PSA on google lowballs: Be ballsy
I'm seeing a lot of people complaining about Google lowballing them and then say they have no leverage to go up. But after going through the process I'm pretty certain the Google initial lowball is just a smokescreen and they actually have your true number in mind already. They want to see if they can trick some people into joining on the cheap who aren't confident enough to negotiate. The strategy should always be to have your ideal number in mind regardless of what leverage you think or don't think you have and ignore their first number. Your minimum ideal number should always be significantly higher than the maximum of: 1) your other competing offers 2) the 51st percentile on levels.fyi assuming a 25% vesting schedule and not including sign on (levels uses 25% standard reporting but google tries to use the 33% to make the numbers look big and scary) Ask for the number *in email* where you can convince them with selling your accomplishments and your worth etc. Email lets you proofread and be thorough with no mistakes. Also consider hinting at your great interview performance or team matching popularity since it's the main form of evidence you have for being worth more from your perspective. If they come back and it's still too low, try *really hard* to continue pushing it up without whipping out the competing offers (good rapport with recruiter helps) e.g. "HR person, you've been a great help so far, I'd really love it if we can push up the equity portion" Don't reveal anything specific about your other interviews, be vague. Other things you can use include performance review at current company, endorsements from any googlers you know (hopefully senior and above). After exhausting every possible option, only then do you whip out the competing offers for more. Imply (politely) that you've got one foot out the door and really need them to beat it. In my case I probably left money on the table and you shouldn't make the same mistake. I got 211 (224 front load) initially with no signon. I took this number too seriously as being my actual worth cause I had no competing offers and people on blind keep preaching "you need more competing offers" garbage as the only weapon against big scary Google. I wussed out and only asked for 263+20 signon (285 front load). This was a mistake because that number is a bit lower than the median on levels as mentioned above. The comp team probably laughed at my email trying to sell myself when the number I was asking was lower than their internal "real" number. They happily came back with 267+30 signon, meaning I probably could have easily asked for 300+40 and gotten them to settle in between. Anyway, moral of the story is, don't sell yourself short, ignore the "competing offer" game and use it only as a last resort. They want you to fall into that trap so that the overall industry can go as low as possible. Use your personal ideal numbers to guide everything. Edit: another decent weapon (CA and maybe other states only) is to ask directly for the range in your level and they're required by law to cough it up. By contrast, they can't ask for your salary because that's against the law and you can report them. #tech #negotiation
Levels.fyi
Same thing happened with me and FB for my pm offer. Except I actually threw out a first number since I didn’t have competing offers and was worried if I didn’t do that they’d anchor me with a lowball and it’d be hard for me to claw up from there. The number I threw out was probably in the bottom 25th percentile from levels.fyi. They ended up coming back 18k below what I asked. I then did a whole email explaining my worth blah blah and provided the RSUs I’d be leaving since the recruiter said if I didn’t provide such data they wouldn’t be able to revisit the offer. I asked for 10k more. They came back with 14K more , which is 4K more than what I asked for but in hindsight I might’ve been able to get more had I threw out a higher number initially. Oh well, I’m pretty happy with what I got. Maybe I could’ve gotten another 10k but at the end of the day it’s still a huge bump over my current tc and it was a good experience for future negotiations. But all that said it would’ve definitely probably been much more easier effective to have competing offers. So in the future I’ll definitely invest in securing multiple offers.
Great point about using competing offers at last resort. I felt into the trap of providing competing offers upfront. Company B refused to even give me initial offer numbers unless I provided the details of Company A because they knew I already had another offer. Company B matched Company A's offer which was lowball to begin with and refused to increase beyond that. I didn't have any leverage after that because I revealed all my cards too early. OP - Do the numbers you mention include the 15% target bonus? I'm assuming you are based in CA? I'm in Seattle and my google recruiter says they won't be able to do 300K+
Yeah I'm in Bay Area, those numbers are (base/bonus/RSU*0.25) and then I put +X to indicate signon
What level is this? Mind sharing yoe?
I agree with you on this. You don’t need a competing offer. Just know your worth, be firm, and make sure recruiter is on your side!
What if my ideal number is 650k? Can google hit that? At L6
Generally they won't go out of band unless you're exceptional, but you should still go for it anyway. Let them tell you it's out of their range and act surprised/disappointed.