Ask HN: How much do you make at Amazon? Here is how much I make at Amazon
Discussing pay is awkward, so most people don't. But this creates an imbalance of power in salary talks. A person I trust who was recently promoted was offered in the range of $55K for their new role. However, I know of one or two people who were hired into the same role from outside the company who apparently started at $70K+.
I suspect that internal candidates have less leverage in pay negotiations than do external hires. I think most people probably won't decline a promotion, even if the raise is weak, because the alternative is no promotion and no raise. Transparency corrects this imbalance.
Me:
Position: Developer (not classified as SDE, do not manage ppl) Tenure: 2 years Job Level: 5 Base Pay: $73,000 Signing Bonus: $25k Year 1, $21k Year 2 2016 Stock Vest: 104 shares LY Review Score: Exceeds LY Pay Increase: 4%, plus 35 shares of AMZN Most Recent Promotion Increase/Stock Grant: N/A - no promotions Gender: M Native English Speaker: Yes
If you're wondering about Native English Speaker, I included it because I think it might be interesting.
I'm not aware of any Amazon policy which prohibits sharing one's own compensation, but I still made a throwaway. A shift of power is never welcomed by those whose authority is diminished.[2]
To non-Amazonians, perhaps you could start an "Ask HN: How much do you make at XYZ" for your own employer so you and your coworkers can share the same thing. Comparing compensation for different companies could also be interesting.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_Litigation
[1] That isn't to suggest that I suspect Amazon of taking part in any illegal activity. I don't believe Bezos would even entertain the idea. I like Amazon, and overall I'm happy here. What I want is a more fair salary negotiation process.
[2] http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/f/frederickd134371.html
716 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 320 ms ] threadDifferent people have different preferences, and some managers probably have mistaken beliefs about what is good for them and their employees.
From a negotiation standpoint, the employer (generally) wants to hire, or give raises to, the employee at the lowest possible total cost. Whereas the employee (generally) want to be hired, or get a raise, at the highest possible total cost. Where the cost analysis may not be the same for each side.
Now assume that that all other things being equal, and no information about salary rates are known, the employer's range for salary is $80-$100k, and the employee's range for salary is $70k-$90k. In this situation, the employer would love to hire at $70k, which they may be able to do if the employee doesn't know any better. Now, imagine that the employee had information about the employer's salary range, then the employee would smartly shift their salary range knowing that the employee was 'low'.
The same applies to raises. If an employee has no information about other coworker's salaries, then the 'standard' raise of 3-4% might be acceptable. However, if another coworker has a significantly higher salary, with similar responsibilities, then the employee may ask for a higher raise. They may or may not get that raise, but it's at least a possibility. One which the employer is likely to not want to have the employee know about.
The worst case scenario for the employee is to find out they are making significantly more money than their coworkers, in which case they have no further bargaining power.
So really, the question of whether or not it's a good idea to share salary information to other current or future coworkers comes down to whether or not you're on the 'employer' side (where additional salary information can only move your costs upwards), or on the 'employee' side where having no transparency about salary can prevent you from getting the best salary possible.
Since the difference between having salary transparency or not is so high, it behooves most employers to subtly discourage salary talks. So you end in a place where it is a possibly a violation of federal law (for the federal government), or possibly state law[0], to prevent people from talking about salaries, but at the same time people will almost always only post their salary information anonymously.
[0] - http://www.dol.gov/wb/media/pay_secrecy.pdf
You are also only addressing the workers with below-average wages (who may be qualified for higher pay) when you say that secrecy helps employers. Half of all employees have above-median wages, so I would assume that transparency could be used to bargain them down, as the below-median workers were helped in bargaining-up; I am not sure what the net effect would be, and don't know why we should assume it goes one way or the other.
I am not an advocate for wage transparency or opaqueness, because I don't know which way the effects go for anyone. I am also an advocate of deregulation, and abolition of most laws, simply because there are so many that nobody knows what is illegal; this seems to be yet another case of governmental over-reach.
And I don't see how it's relevant to mention how workers have "above median wages" compared to national figures. If anything, wouldn't that imply that Amazon is blindly giving out too much money and ignoring this very public information? That's implying an unlikely level of incompetence, when it's really about variation within the labor market.
I never said the above-median wages had anything to do with national figures; I meant that depending on what the employee and employer were bargaining around (more likely to be company median wages than national), the comparison would help the employees bargain up half the time, and the employers bargain down half the time.
I specifically said above, "Where the cost analysis may not be the same for each side.". This obviously includes non-salary benefits (stock, vacation, flex time, home life balance, etc).
You are also only addressing the workers with below-average wages (who may be qualified for higher pay) when you say that secrecy helps employers.
I specifically said above, "The worst case scenario for the employee is to find out they are making significantly more money than their coworkers, in which case they have no further bargaining power.". As an employee, your bargaining power is not reduced if you have knowledge of that you are paid above the median. In other words, from the employees perspective, there is no situation where you are in a worse negotiating position due to having more salary information.
so I would assume that transparency could be used to bargain them down, as the below-median workers were helped in bargaining-up;
Note that when negotiating, the only party that is going to negotiate for lower wage is the employer (since it is generally unlikely that an existing employee is going to ask for a lower wage voluntarily). And from that position, the employer already knows all current salaries. If you are making substantially more than the other people, then the employer can (and likely would) reveal that information in order to help secure a lower raise (or also likely, no raise, and unlikely, a lower wage). That's the power of information asymmetry. The employer can use the information when it benefits them (reducing the size of a raise for an already high compensated employee), but withhold that information when it does not benefit them (when a low compensated employee is up for a raise).
don't know why we should assume it goes one way or the other.
We don't have to assume anything. This is basic economic and negotiating tactics.
I am not an advocate for wage transparency or opaqueness, because I don't know which way the effects go for anyone.
It's perfectly reasonable to have an opinion on wage transparency, but it seems a little odd to say "I don't know which way the effect go for anyone". We have negotiating models and frameworks specifically for this type of activity. And the general rule is, "The more information asymmetry that you have in your favor, the better your bargaining position". Specifically because it allows the party with the additional information to use that information when it benefits them, and withhold that information when it does not benefit them.
I could see it going both ways, and I'm not sure how to figure out what the impact of wage secrecy is.
If all employees values transparency and fairness and would rather have a lower but more fair pay, them the transparency may work.
However, the employer typically derives more profit per unit of work if they employee makes less. Also, if you are a good negotiator or you are the type to always threaten to leave if not given more pay you benefit from the opaqueness. If the company has a lot of good negotiators it may make sense to be more transparent to keep the overall wages down since no one can exercise that benefit.
There are probably other factors such as supply and demand beyond individuals at specific points in time which need to be taken into account (surge pricing?) we need someone for this project now, so we will pay them a premium even if we would normally pay them the same as everyone else, even in consideration of long terms costs this may make sense.
E: Why the downvotes?
Position: Developer (not classified as SDE, do not manage ppl)
Tenure: 2 years
Job Level: 5
Base Pay: $73,000
Signing Bonus: $25k Year 1, $21k Year 2
2016 Stock Vest: 104 shares
LY Review Score: Exceeds
LY Pay Increase: 4%, plus 35 shares of AMZN
Most Recent Promotion Increase/Stock Grant: N/A - no promotions
Gender: M
Native English Speaker: Yes
Sites like Glassdoor are useful, but what they don't provide is company-specific detail. I can view Amazon's average SDE salary, but is that figure for a job level 4 or job level 5? (At Amazon, pay is based on job levels. Two people can hold the same position but have different job levels. For example, Area Managers who are promoted from hourly positions start at level 4, but new hire AMs come in at L5).
Other things Glassdoor can't provide:
-Pay increase percentages for internal promotions
-Pay increases and stock award amounts for annual performance reviews based on performance grade
-Compensation data broken down by race, national origin, native language, etc.
-Differences in pay for positions based on team, department, geographic location, etc.
http://www.npr.org/2014/04/13/301989789/pay-secrecy-policies...
It is a tricky issue though. I am sure that a powerful enough company that wanted to throw resources at it could make all sorts of arguments about whether certain parts of the information (e.g. bonuses, vesting schedules, options grants, stock price discounts, relocation provisions) are allowed to be classified as confidential even if basic salary is not.
As a lowly employee, your only hope would be if some national labor union or pro bono legal institute took on your case, otherwise you'd never be able to afford the legal costs to defend your NLRB collective bargaining rights.
With pay secrecy, it's unfortunately still mostly a "might makes right" situation, where rich companies can sort of make up their own rules and at the very least bankrupt you with legal nonsense even if they don't ultimately win. So few people have the fortitude to endure that kind of legal harassment that it implicitly still does censor our ability to talk about pay, even if it's illegal that this is so.
