throwaway971608

> But if you've been interviewing you should have an intuition for what you can expect.

Indeed. I have talked to recruiters at companies like Stripe, Square and Facebook who say they are willing to negotiate up to U$480k to hire a person with my experience and skills. Unfortunately, the invitations were coincidentally scheduled during my on-call shift, so I missed some of the interviews, which resulted in early rejections.

I can probably talk to them again, if Apple is unwilling to negotiate a bit more.

Maybe I should do that now: get offers from one of them and tell Apple, because, as someone else said in this thread: “You need two offers before joining any tech company.”

I appreciate the sarcasm because it provides a different perspective.

Obviously U$228k is a good salary for many software developers, but there is additional context in my original post to understand that, maybe, it is not adequate for my engineering level. Nonetheless, I welcome the criticism because maybe the offer is good enough to acquire my experience, or maybe it is better than I deserve.

True. Although, I am not comparing my offer with Apple salaries in the US, they are obviously much more higher. I am explicitely comparing my offer with Apple salaries in Canada (the link in the TL;DR of my original post). Notice that the recruiter said they strive to pay 75th of market rate, which, according to Levels.FYI, is USD $290k per year.

If we are to believe Levels.FYI, Apple is low-balling me for approximately USD $60k per year, which is obviously peanuts for a $3 Trillion company. Meanwhile, U$60k is the equivalent of eighteen (18) years of minimum wage salary (accounting for inflation) in my home country. My family would be set for life if I could send them that money.

I actually obtained an offer from Yammer (Microsoft) at the same time.

This offer is what I used to negotiate Apple’s offer.

They went up a several thousand dollars in the signing bonus, but that doesn’t help much if the base salary is average compared to other medium-sized companies in the cities. A bank is not going to give a good mortgage based on compound (imaginary) income, unless I have at least one year of work experience in that company (to use tax forms as proof of income).

That is true, and I think that is one of the mistakes I made before the negotiation started. At some point, I told the recruiter —“I know many engineers want to work at Apple. I will carefully consider any offer you extend.”—. I told them that because I was not sure if they were really ready to extend and offer or not.

> Also, apple offers stock last I knew anyways, which can be quite attractive in some circumstances.

For the sake of clarification, USD $228k already includes the annual bonus and the average (hypothetical) vested stock, so the base salary is actually much lower than that. Banks and other entities do not care about your stock grant or annual bonus, they only care about your base salary, so qualifying for a good mortgage will be an interesting challenge.

Thanks. I don’t want to make it sound like I am being ungrateful, and I told the same thing to the recruiter, but I am sure that my family back home would appreciate it if I can bring more bread to the table for the same amount of time and energy investment.

Did you accept the offer? If yes, are you happy with the progression so far?

It is possible, although, the responsibilities listed in the job description make the position sound quite technical. In fact, the hiring manager and two of the engineers in the team were kind enough to give me examples of tasks that they would like me to work on if I were to join, and most if not all of the examples sounded like ICT4-ICT5 engineering work.