Not saying it's nice, but that just sounds like tough negotiating to me. As opposed to actual illegal salary collusion by Apple, Google, Intel, Adobe

It is worth noting that a "lowball" from Meta is still probably more than a "best offer" from the vast majority of other companies.

Meta has been known for years to only negotiate if you have competing offers. I guess being the only place with high TC hiring right now complicates things but this negotiation strategy is not new.

I mean, lots of companies do the same thing, and it's just part of the job hunting process. If you can't stand it, you don't have to join that company, just find another one. I don't like all that stuff but there is nothing worthy of picking out Meta.

This article seems both inaccurate and unfair. In my job hunt over the last 5 months I have been unable to get offers above 150k. Meta offered me 270k. Yeah that's below what levels.fyi says. So what?

I asked about various amendments to the offer, like a starting bonus or compensation for missing January's RSU pricing, and my recruiter gave me zero BS, she just said they couldn't do it without a competing offer. (And all of my competing offers were roughly half of Meta's, so they would only undermine my effort)

I spent 1 week in team matching before being given an hiring manager interview. He passed on me, and then about 4 days later my recruiter said they were now doing hiring "war rooms" and another manager had approved to hire me without a matching interview. Yes there was a 5 business day ultimatum, but again, this is a job offering nearly double the current market rate.

I had a great experience with Meta and I would recommend it to anyone (just based on the interviewing/recruiting/comp aspects, naturally I haven't started working there yet)

This is the nonsense you get for inexperienced and jr devs.

Let's take a look at the pandemic. The government was handing out free money. People were stuck at home. Why did big tech hire every bit of talent that applied and let them do nothing for two years?

The same reason that they over hire now, and have dumb roles like "button engineers". The same reason why experienced FAANG engineers leave and build bloated systems with more servers (and problems) than users.

The strategy is one to abort competition. To soften potential competitors with cushy jobs and stupid pay days. TO indoctrinate them into a way of building and thinking that isnt wholly compatible with startups.

What happens when these processes misfire. You get what's app. 30 engineers and 30 servers at the time FB bought them (or some stupidly low number, I'm close). Your average post FAANG engineer would have 2 dozen people running kafka and kuberneties with a multi million dollar cloud spend and have given most of the company away to VC's.

Am I suggesting there is a cabal? No, this is the 'natural order' and has been going on since Edison. The distinction is one of nuance. If you have the stomach for risk it is even easier to succeed now than it was in Edisons time (software isnt physical goods and hardware, its application not creation).

Edit: peter thiel 100k dropout offer is likely an overt example of this idea put into action.