Can someone shed some light? If I get an offer, should I settle for it, or should I keep looking for other companies? What if I get an offer from Microsoft before having the chance to interview elsewhere? For example, MSFT L61 is avg 135k/100k/30k, which is the lowest amongst the other companies when looking at levels.fyi. What's so special about Microsoft that they offer low salaries and get away with it, given they're like the second largest company by market cap?
Microsoft has a better wlb. More mature employees who are not necessarily looking to extract the highest tc but also want to spend some with family. They also lose out on some of the talent because of the tc. Microsoft does compete for senior levels (principle and up) to an extent. I guess they just believe mid level employees are not worth as much. Also since they are based in Redmond, their median offers are no where close to bay area companies. Also their benefit package is really good. Only F and G are probably better.
This is accurate. MSFT is way more chill than AMZN. I've heard many people quantify their roles as 1/4th to 1/5th their responsibility at Amazon for lateral moves. From that perspective.... It's a come up.
I don't understand the better wlb thing which people talk about regarding MSFT. they pay less than half but one has to still work atleast 40 hours a week. one has to still go to office 9 to 5 and work (before pandemic). its not like you only go 2-3 days in week for that half pay. In FAANG(except F may be) in reasonable teams, one gets double pay and much more scope with the same hours of work. Redmond's housing prices are definitely not half that of south bay where FAANG have HQ, it probably 85 percentile.
Microsoft looks to be in the top 66% in terms of pay. Pays well for top 20% and avg for remaining 80%. This works well for it. It does not need top talent for mundane tasks... It competes for top university talent and any experienced talent it really cares about. For the rest avg comp is good enough...
Msft lowballs unless you bring a big name offer. My L61 Inital was 128k/80k/25k, but I had FB/G offers which I used to negotiate up to 135k/200k/55k. I chose msft for HW because of the better wlb compared to FB and the more proven HW portfolio and cooler tech prospects compared to G. If I were SW I think FB would've blown msft out of the water though, but they only offered me 200k RSU's for E4.
Wonder what is the meaning of val1/val2/val3? Base/RSU/signon?
It’s an std::tuple
*cries in Hitachi*
*cough *
* looks up to find mates in the same boat*
Want low salaries come to intel ;)
Simple Most folks are from Intel So they have mastered the art of lowballing talent Good luck MC
Lowballing, true Talent? Probably not
Who said that they get away with it? What would need to happen for you to see that they in fact do not get away with it? On average it’s lot more likely that a good engineer would move from Microsoft to {Google | Facebook | Netflix | ...} than the other direction. That means a consistent net negative flow of talent. This is the price they are paying.
Exactly. If an incoming engineer has offers from faang tier companies, they are highly likely to take it over microsoft's. That doesn't mean everyone gets those offers though!
Random anecdote alert. I interviewed for an L68 role and four out of my seven interviewers (L68-L70) were rebounds. They started at MS, went to FB or G or both and then came back to MSFT.
MS typically catered to risk averse corporate and stable market, so the trend of lower salary.
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A lot of folks like it here in Redmond. Being in Redmond vs Seattle is a subtle yet often overlooked plus for many people. It also helps that within Microsoft you can work on almost any type of software. And the icing on the cake might be our stock performance as of late.
What's the advantage of Redmond vs Seattle
This is 100% a matter of personal preference, but many people don't want to live in a big city like Seattle. And Redmond is a nice compromise. Redmond is closer to towns like Duvall, Issaquah, and Woodenville where you can have a large yard, and nice house for much cheaper than in downtown Seattle. If you live in Sammamish, commuting to Redmond is much easier than commuting to Seattle.