In my experience they could do better. Ex: TikTok, Snap, and Airbnb all make ~25% higher offers than FB for L5 and L6 engineers.

It seems like the hiring market is simply exhausted in a lot of metros, e.g. SFO, SEA, NYC. Of course they can try to dramatically outbid competitors, but for a 70k-employee company, that's not really a sustainable strategy.

> They’re already on the top end of the distribution, you can see pretty accurate numbers on Levels.fyi

Just how wide is this distribution? I'll look at levels.fyi but I've always found those surveys to be dubious. Also why is so bad for FB if engineers are turning down offers? That they stayed in the recruiting process long enough to get an offer indicates a basic willingness to work there, so declining the offer was simply a matter of some details not lining up.

I worked with a placement agency last time I was full time job hunting, and the agent urged me pretty hard to interview with FB but I refused. I ended up accepting an offer from a company that claimed to pay mid-market salaries with higher than average equity, and which didn't seem evil. I'd still never consider FB but I'm wondering how big the difference might have been. Wow.