Help on Salary Negotiation w/ Microsoft (Seattle, Redmond: how much, living in, vacation)

[utopiannirvana]

I currently work at a major company here in the bay area and have been offered a job at Microsoft. I have eight years of experience in management consultancy/strategy type roles at fortune 500 companies. The job I have been offered is a Technical/Financial Program Manager role (individual contributor) that will help grow infrastructure (100s of millions of dollars in capital spend) needed to support various online services. Can you please give me an idea on how much (total compensation broken out by base, stock and sign-on bonus) someone like myself can fetch for a job like that in Microsoft, based out of Redmond?

[flyingsaucermom]

My husband is a Msft program manager... his starting was somewhere in the ballpark of $147k-$153k, full relocation package... I think it was a $20k sign on (could have been little less)... can't remember stocks.

[kaoticfury]

glassdoor.com is another good resource to check

[flyingsaucermom]

Good news is that it's considerably cheaper to live here than in SF. We had the opposite proposition last year... I was NOT looking forward to living in CA... much prefer the green mountains and rain over dry and warm. I hope that is in your bag of considerations too

[shaylahc]

My husband got a stock award....$25K. He tried to negotiate vacation time, but they said no. He had previously lost an Amazon offer because he asked for more $$. So we were gun shy about making too many demands. In retrospect I wish we'd asked for a sign on bonus. I think anywhere from $10-25K is not uncommon (for a sign on bonus), although if they're paying for relo, you might get less.

We did not negotiate salary.

Amazon offered him a much better sign on deal (I want to say it was $10K sign on, $40k in stocks?) but the salary they offered him was crap. When he countered, they basically stopped talking to him.

In the end it was ok, because DH got a raise and bonus and more stock grants with the first go round of annual reviews, when he had only been there 6 months. We've been pretty happy so far.

[aimeesc]

Just curious, not to hyjack this thread but is it common for MS to pay for relocation?

[Blondebaerde]

Originally Posted by utopiannirvana

I currently work at a major company here in the bay area and have been offered a job at Microsoft. I have eight years of experience in management consultancy/strategy type roles at fortune 500 companies. The job I have been offered is a Technical/Financial Program Manager role (individual contributor) that will help grow infrastructure (100s of millions of dollars in capital spend) needed to support various online services. Can you please give me an idea on how much (total compensation broken out by base, stock and sign-on bonus) someone like myself can fetch for a job like that in Microsoft, based out of Redmond?

Depends on the level, which these days is usually or always keyed to title since they normalized the latter a few years ago.

Guessing what you describe is a 62, though point being you'll have to think on that based on data you can gather. Should be in the req title that he interviewed to.

They have ranges by-level and role type (Dev, PgM, PdM, SDET, etc.). Will be interested to see if you're both on the same page.

Glassdoor and similar are totally your friend here, do a quick analysis for percentiles once you've got the role title understood.

Objective (of any negotiation) is to walk in with facts that are objectively fair. If they pull a fast one, whip out the data and state "here is our baseline: let's work from there."

I've been on a both ends of a dozen or more similar negotiations for several firms, Seattle metro. You'd be surprised how many candidates roll over without much to-do (surrender, or compromise). Objective is "Win-Win", not domination (one extreme), compromise, or surrender.