The myth of compensation bands
When applying to new jobs you may hear from the recruiter that the offer is at the max of the compensation band or that your expectations are out of band and that they can’t do better. This is just a negotiation trick, don’t fall for it.
While it is true that large companies have compensation band, these are more guidelines than policies for a few reasons:
- VP can overwrite any policy with very rare exceptions – they can definitely change a compensation regardless of bands
- The bands are often for salary or cash flow. At Google, stock grants have a much larger band. The initial grant is not even visible to the manager! And from what I heard, backdoor grants are also invisible (out of cycle grants)
- Compensation bands are like an SLA, what matters is the overall time/compensation distribution
The same applies to small companies as far as I know. They may not be able to increase the cash flow, but the options/grants should be a no brainer.
Salary (and compensation) negotiations are similar to every negotiations. How much you get depends on how much the company wants/need you and how willing you are to negotiate – I personally think that you don’t necessarily need to get the highest possible offer but rather one that fits your need and desire.
There are a bunch of tips to negotiate your compensation though. Maybe I’ll write about these as a follow up post