The unwritten rules (till now) of negotiating with Meta

EDIT: This post is based on stories from users who were interviewing for E4-E6 SWE and MLE roles at Meta. Other, more specialized roles may have different processes than what's described here.

EDIT 2: If you don't like reading, here's me presenting the contents of this blog post in a video. Pick your poison.

At interviewing.io, one of the services we offer our users is salary negotiation. Even though I’m the founder, I still do many of the sessions myself because they give me an invaluable insider’s perspective on what’s actually going on in the engineering market, what different companies’ offers look like, how companies extend offers, what kinds of deadlines they give, and how much they go up in compensation, under what circumstances.

Access to this kind of data is great because it helps me make better business decisions. But sometimes I see questionable patterns of behavior among companies. Recently, I’ve observed a string of practices at Meta that I find reprehensible, and that’s what this post is about. I’ve seen the same practices with enough candidates, and across enough different titles and positions, that it’s become clear to me that they are not isolated incidents or a rogue recruiter’s doing but rather a consistent implementation of a deliberate strategy that comes from the top.

I’m writing about this for two reasons. First, if you’re negotiating with Meta, you need to know how they operate and understand the unwritten rules of the game. If you do not know the rules, you will fail — long before you even start negotiating.

Second, I’m hoping that someone at Meta sees this post and that maybe it’ll spark an internal discussion about changing the rules.

By the way, if I’m wrong, I will gladly issue a retraction and a public apology. Please contact me if you’re a recruiter at Meta and find something incorrect in this post. My email is aline@interviewing.io.

Lastly, if you’re about to interview there or are interviewing there already, please read our free, long-form guide to their interview process and questions.

Meta basically has a monopoly on FAANG hiring right now

I mentioned above that we do salary negotiation, but our main business is mock interviews. We offer anonymous mock interviews in the style of a bunch of different companies (mostly FAANGs). This means we know how many people are practicing for interviews at Google vs. Meta vs. other FAANGs, and that lets us guess (pretty accurately) how much hiring is actually happening at these companies.

You can read in way more detail about how all the FAANGs are doing in our recent blog post where we made 2024 predictions based on our proprietary data. But while I was writing that post, I noticed something odd. Meta was hiring way more engineers than any of the other FAANGs. In fact, Meta hiring is up more than 10X since January of last year. You can see that more recently Amazon has picked up a bit, but it’s very recent and not enough to drive major change in other companies’ behaviors (at least not yet). And, yes, Netflix is hiring too, but Meta’s eng team is more than 10X the size of Netflix’s, so in the absolute, Netflix’s hiring volume isn’t enough to balance Meta out. For all intents and purposes, Meta’s the only FAANG that’s really hiring at scale — and they’re currently getting away with treating candidates really poorly as a result.

How Meta negotiates, given their effective monopoly on eng hiring

Here’s how Meta runs their hiring process. These practices have been consistent across every negotiation client we’ve had in the past 6 months or so.

Meta’s hiring is centralized, which means that you enter one big interview process that’s completely divorced from which team you might end up on and you interview with people whom you might never work with again. If you do well, there will be a team matching component after you pass the onsite but before you get an offer¹. With that in mind, here’s how they run their process, once you get the green light.

1. Team matching. This can take days or weeks, depending on how many teams you speak to and how many conversations you have with the people on each team. You'll speak with hiring managers to gauge fit and chemistry, and if you’d like, you can also talk to peers. We've heard that sometimes you get the chance to talk to a handful of teams, and sometimes it's over 10. After your team-matching conversations, your recruiter will ask you to choose a team. In order to move forward, both you and the hiring manager have to opt in².
2. Likely down-level you. Sometime during team matching, you’ll probably find out that you’ve been down-leveled. Often, your recruiter will cite your performance in the system design portion (and sometimes the behavioral portion). According to a recent survey we did, something like 55% of Meta candidates get down-leveled (more likely for generalist SWE roles, less likely for more niche roles like ML).
3. Make a lowball offer with just a few days to make a decision. Once you’re done with team matching, things get dicey. Your recruiter will make you a lowball offer that’s often $50k or more (!!) below the average TC on levels.fyi. Moreover, you usually just get a couple of days to make a decision. If you were down-leveled, your lowball offer may include a small signing bonus as a consolation prize.
4. Refuse to negotiate unless you can show them other offers from comparable companies. Your recruiter will say something like, “If you’d like to increase your offer, I can take this to the compensation committee, but I need a compelling reason [i.e., another offer]."
5. If you have other offers, they will apologize for the lowball offer, citing that it’s “automatic numbers from our computer” and raise the numbers by $100K or more (in first year’s TC). If you do not, you will be stuck with a lowball offer, though you may be able to negotiate a small signing bonus if the offer didn’t come with one already.

