Negotiating job offers at Facebook, Amazon, GitHub and Stripe

I was unsure about negotiation strategy and how aggressive to be. I was also experiencing a lot of angst about which opportunity was right for me — which one was a good values fit, which one I would actually be happiest in, what they would actually be willing to pay me and how much that even mattered.

You have a lot of time to overthink things during the negotiation process. Josh helped keep my nervousness to a minimum and helped me feel confident about the tone that I was setting in my interactions with different companies.

I negotiated increases in the offers with three of the four companies. GitHub was the lowest offer, but they came up quite a lot with a $25k signing bonus, a $15k increase in salary, and a $32k annual increase in equity.

The offers got close enough to each other that I could decide based on other more intangible factors. I think without Josh’s help, I wouldn’t have been able to narrow that gap and be able to even think about the ultimately more important factors of where I actually want to work, what I want to devote my efforts to, what I want the next chapter of my career to be oriented around. I was able to choose the opportunity that was the most compelling for me personally.