This is the final part in a 4 part series. Part three: Interviewing, part 3️⃣. Offer from Uber..

Eventually, I did all 10 interviews. Those resulted in 5 offers.

The offers were:

  • Uber Premium [1]
  • Uber Taxi [1]
  • Voxer
  • JUUL
  • Facebook [1]

Uber and Facebook had comparable packages, much higher than JUUL and Voxer. Unfortunately, that eliminated JUUL and Voxer from the process, although I’m very excited about both company’s missions.

In what was one of the most stressful moments of my life, I had to negotiate my offer between Uber and Facebook. Uber had the higher initial offer.

Facebook asked, “What number would you need to withdraw from the negotiating process and choose Facebook?” I gave a total comp (TC) of 400k. I would feel comfortable withdrawing from Uber with that amount.

They couldn’t get that much. They countered with 280k TC. Much lower.

I put in one last request for a TC of 300k, and they accepted.

At that point, the Uber and Facebook offers were financially equivalent. I chose FB over Uber because of better chances for long-term learning.

I’ve been doing contract work for several years now. I enjoy it, but a downside is that you’re never in positions where you’re being paid to learn. You’re brought on for a short-term business goal.

Because Facebook is later stage, they can afford to educate engineers over a much longer time-horizon.

I’m extremely proud of this result. I interviewed at Facebook in April of 2017 where I’m quite sure I was immediately eliminated. Almost 2 years ago.

Now, I received a close to max offer for my level of experience. I’m elated.

[1] An interesting aside: I was extremely frustrated due to my performance when I came out of each of these three interviews, and only these interviews. They were my interviews that resulted in the highest offers.

In an experiment, a class was split into a lecture-style class, and an interactive-style class. The students coming from the interactive class felt that they were performing worse than their lecture counterparts, but in fact scored higher than them. This seems like the same sort of phenomenon. [SOURCE NEEDED]