Anonymous mock interviews with engineers from FAANG and more

The unwritten rules (till now) of negotiating with Meta

By Aline Lerner | Published: February 26, 2024; Last updated: August 20, 2025

Recently, while helping our users negotiate, we've observed a string of aggressive, candidate-unfriendly hiring practices at Meta. We’ve seen the same practices with enough candidates, and across enough different titles and positions, that it’s become clear that they are not isolated incidents or a rogue recruiter’s doing but rather a consistent implementation of a deliberate strategy that comes from the top.

If you’re negotiating with Meta, you need to know how they operate and understand the unwritten rules of the game. If you do not know the rules, you will fail — long before you even start negotiating.

How to sabotage your salary negotiations efforts before you even start

By Aline Lerner | Published: August 22, 2023; Last updated: April 29, 2026

At interviewing.io, we’ve coached hundreds of people through salary negotiation. We’re good at it — our average user gets $50k more in cash, and we have a 94% success rate.

Having done this a lot, we’ve seen our users make the same two mistakes, over and over, BEFORE they start working with us. These mistakes are costly and make it harder for us to do our jobs. Both involve how you talk to recruiters at the start of your job search, way before there’s an offer. Even if you never use our service, you should absolutely avoid these mistakes.

Exactly what to say when recruiters ask you to name the first number… and other negotiation word-for-words

By Aline Lerner | Published: August 15, 2018; Last updated: October 31, 2025

There are a lot of resources out there that talk about salary negotiation but many tend to skew a bit theoretical. In my experience, one of the hardest things about negotiating your salary is knowing what to say in tough, ambiguous situations with a power balance that’s not in your favor. What’s OK? What’s rude? What are the social norms? And so on. Before I started interviewing.io, I’ve worked as a software engineer, an in-house recruiter, and an agency recruiter, so I’ve literally been on all sides of the negotiating table. For the last few years, I’ve been guest-lecturing MIT’s 6.UAT, a class about technical communication for computer science majors. Every semester, negotiation is one ...