It looks like one of the main criteria is that it has to be a part of a "concerted action" to benefit a collection of employees, and this had historically been broadly interpreted in support of employees with a very liberal understanding of what a concerted action is.
This whole HN thread about it, for example, would almost surely qualify (I am not a lawyer, of course, so that's not a professional opinion and not a form of advice for anyone here), since it is explicitly focused on the whole class of Amazon employees and encourages employees to share for themselves.
I wish I could find the older case about the leaflets. IIRC it was from the late 1970s.
(I think the only state with a meaningful divergence from at-will is Montana).
From experience (as a bystander), what really happens in a case like this is:
* Employee is terminated
* Employee believes they were terminated for a reason forbidden by state or federal law
* Employee retains an employment lawyer, who drafts a letter demanding compensation for the improper termination, citing specific claims of (say) sexual harassment, complaints articulated to superiors and to HR, and subsequent retaliatory firing.
* Employee does not necessarily prove those claims; they need only demonstrate sufficient facts and allegations to ensure that a lawsuit would not easily be dismissed.
* Employer almost invariably settles.
The two cases where employers don't settle:
* Employer is stupid, and believes that they will pay less to litigate a wrongful termination case than to settle.
* Employer is smart, and has an HR department that keeps excruciatingly careful records of things like sexual harassment complaints, alleged racially-tinged comments, ratio of black/white hires to black/white applications, &c, and is prepared to make it clear to employee's lawyer that the case will cost too much to pursue.
If you've ever wondered why smart employers go fucking apeshit when people make racially-tinged jokes, or why it's not necessarily in your best interests to bring your concerns to HR unless your game plan is to bring a wrongful termination complaint, there you go.
This is also the reason why, despite at-will status in basically every locale where you can hire people, "Performance Improvement Plan" is a euphemism for "slow-motion termination". The purpose of a PIP is to establish in the written record that an employee is a non-performer, so that when they're terminated, the employer can present evidence that there were reasons other than retaliation or discrimination.
The right thing to do is to take the paperwork and say, "thanks, can you give me a few days to review this?" and stall as much as possible while looking for another job.
If you're feeling especially ballsy (and very confident in your ability to find another job quickly) you can say, "I'm not familiar with these at all, and my grandpa (R.I.P) always told me to get everything reviewed by an attorney before signing it, so that's what want to do. Is that OK?"
I was the recipient of a PIP at my last job, went through the improvement process, and at the end of it, my manager signed off that my performance had returned to acceptable levels. I left about a month later.
So why am I not still there? Well, in the process of going through the PIP and asking myself how I let things get to that point, I realized that I was quite capable of excelling at everything I was supposed to be doing, but I just didn't give a shit anymore. My subconscious had already checked out of that job and was telling me it was time to move on.
When I realized that, my reaction was to start looking for another job while bringing my performance back to a good level. We quit on good terms: they "hired" me back to consult on some problems that came up after I left; I helped someone transition into my old position and I have a job better suited to my personality.
EDIT: It's worth noting that in these cases the staff in question also had clear evidence in the form of signed reviews rating them that they were performing well. E.g. the guy I spent most time on a performance improvement plan for was ranked "exceeds expectations" in every criteria three years in a row while I was there, and was given 15%+ raises each of those years. This was in Europe, but for a US company.
There is no self-improvement.
That's leaving aside entirely the issue of how at will employment gives companies confidence to hire since they know they can shed employees if things go south.
If you are looking for an end run try binding arbitration, which allows employers to opt out of the legal system.
Because the employer is at a massive advantage. For an employee having gaps in employment is a major thing when it comes to future employment, and can have massive effects on personal finances. For the employer, losing an employee a bit earlier is rarely a major issue (and if it is, they can generally convince people to stay a bit longer by throwing cash at the problem).
It is less relevant in high-paid positions where employees generally have the ability to put aside more of a cushion, but for lower paid employees it can be dramatic.
There's a reason the long notice periods in large parts of Europe are a direct result of decades of union pressure.
> That's leaving aside entirely the issue of how at will employment gives companies confidence to hire since they know they can shed employees if things go south.
If this was a real concern, then we ought to see a persistent problem of high unemployment across the countries with long notice periods, but to my knowledge we don't.
Maybe for unskilled jobs, but the idea that an employer will hire/fire employees at the whims of the market, and there is zero cost to this process does not apply everywhere. There can be significant cost to on-boarding people depending on the industry / position.
The effect is that by protecting existing jobs you lose out on future ones. Over time this pretty much cuts you out of any industry where there are waves of creative destruction.
It's called court. No provided reason does not imply a lack of reason, and (say) discussing pay on a public forum would certainly be relevant evidence, if highly circumstantial.
What is the flip-side to at-will employment though? Without at-will employment, do employees become slaves that cannot quit their job? Or are there only a small list of "legal" reasons for you to quit your job.
I always see "well the employee can always leave at any time too," but is that really something that disappears in places without at-will employment?
You can, of course, not turn up to work. But that might well make you "unreliable" if you ask for a reference later. But it's not a problem, since a new employer giving a three month notice period will expect you to be on one at present.
(The notice period during the first 6 or 12 months is often less, eg 2-4 weeks.)
E.g. in Norway it is near impossible to give less than 3 months notice for permanent positions without providing additional compensation, no matter how junior the position, except for a typically 6 month trial period.
Before I'd moved to the UK, I'd never even seen an employment contract with less than 3 months.
In practice, shorter notice is often mutually agreed on with or without compensation when both sides agree it suits them, but it's very common to serve out the full 3 months.
The following is true for a sizable part of Europe. The flip side(s!) are:
* I can't just walk out on a job, I have to give a 4-week notice (for any reason, though. It can be anything, from "I feel like I need a new challenge" to "I hate ever single one of you motherfuckers"), during which I'm expected to do my job more or less as usual. Everyone understands you're not as motivated, no one plans for major stuff to happen during someone's N-week notice.
* My employer has a small, but very open-ended list of reasons why he's allowed to fire me, which includes things like me underperforming (but he has to give proof that this actually happened -- i.e. he needs to have an actual evaluation process, has to warn me that I'm not performing as expected first and so on), shrinking clients base which means that they literally no longer need so many people and I drew the short stick and so on.
My employer is also required to give me a four-week notice, during which he has to pay me as usual, and he also has to pay for any vacation days I didn't take in this time (the idea being that I could have lounged in Belize instead of working my sorry ass at the office).
Furthermore, if I am being fired, my employer is also required to allow me to go to interviews during business hours (for obvious reasons).
Regulations vary from one country to another, but that's the gist of it. In general:
- Notices are typically 4 weeks for non-management positions and 6 weeks for management positions. The law around here allows these periods to be longer, but not shorter than this, and they're negotiated as part of the contract.
- However, they can be skipped by mutual agreement (i.e. if I want to leave right now and my employer doesn't have a problem with that, we sign an additional paper that says we both agree to leaving without a 4-week notice and I'm out).
- They don't apply for the duration of the test period at the beginning of an employment contract (if there is one). During that period (typically 3 months), both resignations and firings are effective immediately. I did it once, it' a very refreshing feeling :-).
I work for the European branch of a relatively small American company, which is how I've come to know all this. My colleagues from the US are mesmerized whenever they hear about these things.
Basically, if your notice period is 1 month, you can opt to pay the company 1 month's salary instead of having to work that time. If a company wants you gone, they pay you the equivalent wages for the notice period you were required to provide.
I think it's fair because both sides have agreed that $X amount is a fair exchange for the employees services. If those services cannot be replaced with $X then that's really the company's problem for taking advantage of the worker.
This buyout is in addition to any other severance package the worker might be receiving.
Anyways, I think it's pretty nifty as it allows the flexibility of leaving immediately, but also puts in some structure into the situation.
The flip side of this is that it's very difficult to get fired, even if you're not very competent.
Now, your relationship with your manager might be strained, but hey, that's life.
Sparked a lot of controversy. It kinda made me not want to work at Amazon ever. Although I hear that the Amazon experience varies depending on team and location.
Tenure: 4 years
Job Level: 5
Base Pay: $143,000
2016 Stock Vest: about 140 shares
Review Score: Exceeds
Gender: M
Native English Speaker: Yes
So for example, that seems about right for Portland, OR.
Additionally, you don't mention how many total years of experience you have which would also let people compare. Ex: 2 years of total experience (straight out of college) vs 2 years at amazon, and 10 years elsewhere.
It may be that what I was told was correct, but they were referring only to Seattle and not places like SF where cost of living is very high.
Two other situations involved coworkers transferring teams from Seattle, one to Toronto and one to India, both had COL adjustments to their salary.
