low-ball offer in any case
I was in this situation not too long ago. I didn’t give a number. Got lowballed for minimum L4 comp. I told them that’s not going to fly, had offers above 300TC, they eventually matched L4 comp which brought me comfortably above 300TC and close to max L4. The lesson I learned is: have strong competing offers. If I had to do it over again, I would just give the high range of L4 as my expected comp. Makes things much easier to negotiate later.
I tried this, got a sub-5th-percentile offer, then got a 4-day notice that the offer would expire. lol
4-day notice!? How long are they usually good for? I thought a year.
The internal spreadsheet uses TC=salary+bonus+this year's refresher rather than TC=salary+bonus+1/4 of inutial equity. So I'm not sure if you can get reliable data re: initial equity numbers.
I don’t follow. Can you explain like I’m 5?
Sure. After you work at google for 2 (?) years, you will generally get stock refreshers each year that vest over the next 4 years. The internal spreadsheet of TC at each level and location tracks this number, but does not track people's initial equity grants.
Google usually does a second price auction for it's offers. Find ur 2nd best offer and they beat it by a small amount.
Do not give any number. Let them show their hand first and negotiate from there
They will just lowball and anchor the conversations around their initial package
This is true ^