Comment by crazygringo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by crazygringo | Hacker News Reader

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The author calls Meta's process "reprehensible", but they seem to be acting like any large company when there are lots of people competing for fewer jobs. It's pretty standard with FAANG (or whatever it's called now) that they simply won't negotiate over their offer unless you've got another better offer in hand.

But the advice of this article to "make sure you have other offers" is pretty much impossible to pull off in practice. If you have offers from startups, they're generally going to be for less than Meta is offering in the first place. And if you have better offers from the rest of "AANG", then the whole point is you can just take one of them. But this article starts with the premise that they're not doing much hiring right now, so I don't know how you're supposed to get those offers.

And all of this ignores the fact that coordinating the timing of offers, so that you have an open offer from another company, when Meta makes you their offer, is virtually impossible. You have no idea, when you start interviewing with another company, if they'll make you an offer in 3 days or 3 weeks or 2 months. And they generally give short deadlines as well.

So I don't really get what this article is trying to achieve. What Facebook is doing is pretty standard for corporations in a powerful hiring position, and the advice to try to counter it is nearly impossible to pull off. This is just how capitalism and labor markets go.

But, this article is definitely useful so people know how the process is working right now.

Yeah I hate how companies abuse this crap regarding having other offers on the table. It's built to make candidates lives as stressful as fucking possible and create a sense of urgency since now you have to handle all of this in a short timeline, while potentially working another job at the same time and trying to not come off as completely aloof there. And you need to convince the companies themselves to delay in which time the given position could slip away while you went to interview elsewhere.

Yeah, it's tricky.

Sometimes the exploding offers are real, because a specific team or startup needs a single new employee with a very specific skillset yesterday, and if you don't take it they're going to make an offer to their next best choice -- and by the time you decide you're ready to take it, the position is filled.

And sometimes they're totally made up, to try to get you to take a lower offer because they want a decision in the next 3 days and the other company you're interviewing with is going to take another 3 weeks to decide. When the reality is that if you came back 3 weeks later, they'd still totally hire you, despite everything they said previously. "I swear we never do this, but with your interview performance, we'll write up a new offer letter."

So it's always just a gamble.

But at the same time, you can also do it to companies -- I did once. I had an offer from one company that was exploding at the end of the week, and I went to the company I wanted to work for that had been delaying scheduling interviews, and said here's the deal: if you want to consider hiring me, you've got 2 days to interview me and make a decision. That lit a fire under their butt, I interviewed the next day, and they made me their offer at 4 pm Fri, when my other offer expoded at 5 pm. And so I got the job at the company I did want, faster than I ever would have otherwise!.(And possibly for more money, but I'll never know -- they simply matched my other offer which was pretty high at a really boring terrible company.)

Author here. We have a whole section on timing, including specific advice about how to control it (slow-playing team matching, delaying interview scheduling, etc.)

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