(Admittedly the evidence is less strong in the latter two cases because they involved simultaneous country changes)
1 - Full-time freelance audiobook editor.
$30/hr
2 - Post-Production Associate - Level 6/4
$50,000/yr
35 shares of AMZN per year for three years
3 - ACX Production Coordinator - Level 7/5
$65,000/yr
Additional 20 shares of AMZN per year for three years
I am no longer ashamed to write these figures out to the public because I now make more than twice the salary that I was making before I left the company. I found that my salary at Amazon was always far too low given what I did, and my job titles were not at all representative of the job I actually did (for the 2nd and 3rd jobs they were almost entirely software engineering jobs.)
NOTE: Audible and Amazon have different job levels - Audible's job levels are two points higher than the same Amazon job level.
An audiobook is made in four basic steps:
1. A voice actor records the narration for the book.
2. The editor takes the raw audio recordings and edits these files for pacing, flow, and aesthetic flavor. The editor also makes note of any errors in the narration which require a re-record.
3. After making all re-records and inserting the new audio, the audio is listened through one more time. They call this a "QC pass."
4. Finally, the QC'd audio is mastered and encoded for delivery.
I was the owner of step two for all Audible Studios productions.
Honestly, though, it was a great job. It never felt exhausting. Not only was the pay rather good for a 21 year old fresh out of university - the job was really fun. I got to read medium-to-high quality novels and create the audiobook experience.
Later, I got to witness Audible's rise into the mainstream and evangelized producing audiobooks for ACX [1], bringing it to a new generation of actors and engineers.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QHmtV1Pe1hA
Do they read all of the dialogue for one character in a big chunk, then move on to the dialogue of the next character? Or do they read through the book naturally and switch voices? I would think that the latter would be very difficult.
Narrators actually do switch all character voices in real-time. This does not commonly cause issues that require recording to stop, as the narrators are usually very experienced professionals that come from the Broadway stage or from other voice acting professions (cartoons and the like.) I've also recorded and edited my fair share of bad voice actors (for instance, former Labor Secretary Robert Reich narrated his book 'Beyond Outrage' even though he was told that it really wasn't a good idea.)
The pauses between lines/phrases were often tightened up, yes, by pasting room tone over the pauses. This way, the near-silence of the room tone is consistent throughout each pause, which makes the narration easier to comprehend and allows the listener greater immersion into the experience.
The exact duration of room tone impacts the pacing of the narration. This is, in a way, the audiobook editor's "art." They can't over-edit because it would ruin the narrator's dramatic delivery - they need to be able to edit within the stylistic flow of the narrator. At the same time, if they are not careful enough to make the resulting delivery consistent, then the extraneous audio may distract listeners and lead to a lower quality result. That balance is acquired with experience.
The reason this all happens, really, is to ensure a clean "noise floor" - the background sounds heard in addition to the narrator's voice. The sound of the room and the gear, if you will. The narrators are such pros (my experience) - there are many who I could get away with not editing at all, if it weren't for the incredible need for near-silence throughout the entire finished production.
That's a very interesting aside. I could see how a non-professional narrator would struggle with the demands of the process. Would it not still have made sense for someone like Mr. Reich from a personal branding point of view? He is, after all, a somewhat well-known public figure and paid public speaker.
Audiobooks are a very intimate media, and the wrong voice can really put off the experience. With training I think he could do it, but to just give a public speaker the task of narrating a book he/she wrote without such training is usually a recipe for disaster.
If you don't mind my asking, when people want to do their own reading and are willing to get training, how are they trained?
I ask because (like every geek) I sometimes think about doing a podcast some day, plus I just want to be a better public speaker, and there seems to be a lack of options between free/cheap resources focused on basic skills (like Toastmasters) and intensive training for people who want to do voiceover for a living.
Then I listened to Leonard Mlodinow's "The Upright Thinkers"; Oh god. Euclid's Window by Mlodinow was absolutely fantastic, and it was narrated by the slightly pompous-sounding -- but fitting -- Robert Blumenfield. Leonard had a somewhat slow, drawling voice, and he often stumbled over words. This was pretty disappointing because he seems like such a smart dude. He just shouldn't narrate his own books :)
I was thinking I really wish there was a good app where you can listen to audio articles. It is partly solved in iOS as you can speak selected text, but problem is you cannot select all text easily and you don't wanna mess with it while driving.
Was wondering what would be a great UI for the transcriber and whether you could create p2p network to share the transcriptions.
Anyway, on iOS if you enable voiceover you can read the entire screen by swiping down from the top with two fingers (I think - check the Apple website for accessibility information if not!)
Another possibility i just realised is the possibility to pass texts from reader mode into 3rd party text-to-speech application. Will have to research some of them.
(I discovered a couple years ago that I really like audiobooks.)
You should be ashamed for thinking that money is this fucking important.
The comment is a cricism to his (and pretty much everyone else's who uses this site) very materialistic world view.
I write about salary negotiation and coach people through it, and I think sharing salaries publicly will encourage more people to negotiate and get paid what they're worth.
I recently coached a new Amazon employee, and he got a very good offer, which he increased by about 15% using VERY simple negotiation tactics that we discussed. If he hadn't negotiated, he would've still been paid well, but would have left 15% on the table before he was even in the door.
I submitted this link yesterday—it's a Salary Negotiation workshop I did for developers in Orlando last week. It's definitely relevant to this conversation:
EDIT: Here's a direct link to the Salary Negotiation workshop summary to save you a click: http://bit.ly/21zFG5q
Here's the HN submission for posterity: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11305683
(Not sure why I originally linked to an HN submission linking to the workshop. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯)
Nice job starting this thread!
I've always heard that a candidate should never share salary information and require the company to provide the first concrete number in the form of their initial offer.
However, I've repeatedly used all of the "business-professional" and "HR approved" sorts of conversational techniques to enact this advice, and the only result that has ever occurred is either (a) the company literally refuses to even conduct a single interview with me before knowing salary information, or (b) the company finally makes a job offer and it is extremely low, something around 50%, of what I have earned previously in similar roles.
95% of the time I say I am more focused on assessing cultural and technical fit for the position, making sure I would jell with the team, finding out more about the company, learning more about the trade-offs required for the role, etc., as reasons for not providing salary information as literally the first point of communication with HR, it results in an instantaneous rejection.
I still believe candidates should not agree to unfair information asymmetry by revealing their salary or wage preferences first. The problem is it just seems that something like 95% of all hiring managers will outright immediately reject you, on principle, if you don't agree to bear that unfair information asymmetry.
All the great techie blog posts on being a better negotiator, like this:< http://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/01/23/salary-negotiation/ > -- they sound great and give me a pumped up rah rah feeling, but in practice they basically never work.
My interviewing experience with this has covered large multi-national companies, tech firms, small boutique quantitative finance firms, start-ups, consulting companies, and education technology. There certainly are industries I am missing, but it has seemed like a universal phenomenon to me.
Another principle is that you should always counter.
So I'm _extremely_ surprised to hear that 95% of the time, people have refused to continue talking with you. I can't refute your experience, but I can say this has never happened to me or anyone that I've worked with to negotiate a starting salary.
Patrick's writing, which you alluded to, was a big inspiration for me to write and think more deeply about this subject. He knows what he's talking about.
If you watch the Salary Negotiation workshop (linked in my original comment), you'll see a section on "The Dreaded Salary Question" and there was a 15-minute discussion on it in the Q&A. (Both are linked in the notes below the embedded video.) You might watch those segments to see if anything jumps out at you that yo haven't' tried before.
Thanks for the question!
Places where I experienced this gross miscalibration: a large U.S. food retailer's digital analytics team; a small pharmaceutical research software company; a 25-year-old multinational scientific computing and supercomputing consulting firm; and an FFRDC research lab attached to a university.
In one of these places they even went on at length about how much the hiring manager liked me, how I fit all the skills they were seeking, and many team members remarked that I would "mesh instantly" with the team, and so forth. I had walked away from those interviews knowing that I had done a good job and feeling very confident.
Then they made a job offer than was around 75% of what I had been making before in a similar job in a similar cost of living area, and the new job's other benefits were far worse.
When I told them what I was making before, they just said, "it just looks like there's a bit of a gap here that we are unable to make up, but we think you'll be very happy on this team so we hope you'll consider our offer despite that." The people interviewing me in that company had even gone on at length about how successful their business unit had been recently, signing a new important contract, and how their biggest challenge was recruiting good people and staffing up to support some projects that had important deadlines looming towards the end of 2016.
I still continue to avoid sharing salary info, because I'm not convinced that sharing it would be better.
But I think what you might not be accounting for is that almost every single candidate in the tech world does share salary, freely and openly, from the very first minute they are asked, without even realizing it might have any side effects.
