I used levels.fyi and got an extra $50k over the initial offer. The fee was $500. A good ROI!

Could you have done it yourself though? Pretty curious what the unique insight here is. Some wiggle room is generally a given, and rest is up to unique circumstances.

You most definitely could have. The important thing here is the competing offers. Without those, no compensation negotiator in the world could’ve done anything. Anyway, the other person is happy so whatever.

I find it very difficult to get competing offers in such a way that they care to outbid each other. Usually it’s just a nominally similar but differently structured offer.

Yeah, consultant at this stage seems a bit unnecessary. But it's also a business with high success rate and customer satisfaction. Kind of like placebo. Pretty good deal from the consultant's pov.

I also used levels.fyi they most certainly helped.

The consultant previously worked at both Amazon and Facebook. I was working at Amazon at the time, and got competing offers from Facebook and Google.

Even with the competing offers I’m very happy I spent $3k for the consultant. Lots of good drafts of emails ( I did still need to carry the email ), but lots of great advice about strategy, and about what buzzwords to say and to avoid, which company to talk to first and what number to ask for that would be very easy for them to hit.

We ended up pushing FBs offer up to the limit before triggering an escalation then sent that to Google to beat. I would NOT have done as well without them.

They even told me “FB is gonna try and pressure you with a time limited offer. The time limit is not real. Don’t feel the pressure.” Stupid info like this was itself worth the money.

My experience was quite similar.

Actually I had no competing offers :P

I did have a job at the time, though.

I think having been walked through the process once I'd be able to do it myself. It's not too complicated but you do need to know a few things.

1. Each level has a range of salary/stock that they can't go above and you can infer the range by looking at the reported info on levels.fyi. For my company you have no possibility of negotiating into a higher level.

2. If you haven't been offered a signing bonus just say the words and 10s of thousands of dollars will magically appear.

3. You can push back on their offers many times. Previously I'd only ever made one negotiation move but I think there were 3 rounds of back-and-forth for my current job.

Just learned levels.fyi is direct linking to this comment on their site. Not sure how I feel about that but I can’t stop them.

Hey, will take it down. It was just good social proof for us especially coming from the HN community, but perhaps should have checked first