The money I spent working with Carlos while I was looking for a new job was genuinely the best money I’ve ever spent. When I first talked to Carlos, I was in the process of shutting down a startup that I had been working on for over a year, so I was feeling really down about myself. While I was pausing my business, I had to simultaneously search for a job in what was one of the most challenging markets for tech employees ever.
Carlos and I did a real-time review of my resume to get it in better shape to submit to big tech companies. He explained to me all of the nuances and best ways to format the resume to catch the attention of technical recruiters at the big tech companies.Carlos then helped me prepare for an interview that I was going to have at Meta. At the time, I was very self-conscious about having shut down my startup, and I was worried that this “failure” would look bad in an interview. Carlos didn’t see it that way at all.
Over the course of a few weeks, I had numerous calls with Carlos where he helped me craft my stories about the roles I had held in my career. By the end, I had ~8 polished stories that I could use to answer any type of question that an interviewer might ask. The stories were designed to demonstrate the major core competencies that interviewers were looking to check the boxes for in the behavioral interview. There was a formula for this, and had I not talked to Carlos, the expert on the matter, I would have not felt nearly as confident in the interview.
I passed the interview and got the job as a Senior Software Engineer in Machine Learning. When the recruiter let me know I was going to get an offer, Carlos helped me prepare to negotiate my package, to much success. He helped me understand that, now that I had passed the interview, the ball was in my court, and that Meta would do what they needed to to get me to sign.
He taught me how to present myself, leverage the interest I had from other companies, and gave me the courage to ask for much more compensation than I would have thought reasonable on my own. I got an offer that was in the top 20% for engineers at the L5 level at Meta. The total comp I negotiated ended up being a 25% increase over the initial offer the recruiter made. The ~$3k I spent working with Carlos turned into a job offer and total compensation package that I couldn’t have possibly imagined before starting the process. The total comp increase from the compensation negotiation was $90k/year ($360k over 4 years).When a friend tells me they are going to look for a new job in tech, I insist that they talk to Carlos.
As a tech employee, you may not understand how the process really works, or have the confidence to fight for yourself.
Having Carlos in your corner will give you a huge upper hand. ~Christian Ayscue, Senior SWE, Meta (ML Infrastructure)