A lot of corporate recruiters are conditioned to expect this, and the minute someone fails to share salary, they flag them as "not a dope, can't hire them cheaply" and they just move on. Constraint number one, above any and all talent requirements, is that they must be cheap to hire ... for a lot of firms.
Generally I say something like, "I appreciate the need to consider salary as an important part of the process, but since we have only just started talking about the position I feel it would be best to make sure that I really am the sort of technical and cultural fit you are looking for. If we can determine that I am the right fit for the role, then the salary information will fall into place at the appropriate time. But if it seems that I am not the right fit for your team, then no amount of salary discussions will be able to help us."
I have a few variations on that kind of description that I use. It's entirely possible that the way I say it can come off as rude, and I think that did happen to me especially a few times when I first started doing this.
But I have practiced it, asked friends for advice about how to say it better, how it sounds, etc., and researched a lot about this online. So I have some confidence that it is coming off as strong and assertive, but not rude, and it is communicated clearly in good-faith because I truly am primarily interested in whether the cultural fit is a good one.
Even so, these kinds of HR-approved ways of talking only ever result in about a 95% chance of immediate rejection.
Whenever I have made it past the initial question about salary, and eventually salary comes up again towards the stage when an offer is made, I have a different way of talking about it.
At that stage, if they ask me again, I will usually say something like, "I have spoken with the team and had a great chance to learn about your company and how I could fit in with this role. If you have a particular salary range that you'd like to share with me, I can definitely let you know how it will match up with my expectations."
Again, I have some slight variations on that, but it's more or less the same idea of changing their question asked of me into my question asked of them. They can't keep coming back and specifically asking me for a number without seeming very awkward, and if they do that it's sometimes a red flag and I would usually be happy walking away if they were to heavily press me at that point.
Unfortunately, as I mentioned above, when people have been OK with all of this and they have actually come back with their offer, it has been not just a tiny bit below my ideal, but way, way off base from what I was previously earning, let alone what I was actually seeking to earn in the new role.
And if they do and somehow, your previous employer disclosed this to them (a big no no), you can always say "I was underpaid then and what I was making there is not relevant to the position I'm applying to with your right now. I also think I've learned a lot in my past position, which justifies this jump in compensation".
Quick searches reveal this is a popular question, spot checks of the answers agree that it's not illegal and quite common.
Most large companies won't give out your past salary information, so if they don't force you to provide proof, it's not very likely they will be able to verify it.
>via background checks
Background checks are normally done via a 3rd party background check company, and they don't have access to this kind of data.
In the US, this is a legal minefield and when a potential employer calls a past employer for references, that past employer will very often not reveal anything more than "We can confirm that this person was employed by us from date1 to date2" and that's it.
They will not disclose your salary, what you did, your organization, who you reported to and who reported to you, your performance reviews and anything else of that nature because all of this extra information is grounds for you to sue them later if you don't get the job you're currently applying to.
I'm going to be more careful next time. :D
Yes they do. There's a company owned by Equifax called The Work Number that collects such information.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Work_Number
We are back to my original point that the only way a hiring company can verify salary data is by asking your employer (or having 3rd party ask for them) or forcing you to verify it.
[1] http://www.forbes.com/sites/sageworks/2013/05/26/4-things-yo...
So employees can ask lots of questions about company financial health, as part of trying to reduce the far larger risk they are taking.
Meanwhile, a company doesn't need to know your salary history to make an informed opinion of whether they want to hire you and for what amount of pay.
You may still find other teams in the world that you can dupe, but in the end, I expect lies to hurt your overall prospects (in life as well as work.)
What you're saying contradicts the common advice to oversell yourself (AKA "fake it til you make it").
But there's an easy check, should they care to do it: call their current manager.
If I thought the employee was worth the extra money they were asking for, I'd give it to them. If not, I'd let them walk. Whether their current job is considering matching their offer doesn't really matter to me.
If a candidate asks for a specific salary, I don't care why they want it. I only care whether I think they are worth it, and whether I can afford it.
If so, you're not talking to your recruiters. You should find out more about what your side of this negotiation looks like to a candidate.
Do you seriously think your team is made of 100% people who only ever tell the truth?
Let's get realistic, we all tell lies here and there. What matters is what you lie about and why you do it.
I couldn't care less if a developer joins my team and lied to get a higher compensation. All I care about is whether they are a good hire and if they'll do good work.
The reason I ask is I've certainly worked at companies that shared salary info if asked about your tenure there. In fact, it was one of the very few things they would share (in addition to start date and end date). Maybe it varies by state?
It's important to neg them a little when you guess what they will offer. Male them self consious about lowballing you without insulting them.
I actually am beginning to think that its weak to ask them to throw out a number. Why not state a deal that's 10% better than what you want? Are you really going to be heartbroken if you get more than you want?
Because you might be leaving money on the table. What if the company was prepared to offer you 20% above your desired rate? Once you tell them +10% is your floor, they have no reason to offer above that.
"I'm not comfortable sharing that information [my current salary]. I'd prefer to focus on the value I can add to your company and learn more about this opportunity.
I want this to be a big step forward for me in terms of both responsibility and compensation."
You can obviously adjust it for your own situation, but the idea is "I'm not comfortable telling you my current or desired salary. Let's keep going, please."
I call this "The Dreaded Salary Question" and you can see a better clip and a lengthy Q&A on this specific question in this salary negotiation workshop I did in Orlando last week: http://bit.ly/21zFG5q
If you want to give a number, give a high one that you are ok with the company negotiating down, because that is what will happen.
As for 'shares' I flatly refuse to even consider that as part of a package. if they want to /add/ them it's wonderful, but I've been so many time multi-millionaire in 'options' that it's not even funny.
As for 'yes but the work/team is so rewarding' point I counter that it's a lot better if there isn't a sour note about being underpaid mixed in. Pay me well, and I'll be the one pulling the team to be all shinny and dynamic.
However, ultimately, you STILL get underpaid unless you go to the usual suspects like GG and such. That's why I gave up 'career' and went off contracting. Turns out being a mercenary is rewarding in many ways, including monetary !
The networking is always important, even as an employee -- always brush up your network, it might save your ass next time there is a shakeup at the company you work for, and might also give you the occasion to slam the door and move on if necessary.
I think there is nothing worse in life than waking up realizing you have to go to work to a job you hate, with people who are beepheads for a product that is a failure and going to the wall.... while knowing you don't have the freedom to just go.
"Too open-ended? Then how about you just put in the lowest/highest amount YOU'D be willing to accept and we move from there."
Usually, my advice is "don't share you current or desired salary", but the one exception I've discussed with some people is when they're concerned they'll be low-balled. In those cases, I've suggested it might be better to just disclose your desired salary.
I've been rethinking this lately. I think a better tack might be to ask the company to share the salary range they're offering for the position. (You're only doing this if you're concerned you'll go through the interview process and get an offer so low you can't even counter with anything reasonable.)
In this case, you have virtually nothing to lose: either they'll tell you the range and you'll know if you're wasting your time, or they'll refuse and now you're both refusing to disclose the "desired" salary component. In the latter case, you can choose to continue with the process or not, depending on your general feeling about the opportunity.
The more I think about it, the more I suspect you should _never_ reveal your desired salary because it can basically only cost you money. When you do reveal your desired salary, you're basically guessing and gambling. You're guessing at the range they're offering, and gambling that you don't undershoot and cost yourself money. (See this clip on why I think it's so important to protect the few pieces of information you have in a negotiation: https://youtu.be/ndrY2UI-fyU TL;DR, you have only two or three unique pieces of information that the company doesn't have; the company has oodles and oodles of information that you don't have; they have a significant informational advantage in your negotiation and this is bad for you, but it's worse if you give away the few pieces of unique information that you have.)
This is a worse gamble than simply interviewing to see what they're best offer is, IMO. If you go all the way through the interview process and find they can't afford you, you wasted a few hours of interview time. If you guess and gamble by disclosing your desired salary, you're risking thousands of dollars of base salary over several years. Odds are, the opportunity cost of your time isn't anywhere near the potential downside of guessing wrong with respect to the base salary they're willing to pay.
(I'm going to sleep on this, but it feels right) So, my suggestion is don't disclose your desired salary, even if you're afraid their offer will be way too low or if the recruiter says they won't continue without it. If you're dealing with a very persistent recruiter OR you're afraid they can't afford you, ask them to tell you the salary range they're offering so you can tell them if it meets your requirements. If they won't tell you, then you can choose to continue and possibly get a low offer, walk away, or the recruiter may end the conversation (this is rare, in my experience, but I'd be open to seeing data to change my mind).
All of these outcomes are preferable to the alternative, which is risking thousands (or tens of thousands) of dollars of base salary by guessing at their range and gambling by disclosing your desired salary.
