What companies in the Bay pay better than Google?

Google is known for "low-balling" if you compare to Facebook. My Google offer was higher than both my Amazon and Microsoft offer by a significant margin, and these offers in turn were higher than almost any other offer I had in the Bay.

The only companies that got anywhere near Google on pay were some very exceptional unicorns.

Google will definitely “lowball” you if you don’t have competing offers. However once you do have them, google is very quick to match them. This is just my anecdotal experience though.

Not in my experience, nor that of my friends who got offers.

My typical friend who got a Google offer, already had a bunch of other offers by the time their Google process finally completed. Then the Google offer came in and it was typically higher than most or all of these outstanding offers. Often substantially so.

However, if you have an outlier offer that is based on some theoretical equity valuation ("an extra $1m in stock options based on our last fundraising round"), Google will not match it.

Frankly, they don't need to when their initial offer is already higher than most other options, and far safer.

Also from what I've seen, Google won't just match other offers, but they do have some specific companies whose offers they will match, like FB. FB is also one of the few companies that may offer you higher comp than Google.

My experience is that FB will offer a marginally better offer (30k or so more than G) for comparable levels, and those other public companies give a vaguely competitive offer that still falls short of G by about the same amount. Though I'd love to see actual data.