Ask HN: Propaganda for creative salary manipulation?

I'm one of those engineers that drank the kool-aid. Yeah, I could probably make more elsewhere. However, I'm at the stage of my career where I'm optimizing for experience, not for earnings. I'd rather trade salary for skills now, so that those skills can bring more salary later. That's capitalism.

Besides, I honestly don't see the point of going from $100K to $200K (made-up numbers, but presumably the ballpark we're talking about). I save half my take-home pay anyway; I can't really think of what else I'd like to buy with it. When I choose to optimize for earnings, I'd rather be in the tens of millions, i.e. found a company and grow it - which also happens to be quite satisfying, although lots of hard work. There's a material difference between "never has to work again" and "still a wage slave". There isn't one (to me) between "can afford a Beemer" and "can afford a Honda Civic."

The second issue is how the founder presents the situation to potential employees. I was once offered 10,000 options by what's considered to be a very successful startup. When I politely mentioned that this figure is meaningless and that I need to know the percentage of the company it represents in order to properly evaluate the offer, the founder said that "investors don't like giving away this information - I promise you that it's enough that you'll become a millionaire". If you're in a situation like that where the management has no respect for your time, I'd say run. But if they're honest about why the salary is lower than average, well, it's really up to you.

I think in general the economics works out because it's easy for investors (and in turn, founders) to prey on young, gullible people who have a romanticized idea of the startup scene and potential returns. If you look at the statistics, the expected value is just bad, and young inexperienced people generally aren't able to properly evaluate it. So investors put in too little money because enough people are willing to work for pizza and beer, and in turn employees are underpaid because enough people are willing to work for less in exchange for the "startup experience". It's a crappy situation, but like with most things in the world, I'd say don't worry about fighting battles that aren't worth fighting. If you're clever enough to realize this, work for Wall Street or Microsoft - in my experience you'll find much smarter people there than in most startups anyway.

Regarding Google underpaying engineers, in my opinion it doesn't jibe with their "don't be evil" mantra. They really should know better.

If money is so important to you, maybe you should start a startup.

The problem is, I think that in engineering and other skilled work, the ones that are interested in their area of work regardless of whether they get paid well or not tend to be more skilled and do a better job. The same can be said for airline pilots (to put it simply, don't become an airline pilot if you want a safe job with a good salary, become an airline pilot if you LOVE flying).

So for a company looking to hire people, if a candidate will accept more interesting work for a lower salary, that is a good indicator that they CARE about the work they do. Someone who is only more interested in the salary and less interested in what they do _might_ be the ones that are happy with doing the bare minimums.

The other side of the problem is that most people think they are above average intelligent, and therefore most people will feel underpaid if they are not paid above average.

If you really love your job and you can do it by running your own business, that's often the best option. As an employee you are only making other people rich in exchange for some economic stability.

Every person out there should read 'Secrets of Power Negotiating' and 'Secrets of Power Salary Negotiating' by Roger Dawson. Yes, both the titles of the books and the contents inside absolutely scream 'sales toolbox', but I'd ask you to ignore this and power through it - the lessons you'll learn are indispensable.

"They don’t care about money, actually, unless you’re screwing up on the other things. If you start to hear complaints about salaries where you never heard them before, that’s usually a sign that people aren’t really loving their job.

...

That doesn’t mean you can underpay people, because they do care about justice, and they will get infuriated if they find out that different people are getting different salaries for the same work, or that everyone in your shop is making 20% less than an otherwise identical shop down the road, and suddenly money will be a big issue."

An employer could really take advantage of me monetarily if they provided a work environment that was that cool. Aside from that, as long as I make enough to make a decent living, I don't care. When I'm considering working for a new company, money really is a secondary issue.

Consider, for example, a company that buys you lunch. Here in NY, lunch costs about $10 if you buy it yourself. If you're in the 25% tax bracket, that's worth $3,300+ in salary.

Do they provide daycare? Transportation costs? Paying for conferences? 401k matching?

Your friends that feel underpaid did a poor job of negotiating their total compensation. Next time they should sit down and do something along the following lines:

- list out every possible benefit a company might offer

- group the ones they personally care about (don't have kids? Then the daycare benefit is worthless)

- for the ones they care about, think about how much each one is worth in $ to them.

- think about what the minimum they would accept for that benefit, how much would make them happy, and how much would make the ecstatic.

- for the ones they don't care about, thik about how much it costs the company to pay for each

When it comes time to negotiate your compensation, always think in sets. Always word things in terms of how moving any one piece requires movement on a different piece. Give up the things in the "don't care" set for the equivalent value of something in the "want" set.

If they want to give you less money, you say you could agree to that, if they give you X number of vacation days. Or if they say they have free daycare, you say that you appreciate that, but since you don't have kids you would rather have "work at home Fridays" and a slightly larger 401k match.

Consider the total You are much more likely to get a larger total if you don't focus only on the money.

[edit: bad math]

  (salary equivalent) = (daily cost * 5 days/wk * 50 wks/yr)
                        ------------------------------------
                                   ( 1 - tax rate )

  25% tax bracket 
  $ 5 lunch = (5 * 5 * 50)/(75%) = $1,667 salary
  $10 lunch = $3,333