The bottom line is the company has something you need: a job. BUT you have something the company needs: skills and experience that can help them make money. Don't be fooled into perceiving a salary negotiation as a one-sided affair.
If I am the first one to bring up salary, and I request a range because I want to make sure that nobody is wasting their time, then they clearly get the message that I am expensive to hire, and they can efficiently reject me if needed. If they give a number and it's too low, then I can politely tell them it's best for everyone to discontinue the interviews.
But, if they don't want to give a range, presumably because they might be willing to pay a high wage if they liked me, then it puts me in a much better position to avoid stating what I am seeking.
Then I could say, "OK, it's alright with me if you don't want to explicitly tell me the range ... I just want to be sure that the position is offering compensation in the range that I am seeking. If you prefer to leave the salary discussions for later, that is perfectly understandable."
Now, if they press me for salary info, I can say the same thing they said and refuse to answer.
It's a game of chicken. The best counter I have is "what is the top of your range if we have a perfect fit?", but even that doesn't always work.
At this point, I'm sick of games. If a company refuses to disclose a salary range and/or insists on getting me to quote a number, I lead with $2X0 and see what happens. 80+% of companies aren't willing to hit that high, and the other 20% have been more interesting roles at higher quality companies.
In my experience, refusing to agree on a range will inevitably lead to some lowball offers.
The strategy I've been using is to give out a range that is 1.5-2x what I'd be happy with. This anchors the conversation and quickly sifts out the employers who are not serious about attracting top talent.
Realistically, I never expect to get that 2x number and am certainly not leaving money on the table.
On the one hand, that screws up the usual "don't give a number" advice, including this advice -- there's usually not a defined salary range for a startup's catchall "we want somebody who does backend" poorly-defined job req.
On the other hand, I suspect "don't give a number" isn't the biggest mismatch happening there.
Honestly, discussing desired salary is a good screening tool and when following advice like this I find ~50% of job applications are a waste of my time.
So desired salary is an important filter if a job doesn't state the salary range.
I know it can often mean wasting time, but focus on whether it's a company you want to work at. If it is, see it as a way of getting on their radar, and if you can't agree for that position, ask them to keep you in mind if they get something more suitable.
That's one way, at least, where neither party has to concede the information advantage.
In fact, I'm surprised there aren't already 37 start-ups that offer this as a service. You could have a cute little envelope logo like the MS Outlook logo and give a TED talk about how you're totally disrupting information asymmetry in recruiting, and eventually be pressured by techtopus to provide data about what candidates are asking for to perpetuate information asymmetry.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yao%27s_Millionaires%27_Proble...
Why pay for a service when you can just ask? Basically they do it on purpose because they have the upper hand.
You have very little unique information when you enter the negotiation (you know your current salary, your desired salary, and how badly you need the job—that's about it). They have tons of information that you don't have (what they're willing to pay, what they're already paying others to do the job, how badly they need to fill the position, how badly they want you in particular).
By waiting for them to make an offer, you retain the unique information you have AND you wait for them to reveal some of the information you didn't have. When they make you an offer, you now know approximately what they're willing to pay you to do the job. This is a very big gain for you and allows you to negotiate much more effectively and increase your salary.
Example: today I was talking with a recruiter about an iOS developer position. The salary question came up (in the form of: how much do you make right now?), and I gave the standard deflection about wanting to make sure the position was a right fit, etc... When pressed, I said that based on my research, the base for this position is $75k - $95k, and that a number in that range would be acceptable as a starting point for negotiation, but contingent on the details of the position.
This kind of response seems to give you some wiggle room without giving up all your leverage, while giving everyone a general idea if you're in the ballpark. I only use this as a last resort if I'm getting the feeling that there is little chance I'll be able to proceed with the opportunity if I don't answer. True, by not establishing salary up front you may be wasting each others' time due to different expectations, but that is a very small risk to take compared with the potential upside of a big raise.
"Lower bound you'd accept" != "Lower bound you SAY"
This makes sense. You have to be as good as the same quality of software engineer, do work that is less glamorous, and carry a pager.
My background: I'm a senior-level engineer in my early 30s, in SF. After a consulting stint, I interviewed heavily in 2013, and again in the second half of 2015, and currently speak with 1-2 recruiter cold calls per week to keep my options open. My sample size is many dozens of intro calls, across startups ranging in maturity from 1st engineer through some of the unicorns everyone knows.
In short, I agree with p4wnc6. A very relevant fraction of recruiters, say a third, will refuse to proceed until you quote a figure. This is true for internal and external recruiters. No amount of push back works with this group, they'll see you as difficult or otherwise not worth pursuing, and would rather end the discussion than proceed number-less.
This leaves the two-thirds of recruiters who are willing to play ball. Now there's another problem - not quoting a number is only a good idea if you want to avoid being low-balled - it's a tremendous waste of time if your desired compensation is above the expected range.
For transparency and knowledge sharing, I'll be specific: my background is in operations and infrastructure ("devops"). 90+% of the roles coming my way pay in the range of $130-180K base. My base is above this, and very few companies will be willing to pay a premium of 50% more than they expected to. No amount of wishful thinking about "your payroll is a drop in the bucket" will bridge the gap if it's too large.
Which brings me to a question I'd love the answer to: other than working for the big ~6 (Google, Facebook, Uber, Apple, etc), how can I push my comp up to $2X0 (or even $3XX!)? I feel like I'm near max, so I'm biding my time until the right VP/Director/etc of Ops role comes along. Is there anything else I can do?
I am in scientific computing and machine learning, and I actually love being an implementer and a coder. I don't want to be a people manager (mostly because I think all companies force managers to treat their subordinates in unhealthy ways, and no matter how good your intentions are, being a manager will ruin your humanity).
I worry about finding any job, and then further worry about what growth path there could possibly be.
I'm suspicious that this is a silent-evidence phenomenon. I'd assume that the duration a job listing is up correlates inversely proportional to the compensation. If that's true, all the great paying jobs are optically invisible.
A fair amount of the interviews I accept come from unsolicited head hunters seeking me out, and even then the reveal-your-salary thing is a huge sticking point. And even when it hasn't been, I've still been let down by the ultimate salary offers.
I heard once that you should budget 1 month of job searching for every $10,000 of compensation you seek, and maybe more once you are seeking high-level bonuses. That's easily been true in my case. You also have to put up with horrid HR people who are quite simply just rude to you, and lots of degrading "dance monkey dance" whiteboard and coding puzzles and hazing, and demoralizing cross country interview trips that you have to muster the ability to put your whole self into but which you cynically know in your heart of hearts that it's a waste of time.
These sorts of jobs are best found through one's network. Not only does this open up better opportunities, but this sort of "back channel" opportunity usually comes with more details than a public job listing (such as the "I think they're probably paying $YYYk or so").
Is there a way into machine learning without doing going and going an Ms or PhD?
Im working my way through a coursera course on it but I'm not sure that is enough. All the positions I see are looking for academic experience or 5+ years doing it. Neither of which are doable for me.
http://www-bcf.usc.edu/~gareth/ISL/ISLR%20First%20Printing.p...
It assumes some understanding of calculus, but doesn't require matrix algebra.
The original (and amazing) book that lots of people used is Elements of Statistical Learning.
https://web.stanford.edu/~hastie/local.ftp/Springer/OLD/ESLI...
Chapters 1-7 are worth their weight in gold. This is one of the cases where the physical books are much better, as you'll need to flick back and forth to see the figures (which are one of the best parts).
The forgoing assumes that you already know some statistics/data analysis (the latter probably being more important).
If you haven't done this before, then I suggest that you acquire some data you care about, install R (a good book is the Art of R Programming by Matloff), and start trying to make inferences. And draw graphs. Many, many, many graphs.
If you keep at this, finding papers/books and reading theory, and implementing it in your spare time, then you can probably get a good data science job in 1-2 years. You'll probably need to devote much of your free time to it though.
I'm assuming that you can already code, given the context :)
Which posts exactly? What is that blog known for? First time I see it referenced.
The blog is known for interesting posts on startups and software development from outside the Bay Area filter bubble.
also, everyone I know in that income tax bracket works for those big companies. Startups just don't pay that kind of money. If you want to get paid (I mean, paid now, not paid if you get lucky and pick the right company and it gets huge) - if you want to get paid, go get a job from a big company.
why don't you want to work at google, facebook, uber, apple, etc...? (amazon, btw, is on that list, too.)
Also, on another note, while I get "what is your salary expectation" a lot, (and I often return with "getting X now, need X+y if you want me to move" because maybe I'm a terrible negotiator?) I've never had any but the lowest of body shop recruiters actually ask me for a previous salary.