How to negotiate with Meta

Below are the steps for negotiating with Meta in a hard climate where they have a monopoly on hiring. We hope that most of these won’t be necessary in the future. They are:

• Don’t share anything with your recruiter
• Make sure you have other offers
• Slow-play team matching
• Build rapport with every hiring manager you talk to
• Actually negotiate (this is the easy part)

Don’t share anything with your recruiter

We wrote a whole post about how to avoid sharing information with your recruiter and why this is so vital. If you share where you’re interviewing or how far along you are, or if you start negotiating prematurely, the strategies below won’t work.

Please read our post on not shooting yourself in the foot during negotiations before you continue!

You should also be aware of a few tricks specific to Meta recruiters. If you're not forthcoming about where else you're interviewing, they may say a few sneaky things.

First, they may say something like, "Well, we just want to know where you're interviewing so we can intro you to others who interviewed at those companies but ultimately chose Meta." Don't fall for that early in the process. It's a trap to get information out of you. You can always ask for those intros later, when you're negotiating and it's the right time information about your other offers.

The other thing they do is fish, saying something like, "Well, in case you're interviewing at {Google, Netflix, some other big company they don't want to lose candidates to}, just so you know, they move kind of slowly, so we may not be able to wait." There, the Meta recruiter's goal is to get you to say, "Oh, no, don't worry, I'm not interviewing at Google!"

Now, you've lost leverage in their eyes because that's one less competitive company they might lose you to... and they'll be more confident about lowballing you later on.

Make sure you have other offers

As you may have guessed from reading the previous section, it’s critical to have other offers, and not just any offers but ones from top-tier companies who pay very competitively³.

We realize that saying “have other offers” doesn’t capture the blood, sweat, and tears that go into months of interview prep, applications, emails, recruiter calls, and interviews. We know it’s hard, but as you’ll see, it makes a huge difference in your compensation.

Getting those offers doesn’t start when you’ve received your Meta offer. It starts months before. Make sure that you get enough initial conversations with other FAANGs, FAANG-adjacent companies, and late-stage sexy startups to end up with at least one other offer, ideally at least two. Depending on your interview performance, this might be anywhere from 4 to 10 initial conversations.⁴

Slow-play team matching

Having your offers come in around the same time is critical for any negotiation, but it’s especially important with Meta because they take such a hard line — without other offers, they will not meaningfully budge.

Obviously, you’ll want to start your conversations with other companies well in advance of your Meta interviews and do everything you can to make sure they all come in at the same time. However, even with your best efforts, it’s not guaranteed that your timing will match up. Here’s how to make sure that your offers come in at the same time: slow-play Meta’s team-matching process.

Team matching is actually the part of your Meta journey where you have the most leverage and power. Why leverage? At this point, they know they want you, but they can’t yet hold an offer deadline over you. We’ve already mentioned that once they make the offer, your recruiter is going to push very hard to have you accept, often giving you a deadline of something like two days. In your recruiter’s eyes, you’re a ticking time bomb, where for every day you don’t sign, the deal loses momentum, and your odds of signing drop off. Recruiters are also evaluated on how many candidates they close, so it’s in their interest to create a false sense of scarcity in order to rush you and to use high-pressure sales tactics to get you to seal the deal.

And what power do you have? It turns out you can really control how long team matching takes, within reason. If you’re still wrapping phone screens with other companies, slow-playing is the best thing you can do. Here’s how to do it.

We’ve recently heard that Meta is now insisting that hiring manager conversations happen in serial, but even if Meta lets you talk to multiple hiring managers concurrently, try to serialize those conversations as much as possible. For instance, if you hear from your recruiter that you’re going to start team matching on a Monday, and they offer to set up some calls for Wednesday, ask to do the first call on a Friday and the next call the following Tuesday. When we advise our users to do this, we often get pushback because they’re worried that slowing things down will make them look disinterested/not serious. We promise you that’s not the case. The biggest risk you run when you slow-play team matching scheduling like this is losing the chance to work on a specific team. If you find that your recruiter has proposed what seems like the perfect team for you, you can and should prioritize doing that call as soon as possible.

In addition to serializing your hiring manager conversations, for each team, ask to talk to a few individual contributors on teams that you’re serious about. This isn’t just a stalling tactic. These are the people you’ll be working closely with every day, and they’re the ones doing the job you may have in the future. They’re also less likely to do hard sells, and if you ask thoughtful questions, you’ll learn a lot about what to expect. We’re always surprised by how few candidates ask to speak to their future peers, out of a mistaken concern that asking for too much will make them look disinterested or unengaged. Just like with hiring manager calls, if you need to slow things down, we recommend scheduling calls with your peers a few days apart.

