Every switch came naturally, all with eye toward moving out of engineering and into product management, he told Business Insider.
“I didn’t have any strategy like: ‘Hey, I need to switch jobs every two, three years, something like that,” Lin said. “Every single switch had a slightly different reason.”
Lin shared his compensation journey since graduating with an MBA from the University of Southern California in 2016. He has since worked at Meta, Visa, and PayPal and is currently a senior product manager at Google.
Meta
Lin, originally from Taiwan, first joined Meta as a business analyst intern in summer 2015. It was a change from his pre-MBA roles as a hardware and software engineer at a semiconductor company and then Yahoo.
As an international student in the US, he knew it would be hard to find jobs that would sponsor a work visa after his MBA. He had applied to 400 internships, got 10 interviews, and landed two offers, one of which was Meta.
His return offer for a full-time role “a huge relief, for sure.”
Lin was offered about $200,000 a year as a strategy-planning business strategist, including stock units and any bonuses.
After close to a year, he moved to a data scientist position, which was a similar role and did not have a change in salary. He worked in the company’s Menlo Park, California office for both roles.
Visa
Lin moved to Visa after two and a half years at Meta.
He switched companies because he was looking for a role in product management, his goal even before business school.
He joined Visa as a technical product manager, and his salary increased to around $250,000, including base and stock units, after negotiation.
He attributed part of the pay hike to the change in role from a data scientist to product management.
He was at Visa for under a year before finding an opportunity at PayPal. He switched to a nearly identical role because the projects he would be able to work on aligned with his interests better.
PayPal
Lin joined the payments company in 2019 as a senior product manager and got a 20% pay hike from his total compensation at Visa.
After successfully negotiating his salary by bringing counter offers from companies including Nvidia, Lin accepted a $300,000 package at PayPal.
“Having a competing offer is always the best strategy to negotiate, because that’s the most objective way to evaluate different opportunities,” Lin said.
He brought the offer to the PayPal recruiter, saying “Hey, actually, there is another opportunity, but I really prefer this opening, so is there any way you can adjust the compensation structure so that we can bring two offers closer so that I can make my decision?”
After three years at PayPal, a recruiter at Google approached him for a senior product management role.
During the recruitment process at Google, Lin said he applied to other companies for two reasons.
“The first reason is certainly if I’m lucky enough I get multiple offers, then I can have a chance to negotiate during the offering phase,” he said.
His second reason was that it had been three years since his last job interview. “I also applied for several jobs just to bring my muscle memory back for interviews.”
He landed Google and some other offers, but their pay did not compare with the tech giant.
Instead, Lin decided to have a conversation with his current employer and try negotiate a retention package.
“This time, when I ended up sharing a competing offer, I actually took my PayPal offer,” he said. “So I had a very honest conversation with my managers about my skill levels,” and they made a counter-offer.
Lin successfully negotiated a 10% pay bump on total compensation as part of his retention offer at PayPal. He took that to Google and asked for a pay bump.
He was offered a 20% raise on his total compensation at Visa, which brought his Google offer to the $350,000 to $400,000 range as a senior product manager.
He started at Google’s Sunnyvale, California office in 2022.
Business Insider has verified his offer letters, employment history, and Google compensation.