I've never come across an ex-Amazon employee with good things to say about the company (though this is admittedly a small sample-size).
paying better is a good thing. It's certainly not the only good thing, but it's an advantage that amazon often has. Most of the people I know who currently work there[1] are like "The work is only okay, and they kind of treat you badly, but the pay is really nice"
I was out drinking the other weekend with a good friend who works at amazon, and we were comparing notes. As a contractor at google? My perks are way better. The free food at google (which I get to eat as much of as I want, and can even take home, even though I'm just a lowly contractor) is way better than the not-so-free food at amazon. At google, even as a contractor, nobody gives me shit about leaving my car at work while I'm on vacation. The contractor next to me has had his clearly inoperative vehicle parked at google for the last month or two. They asked him to verify it was his car, but didn't tell him he needed to move it. All my interactions with security and google corporate, and, you know, breakfast, lunch and dinner, kind of made me feel how I imagine the coddled children of the super rich feel when they are on the campus of an elite college.
At amazon? even full employees get shit for just leaving the car there over the weekend.
But my buddy, I mean, he is a little better than me, but he's not, you know, amazing, like the guy from apple we were hanging out with at the time, but he's making a lot more money than I am. Really dramatically so.
[1]I'd expect reviews from current employees to be rather better than reviews from ex-employees; the current employees clearly aren't annoyed enough to find another job.
$180k a year can not buy you a home in Santa Monica. Mortgage would be > half your take home even in a condo and the alternative is to commute an hour each way.
Jobs in the $2X0 range are basically outside the range where a company will trust the normal recruiter/interview process to bring in a good candidate. You must start working your network, and you must either go to one of the big 6 you mention, or you must find a company that desperately needs somebody really senior and where you have an "in" -- somebody who knows the quality of your work and knows you're work $2X0.
It's not that hard to be worth that -- that's about two senior-ish engineers in Silicon Valley. But it's very hard to prove you're worth it. You have to know somebody and they have to know you.
You'll see a lot of advice about becoming a "thought leader" and "noncommodity." And to be fair, that helps -- I give talks, wrote a book, etc. But those things won't usually let you interview cold and get $2X0. At this point, maybe $200, barely? Beyond that, it's networking or seniority.
I can't tell you about $3X0, that's out of my personal experience.
You'll occasionally see massively outliers, up to maybe $6XX (which includes stock, not just base.) But those are almost invariably people who rose in the ranks at very profitable companies -- either big 6 or a small niche company that makes bank. It's very hard to be hired into a role like that unless you're well-known by the company in question.
And at the opposite end of the spectrum, if a candidate gives a number that's too low, we ignore that and offer them what we think they are worth (which is a higher number). Our reasoning is simple: if we treat people fairly, they will be more loyal and less likely to jump ship at the earliest opportunity that pays more.
Because you aren't honest at all, to system is trying to get rmpoyees for less.
I actually have a friend who worked at one of the aggressive boutique recruiting firms who mostly focus on the New York investment banking jobs.
He told me that almost always, their client companies would tell them that if they were able to get a candidate to come in with a salary below X, the recruiting firm would get an extra bonus on top of their commission, and the bonus was priced to make sure it was more lucrative to try to suppress candidate wages than to adequately represent the candidate's higher-end expectation.
Whenever I hear a recruiter say anything like, "Look, I don't get paid unless you do so clearly I'm trying to get you the most that I can..." it's an immediate dealbreaker. They are probably being paid a bonus precisely to ensure I come in at a lower salary than what I could otherwise command.
Raises were always harder to arrange, but it was a lot easier when we had evidence that new hires were costing us 20% more than our existing high performers were paid
I definitely understand the need to be efficient with everyone's time, but "have the candidate share their desired salary" is only one way to do that.
I have heard this reasoning from recruiters many times, but haven't heard a good explanation as to why they don't just tell the candidate the range they're willing to pay.
(This is a genuine question) Why not just tell the candidate your range if your concern is to respect everyone's time?
Surprisingly, very few candidates ask us upfront what the position pays. In fact, we've only had one candidate who tried to play the "salary game" (if you will) and turned the question back on us when we asked what their salary range was. Like I said though, we just reveal it. To us, it's not a game, but rather two parties exchanging information in a fair and transparent manner.
At the beginning you are not invested in the candidate. A candidate that wants to work for you, but wants to maximize salary would be foolish not to try to get you to invest more before starting to talk salary, as it's far harder for you to walk away over 5% or 10% or even 20% once you've decided you have a candidate you like and face the prospect of spending time on another candidate instead.
You have the power advantage that passing the candidate over has less impact for you than it has for many/most candidates, so to a candidate it is far more important to spend the effort of selling you on just them first before talking price.
It is true that making sure you are on the same page salary-wise is a good idea, but it doesn't always have to be the interviewee to establish that.
Basically, I have a checklist for the first phone interview, and the relevant item on that checklist is "make sure pay range is agreeable". It doesn't say "get desired pay range from candidate" or "let the candidate know what the pay range is". We have no preference.
Even here, you ask the candidate for their salary range, instead of just stating what yours is.
If the salary isn't posted, it's a negotiation. There isn't a hiring manager alive that will blow off a potential hire because they ask for 5-10% more than the initial offer. They might not give it to them, but they won't walk away because of the question. Naturally, as a hiring manager, you might very well offer 5-10% less than your maximum in order to either give you bargaining room, or come in under budget for the position.
It's lightly adversarial, sometimes unpleasant, often annoying, but a part of life unfortunately. Some places more than others for sure, but I think it'd be hard to escape it fully.
For my own part, usually I end up negotiating up at least 25%-30%. My "record" is 50% over the initial offer. Usually I also end up asking for more options etc.
The most unpleasant and adversarial negotiations have been ones where I had to give up salary information at the beginning or have the conversations cut short. They're the only negotiations I've entered into where I've sometimes ended up being lowballed, and the only ones that have failed over salary, and in one case led to me telling a recruiter to fuck off and never me call me again over it. As a result, these days I will tell them flat out that if they need my salary details up front, that indicates to me they are unlikely to be able to afford me, and to call back when they have more budget flexibility.
Because when you say "if we can come up with an agreement internally (our hiring is very informal)", that to me means that if I get through interviews and you like what you see, I'll be able to work with you to get you to fight for a bigger budget if I expect more than what you had in mind.
It's easy to get people to push their numbers up once they know you and like you and believe they need just your skills, and it's easier to do that if you've not revealed that you'd be willing to settle on their range earlier in the conversation.
My best results in getting good offers have been when I've deferred all exchange of salary information until the very end: Get them to agree that they want me to join, and it's "just" the formality of getting me to agree to a salary. At that point the interview process has gone from me courting them, through a "it looks like we both like each other", to them courting me, and the power balance has shifted substantially because the hiring manager is invested, and everyone has spent lots of time getting to that point.
This doesn't necessarily work as well at low end position where you're just one of many cogs, but it makes a big difference when people are looking to slot in just that one important (to the hiring manager, you might still be inconsequential to the overall business, depending on size) position.
This was the only time someone offered me more than I was asking :)
It can be one of the great parts of negotiating with someone located in a much higher paid location.
[1] Thinking, Fast and Slow - by Daniel Kahneman
[2] http://www.businessinsider.com/how-to-negotiate-make-first-o...
The most important part here is that this will end the conversion with many recruiters. This helps you to know that those recruiters were not trying to help you. Just repeat with more recruiters.
Before I would speak to any of them on the phone, I'd get a soft confirmation via e-mail that they had a position that could meet my requirements.
The web page also had information about what areas I was willing to commute to.
I've used variants of this approach for more than 20 years, and it's working exceedingly well.
When things get more serious, I sometimes go over my history of compensation with them.
To me, it comes down to the question: does company X need me more than I need company X? For the right people with the right skills and the right experience, the "power" is with the potential employee.
The feedback I get from HR/recruiters is that my approach is rather unusual, but that they generally appreciate it since it is rather efficient.
They have only ever said that every position they are working on would offer a salary too low to compete even with what I currently made, let alone the larger amount I was seeking.
Yet at the same time, I have friends and colleagues who already are earning the higher level I am seeking, and who say it is a common amount to be earning in certain places.
My opinion is that recruiters focus a lot on whether it would be easy to get you hired. If your salary is high, few recruiters will bother because it means you are picky and you're looking to work at companies that are picky and so lots of times it doesn't work out.
Recruiters are a lot like crappy stock analysts. They are always looking for a story about something being undervalued, to hook someone on how they can get something great for an amazingly cheap price.
If you are justifiably expensive, most recruiters scatter like roaches. They can't sell things at their true value, and view it as wasting time even to try.