Situations where slow-playing may bite you, and how to know the difference

We have seen two instances when our advice about slow-playing could backfire. You probably remember when companies started to freeze hiring aggressively in mid-2022 — if you didn’t get matched before the ax came down, you were left out in the cold. Much more recently, we heard from some of our users that Meta put a pause on team matching for E4 roles (largely outside the Bay Area), and many candidates were stuck in a holding pattern (while Meta figured out headcount constraints, though it looks like it’s since been resolved, and picking back up in earnest. Slow-playing and then getting stuck is obviously an unfortunate situation, as is being on the wrong end of a hiring freeze, but these situations are rare, and in our humble opinion, not worth optimizing for — in most cases, you will not be dealing with an impending freeze or stalled matching. If you’re unsure about team supply or the state of hiring, you can do two things:

1. Always ask your recruiter up front to share the number of teams that candidates have had the chance to talk to, on average, recently.
2. Look at our real-time graph of FAANG hiring volume (as opposed to the graph above, which is a monthly snapshot). In this real-time graph, you can see what portion of our mock interview volume is dedicated to practice in the style of Meta, Amazon, and Google. Historically, our purchasing behavior has lined up very well with what’s actually going on in the market, and the rate of change in this graph should give you an idea of whether Meta is slowing down. As you can see, there was a dip in February (and one in December, but that almost always happens because hiring slows down over the holidays). If you see dips like these, you’ll want to make sure that you do (1) and ask your recruiter about the situation inside. You may also choose not to slow-play for too long.

Build rapport with every hiring manager you talk to

Outside of using the team-matching process to control your timeline, there is one other important tactical piece of advice: Do your best to build rapport with hiring managers.

As we said above, recruiters are trying to close the deal. That’s their job. Hiring managers, on the other hand, are trying to lay the groundwork for a good working relationship with you. As a result, their interests are much more aligned with yours. Of course, they still want to close you, but it’s not worth it to them to employ high-pressure tactics, and it’s not something they’re trained in or comfortable with (in fact, many of them hated these tactics when they were on the other end of it while looking for work)⁵.

As such, hiring managers will generally be a lot more transparent with you about how much time you actually have to make a decision, and their answers will likely be very different from the ones you get from recruiters.

We’ve advised all of our Meta candidates to ask their prospective hiring managers about when they realistically have to make a decision by, and the differences between what the hiring manager has told them (“Take your time; you have a few weeks at least.”) and what their recruiter has told them (“We’re talking to a lot of candidates for that team. To ensure your spot, you should make a decision in the next few days.”) are stark.

There’s simply no downside to building rapport with hiring managers. At worst, you make a professional connection. At best, you get a head start on a great working relationship with your new boss.

One practical note: Always ask your hiring manager for their email address in case you have more questions later. This way, if your recruiter starts telling you that you need to make a decision by Friday, you can ping your hiring manager, explain that you’re still thinking, and ask if it’s OK to take a few more days. Almost always they will say yes.

Actually negotiate (this is the easy part)

If you’ve done everything else in this post, the negotiation is the easy part. By now, you’ve wrapped up team matching, chosen a team, and have likely gotten an aggressive offer deadline.

You have also not shared any offer details till now. As we said at the beginning of this post, the success of your strategy hinges on the recruiter not being aware of the other companies you’re interviewing with. This will be the first time they find out about it, and that will put them on their proverbial back foot.

To respond to the offer, you can send an email⁶ that looks something like the below. The details will differ, and how much you reveal about the other offers will vary, but here’s the general idea.

Hey [Recruiter name],

Thank you, and I look forward to hearing from you.

By the way, this isn’t the only approach you can take, and with other companies, you might have better luck with the Reverse Used Car Salesman. However, in our experience, if you don’t share offer details, your Meta recruiter will immediately ask you to share, so you might as well control the flow of information.

In the template above, I’ve assumed that not all of your offers are stronger than Meta’s across the board, which is why I’ve cherry-picked which pieces to share. Sometimes, if you’re lucky, you’ll have multiple offers that have a higher base, more equity, and a higher signing bonus. In that case, it’s less of a game of skill — just throw the numbers at them, and they’ll exceed the other offers without much prompting.

If you run this play, your recruiter will apologize for low-balling you, blaming the “computer” for giving them those numbers. Then, like clockwork, you will see a $50k to $150k jump in your offer (precisely how much depends on where your other offers are from and how strong they are).⁷

Now, whether you take that offer is up to you.

Some closing thoughts. I’m a capitalist. Meta’s behavior here is aggressively capitalistic, if short-sighted – once other FAANGs start meaningfully hiring again, and Meta employees figure out that there’s a $150k comp differential between people with the same job title, they’re going to pay the piper and likely see a bunch of attrition. Ultimately, the market will correct these practices. However, I also believe that individuals have the right and duty to be as informed as possible and to wield whatever weapons in their arsenal to advocate for themselves, rather than waiting on the mercy of slow, indifferent market forces.

As such, we hope this post has given you some ammunition in your negotiations and helped reduce the information asymmetry between you and Meta, a huge, aggressive player with basically a monopoly on eng hiring at the moment. And we hope that if anyone from Meta is reading this, it’ll spark some internal conversations about what’s right. And if they don’t, other FAANGs’ recruiters will swoop in soon enough.

Want to know if you’re ready to interview at Meta? Do anonymous mock interviews with real Meta interviewers, and see exactly where you stack up.

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