Its true that it is irrelevant what you made at your last job, but its kind of silly to play coy when they want you to give a number. When you're trying to get hired you are selling yourself... and the first step in selling is to qualify the customer. Just tell them a number that you would actually be acceptable to you, and if they balk then you don't have to waste your time. If you find out more about the job or company and decide you actually want more money, once you get an offer you can try renegotiating that number and give them your rationale.
Might there be some out there that would be willing to pay me what I'm looking for, but unwilling to discuss it up front? Possibly. But after wasting several dozen hours of my life with offers that weren't even in the same ballpark of what I was making or what I was after, I made the decision to not bother if the recruiter wouldn't be candid up front.
I've job hopped a bunch, and usually I just take whatever I was currently making, and add 15%, and say that that was my base.
If employers are going to play negotiation games, you shouldn't feel bad about playing them too.
Employers play games way worse than this.
That one case was Google (about 8 years ago) and like an idiot I gave them the paystubs (which matched what I asked for). Their offer was 25% less.
I don't know if you'll like what I'm about to say, but you sound like a pragmatist so I figure that you will appreciate a no-BS answer.
It's likely that there's something about your manner, presentation, personality - which I can't and won't fathom to guess because I don't know you - that is tipping your hand and sending the message that you're bluffing or easily manipulated. Obviously nothing is going to work every time but the stuff Patrick and others relate is solid advice so it is of concern that you're repeatedly getting iced out.
The other possibility is that you're interviewing with terrible people; however, the common aspect is still you and the only way to grow is to analyze whether there's a problem.
Could you just not be very convincing? Do you have an irritating voice? Do people generally snicker when you make confident assertions? I don't know why it happens in any case, just that in some unlucky cases it does happen.
My advice is that you have to be thoroughly believable in your disappointment in their offer. You have to look unfazed when you refuse to tell them what you made in your last job.
Finally, if none of these things is true and you're basically George Clooney, then I urge you to interview at different companies.
If you feel your job prospects are generally weak, you might not be comfortable standing firm on things like keeping salary history hidden. That seems reasonable to me, as long as you're not selling yourself short. "Impostor syndrome" is a thing.
I would actually reveal salary history if it's a "favorable" history -- if I would be happy taking a similar amount, because I value something about this new job more than my previous employment.
But I've never encountered the issue, I would be interested to see an analysis of what sort of jobs people who deal with dodgy HR reps are applying for (or what route to entry they are taken) vs the jobs people with positive experiences of the hiring process are going for.
I feel like it can't only be luck, presumably there would be some trends (ie. people who respond to advertisements are offered X% against people who are recommended through word of mouth for the same job)
The problem at this point is societal. It's been taboo for so long that people still harbor deep discomfort with it. Maybe they believe they don't deserve the pay they're getting so they wish for it to be quieted. If that's the case, then fuck those people.
If employees know each other's pay, they will start demanding raises - Then you get in a situation like in the finance sector where companies will be forced to pay big bonuses to hold on to important employees. Companies don't want that - They want their engineers to stay cheap, dependent and foolishly loyal.
It's how the system works; nice people get screwed. In your career, you will only receive the minimum amount that you're willing to accept - It's HR people's job to make sure that you don't get anything more than that.
I posted one for Google here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11314449
This Amazon thread has been very enlightening.
It's less of a corporate conspiracy but more "this is why you can't have nice things". People just can not handle it in a mature and responsible way, which is why the 'don't talk about money' "common sense" developed.
Less, "You make more than me? You earn too much!" and more "You make more than me? I should be paid more!"
But secretly he wonders: "why does he get more than me, im smarter than him!!".
This is then bottled up under 10 psi of pressure until the perfect moment when the slightest thing sets it off and creates a scene in the office.
[0] https://www.boundless.com/physics/textbooks/boundless-physic...
In fact, if I were at a party and I mentioned something about "10 psi", only to have someone correct me by saying "actually that's a slight vacuum...", I would assume they were trying to be mean.
Perhaps it is because our work puts us is a position where we aren't able to practice our people skills (and negotiation skills) and we don't have good instincts when it comes to how the free market works (we get boxed in and caught up in our work and forget about the financial realities of life).
When you think about the enormous value which engineers have created over the past 50 years and you compare that to who actually benefited the most from that value (in terms of wealth accumulation) - The people who benefited the most are business people, lawyers and financiers.
Every field of industry has been significantly enhanced by engineers... Heck, even medicine would still be voodoo pseudo-science if it wasn't for all the awesome tools created by engineers... Yet in spite of talent shortages, the education/intelligence barrier, the extreme amount of after-work hours required; we barely get paid more than an Australian construction worker.
It comes down to the fact that we don't stand up for ourselves - And we should.
We should, therefore, not be surprised when the structure of organizations in their control reflect that reality.
Whereas other types of people who are quicker to embrace "irrational" ideas of what they're worth, are more likely to ask for and therefore receive irrationally high salaries.
The reason it's hard to come up with a rational reason for a particular pay rate, is because no such reason exists in the real world. You can talk in terms of being paid proportionately for value created, but that's just an attempt to apply reason where it doesn't actually govern. Plenty of people are underpaid compared to the value they create, for no good reason: teachers, women, manufacturing workers, foreign sweatshop workers, open-sourcers - though willingly in the latter case.
What governs in setting labor prices is not reason, but all the gloriously irrational behavior of any and every marketplace, where people we denigrate as stupid idiots are basically like "oh look, shiny things." Well guess what, those shiny things - objects of desire - are worth a lot, even if rationally speaking they are crap. Never underestimate the Shiny Factor.
That's how someone ends up paid more for the same work for example. Like when a person from outside gets hired on at a higher rate for the same job being done for less by someone already in-house. The "reason" is simply that the new guy happened to be an "object of desire" (not currently working for the firm) which enhanced his Shiny Factor. As opposed to someone already on the payroll, dependably doing exactly the same thing - that guy, by his very dependability, actually has a lower Shiny Factor. To raise it, he needs to create a real threat of his leaving, and/or actually leave for somewhere else, and maybe come back.
Rationality, is or should be, by definition, pursuing actions that are in your own self interest.
Maybe engineers, if they had the knowledge that they could increase their salary by inflating their self worth in the eyes others, would do so. But in that case the problem is one of knowledge, not of rationality. Or perhaps engineers are more ethical. But in that case the problem is one of values, and not of rationality.
If someone needs to justify their pay by more rigorous means at their own expense, should they really be viewed as rational? Compare that question to the following one. Should someone with OCPD (obsessive compulsive personality disorder), that is conscientiousness and perfectionist to a fault be seen as more adept?
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/my-boss-revealed-everyones-salar...
It's a question addressed to "Evil HR Lady" (didn't know that was a thing...) from a woman. Her new boss accidentally emailed a spreadsheet with everyone's salary to everyone. The spreadsheet revealed she was underpaid and was embarrassed and now wants the boss's head on a stick.
This is the response from Evil HR Lady
"You are really angry, and you should be -- but your anger is misplaced. Your new supervisor made a mistake in sending out everyone's salaries. But because she is new, I can guarantee she didn't decide on your salaries. Your previous boss did. So, yes, you should be angry, but not at her. You should be angry with your old supervisor.
In fact, you should be thanking your lucky stars that the new supervisor did this. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if she subconsciously did it on purpose. If I got a new job and on day one found out that there was a huge disparity in pay among workers doing the same job, it would be top of my priority list to fix that. And I would act as a thorn in my boss's side until it was fixed. Since the problem is a longstanding and expensive one, no one is going to be excited about fixing it. By revealing the discrepancies, she's just brought the issue front and center, and HR and the big bosses cannot ignore it anyone more.
By sharing everyone's salaries, she's given you the power and the tools to fix the problem. HR can't smile sweetly and say, "You're making the market rate, dear!" because you've got hard evidence that you're being underpaid. And you should use this information to negotiate a new salary, as should all of your coworkers. And your boss? She has plausible deniability. It was amistake.
You're angry because you're embarrassed that your salary is low. Not because your "privacy" was violated. If she'd sent out your medical records, or notes from a conversation about your marital problems because they were affecting your work, then that would be a privacy violation and you'd be justifiably angry. But this anger is coming from the unfairness of the whole thing. Yes, you should have negotiated better when you were hired, but because of the information asymmetry in hiring, the company was able to low-ball you. Lesson learned -- always negotiate.
This is precisely why I advocate more openness in pay in the workplace. If you had been aware of what other people in your group were earning when you negotiated your salary, your present salary would likely be more fair. Everyone shouldn't be paid an identical salary because performance and skills are not identical, but salaries should be justifiable and logical.
So forgive your supervisor for her mistake. Accidentally attaching a file in an email shouldn't be a fireable offense. Use the new information to get a higher salary. And if you have to be angry, be angry at the previous supervisor who allowed this to go on.
Good luck with your salary negotiations."
------ Keep in mind that 2 employees with the same education and years of experience might not always be "equal in all respects". There are so many other things which come into play - taking initiative, energy they bring to the company, team play etc. etc. most of which cannot be measured. So the reason for 2 employees with apparantly equal qualifications + experience not getting the same salary is not always the company "trying to fuck them" or because they did not "negotiate hard".
If you make all salaries open, keep in mind that so many employees will get demotivated to know the colleague next cubicle gets paid more. Serves no purpose.
This appears to be one of many variables HR uses for salary negotiations and I recognize that. I don't see why this necessarily matters for most work places. Shouldn't you just pay for what the candidate brings to the table (skills, experience, etc.) and not consider what, even someone with a similar background is currently making in the company. I suppose salary negotiations/the labor market isn't an efficient market where a price can be assigned given x, y, & z.
The stock seemed like a mind-game to me, but it did work out to about 10% YoY increases in total compensation.
It's also inaccurate to characterize the stock as a one-time grant. The initial grant vests over four years (weighted on the last two years) typically you receive more grants after performance reviews, which vest over two years (again weighted on the second year.)
So in practice, you get a grant of 200 shares at signing, but by the end of year two only 50 have vested. At that point you have at least one performance grant, so you're probably getting shares vesting pretty regularly, at least four times a year.
RSUs are frequently given during annual performance reviews to employees with good reviews. For my first annual review I received a score of "Exceeds" which is second from the highest. For that, I got 35 RSUs worth roughly $19K when they vest (at current price).
In theory, good employees will continue to receive stock grants that vest over time, thus creating incentives to both stay and to perform well.
I walked away with close to 100k on the table over the next 2 years because I couldn't stand the place anymore. Their golden handcuffs are awful.
Meaning the equivalent income to maintain your standard of living in Dallas is $81k, or ~70k less than San Francisco.
I was a systems engineer in Dublin and the only significant payraise I got was after I left the company for 4 months to then rejoin, my salary was bumped up 12k euros, for a total of 62k/yr, with 150 shares over 4 years (sorry I do not remember the vesting scheme).
The HR department in AMZN has the tendency to screw internal employees upon promotion. The way it was unofficially explained to me by a low-level buddy in HR is that there are salary ranges for each corporate level, and during a promotion you get just over the lower bound of the salary range for your new corp level, that's the policy, that's what happens.
New hires instead have negotiation margin and, while the hiring manager can't offer a salary higher than the approved salary range, more often than not the offer will end up in the upper bound of the range, to lure the candidate in.
Furthermore, there are huge differences between salary ranges in job roles, a Systems Engineer will always be paid 15 to 30% less than a Software Development Engineer at the same level, despite the fact that the skills and duties are not that much different, why? Again unofficially "because Amazon values more people that write software". Except the fact that in my ex-team, we all wrote software and the expectations were all the same regardless the job title (there was however a difference between levels).
So yeah, as internal promotion you have absolutely NO leverage regarding salary, if you want a salary increase and your organization is hungry for people but is having trouble in hiring (like it happens frequently in Dublin where the job market is quite competitive), I'd suggest you start looking around for a new job, accept the offer and then come back to your same team 4 months later. If you leave the company for less than 6 months and your position hasn't been filled in the meantime, the hiring manager is able to extend an offer without sending you through an interview loop, you'll get your old job back but with a nice pile of money on top.
Were your offices by that famous Gaol? I thought it was interesting seeing a mix of the old and new so close together.
Who said he was at another company for those four months? And who's to say the company didn't just fold in that time or earn someone walking out on them?
And yes, the office was exacly in front of the Kilmainham Gaol, unfortunately the office was quite depressing, so much so that it was an inside joke that the Amazon office was 21st century Gaol.
Luckily they moved in a much better place now.
Personally, this netted me a 10% base pay increase. More counting the performance stock bonus that came with the change.
But what? Returning to the employer you quit from seems like a terrible idea. If it was years later, maybe you could explain it away with interview BS like "changing direction" or "finding your place."
But months later makes you not much better than the guy who shows his boss an offer from another company to negotiate a raise. It might work in the short term, but then you're branded as a flight risk. The next time they need to lay someone off (or if you slip up and they have a legitimate reason to fire you) you'd be high up on their list of disposable employees, perhaps moreso because you're more expensive than you were before.
In the past couple of months this was fixed by the creation of a new role called 'Systems Development Engineer'.
Another thing that could be interesting is your accent. My eyes were recently opened about the discrimination that happens based on that.
The reason for the throwaway is because I generally try to avoid "stirring the pot." Or at least, don't want a reputation as a pot stirrer. But if some higher up confronts me about it, I won't deny posting it.
How does that vesting work? 60some shares per quarter or each half year?
I'm really not a fan of having so much comp be stock. It's a way to go I guess.
Joined: Last year
Base Pay: 145,000
Native English Speaker: Yes
I don't work for Amazon but here is my salary information, for anyone who is interested
Current position: 50-100 employee startup in Palo Alto, $170k and .1% equity vested over 4 years
Previous position: Google, $130k base, 15-20% annual bonus, around 64 shares vested per year (so around $170k annual net comp) Previous position: Small startup, $90k base
I live in the SF Bay Area. When I interviewed, most offers from startups were in the range of $140k-$170k.
On the other hand, my work is not that stressful, and I'm still going to school so my job is very flexible on time.
Anyone else been in a position like me?
I made $25/hr (without benefits), then got dropped to ~ $18ish / hr (with 401k matching and health insurance) at the part time job I worked while I was in school.
I worked 20 hrs a week, completely remotely, and was responsible for some of the NMS systems and Linux admin work at a large satellite operator. It was a mix of sysadmin and software engineering, and I learned a ton.
There were a few stressful moments, as I was on call, but my boss tried to shield me from it as much as he could because he wanted me to be able to focus on school.
If you're a full time undergrad student, then my advice to you is to enjoy what you have right now, as long as it allows you to focus on your friends and education. Having practical, hands-on experience from work will greatly complement your coursework, and if you can get that experience without being in a high-pressure role, then it's a win-win situation for you.
Consider asking for a pay bump if you think you're undervalued, but do research on what other paid SWE internships are at, and consider the fact that a bump in pay may cause your boss to have higher expectations of your output.
You can relax, but you might not want to. My salary has been artificially lowered because every previous company likes to make an offer based on your previous salary, or I've made so little that I had no savings and had to take the first job offered to me every time. It wears on you after awhile, and I probably could have made a lot, lot more money if I made better choices earlier (although I also wouldn't have some of the wide range of job and life experiences also, so there's that).
But every once in awhile it's nice to take a breather, sit back, recalibrate yourself, get your work/life balance back in check, work on some creative things in your spare time, etc. Easier, non-stressful jobs will allow that. So I guess it's wherever you need to be in life right now and how much you need to be compensated.
But if you're not getting challenged at your work, you're probably not learning skills that are in demand and your next job hunt will probably be more difficult.
By competitive, I mean microsoft, facebook, and google. This could be naïve of me, but that's how they position themselves.
Note: as of right now, GlassDoor is down for "Scheduled Maintenance" but the question stands.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11314076
Position: Senior Software Engineer (level 5)
Tenure: 4 years, no prior experience
Comp: $300K (160 salary, 40 bonus, 100 stock)
Male, native English speaker
P.S. We're hiring.
Upon hiring and usually each year thereafter we get grants that vest over the following 4 years, varying in sized based on budgets, level & performance scores.
Getting somebody you know at Google to refer you is the best way to secure an interview, but you can also apply online.
http://www.google.com/about/careers/students/
If you get an interview, practice algorithms/data structures interview problems like crazy.
Daily 10K I guess.
I started a discussion for Google salaries here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11314449
If you have a chance, can you send the link to your colleagues at Google? (-:
$180k/year 15% bonus ~ $30k/year 600 RSUs in the first year = $440,000 400 RSUs in the second year = $280,000 200 RSUs in 3rd and 4th year (assuming no refreshers, and oh boy there will be refreshers!)
Male, native english speaker.
It helps that my prior job had a comp level around $480k/year and also I got hired when GOOG was $550/share.
BTW, the T-5 salary band ends at $180k. So you're pretty close. Its the RSUs that make all the difference.
I don't think I was a highly strategic hire, just a very solid engineer with a lot of experience, prior employment at Google (and Amazon), and a strong salary and stock compensation at my immediately prior job.
So they busted out the competitive offer, and I was very happy. Also the stock went up like $200 a share.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11314449
Title : Software Development Engineer (SDE I)
Base : 98,000
Sign on : 50,000 (2 year period)
Relocation : 10,000 (2 year)
Stocks : worth $70,000 (4 years)