How do you avoid wasting your time doing interviews with companies that have no intention of paying you what you expect without disclosing some form of salary range upfront?
I've generally taken what I want to make in the role and added 20% to it as a starting point. While this might limit me, it also keeps me from doing 100 onsite interviews only to discover their max is 2/3 of my expected comp.
for big companies a lot of salary/comp data is out there. I didn't discuss comp at all for the last 4 companies I interviewed at, since I knew they'd all beat my current comp by quite a lot.
Because the marker is relative. What’s crap pay to you is a golden opportunity to others. Experience is relative as well. They may not have the experience and the company doesn’t care about that, only to fill the seat. Don’t take it personally.
Whether I am thrilled to take a $60k TC job or my absolute minimum is $400k that doesn't change the market in that 60k is insultingly low and 400k is well above the median (cue all the folks who think FAANG is the market chiming in about $450k TC juniors).
Perhaps people who joined shortly before a stock rally. I was pulling ~$270k TC at 2 YoE, but it was really ~$175k TC at the time I actually joined the company. Equity is so variable, that's why it's better to compare TC at time of offer. Of course, when I negotiate I always cite the highest stock value in the last several months.
Probably not "junior" in the traditional sense of the world. Maybe some PhD holders researching very, very specific literature that the company wants to lock in pronto. You're not hiring a new engineer for that much to simply code.
Yeah given the author’s expertise in job markets I’m shocked she wrote this as well.
I don’t think there’s a single other profession with as much compensation variability as software engineer. I’ve heard it described as bimodal or trimodal, but I’m not even sure that captures it.
There was a YC company on the hacker news homepage recently looking for senior AI engineer for 60k. Even by international standards that’s absurdly cheap , but this is a YC backed company, I don’t think their head is in the sand (though I do suspect YC coaches founders to play moneyball with hiring as YC companies as a whole seem to pay far below average).
There’s many companies that consider 150-200k as “standard”.
And there’s still many companies paying 400-600k for senior engineers. I thought in the “tech recession” with the interest rates up this wouldn’t be available for a while but an acquaintance who got laid off from Twitter did the “grind interview prep and interview a dozen companies simultaneously” strategy just this summer in 2023 and got multiple competing 500k+ offers (all liquid) for staff SWE including from some companies I didn’t realize paid that much like HubSpot.
Despite many great offers he also encountered many companies that tried to lowball by claiming “salaries are going down for engineers” but that turned out to be wishful thinking and/or a bluff on the company’s part given his final result.
So basically there is no “market rate” for senior engineers but to the extent there is one a huge percentage look to massively go under it. I don’t blame them as it’s part of the game but just be aware many companies say things like “we want the best and are willing to pay for it” but then lowball and try to bluff engineers into thinking “the market” is much lower than reality. Which they do because many many engineers fall for it.
A lot of companies don't know what they want and how much that costs. The "senior engineer" at my FIL's 60-person company makes less than an inbound "junior" at a FAANG.
Obviously a silly example, but the caliber of folks is totally different. If I am a job searcher, I want to know the employer understands and is willing to pay for my caliber because otherwise our ideas of what the role is and what it should pay could be vastly off.
My understanding is that the game is usually about the money saved between the offer and the target salary band.
Companies have their review schedules and the new hires would be boarded before the reviews. This would allow to hire at low ball and then give a "raise", effectively leveling it.
Not only aiming at below market figure saves company the money, this also serves as a retention tool.
So, it does pay to know an approx of the target comp band AND your own "happy" target. The hard part is to formulate it as a package.
I do think being proactive like you suggest is a good approach. It is pretty easy to couch it in a relaxed way that you are attempting to save everyone's time and it makes them show their hand first. That way you aren't reducing the possibility of making a higher than expected salary and you can hopefully short circuit positions with companies that are below your desired range or as you said, being secretive or weird about it.
I have never had issues with this approach. Yeah you'll get a few people who think they're being cute about wanting to schedule a call or whatever, but when it comes down to it "I don't move forward without knowing the budgeted range for a position" gets me a number probably 19 out of 20 times, almost always the first time too.
It makes no sense at all for the company or recruiter to hide the range for you. Because they would be wasting their timing doing all kinds of meetings if your expected number is far above that range.
I don't think the company with the $120-150k range is trying to hide it from the person who wants $200k, I think they're trying to hide it from the person who wants $110k. If you tell them $200k they just stop talking to you. If you tell them $110k they write it down and carry along with the process and a little green $110k next to your name.
This kind of strategy seems a bizarre one for a company. "Let's figure out how to systematically pay our employees less than they're really worth." How is that any kind of long-term plan? To really move the needle you'd have to do it a LOT -- but then you've selected on employees who lack knowledge about their own power. Those are going to be systematically different (probably not in a good way?) from employees who are more proactive and entrepreneurial about negotiating. Wouldn't you prefer a whole lot of the latter type? Since they will presumably be better at solving open-ended problems, etc. etc.?
> you've selected on employees who lack knowledge about their own power
Which is the majority of employees. Because...
> employees who are more proactive and entrepreneurial about negotiating
...aren't going to remain employees for too long; they are going to end up starting their own businesses because they realize that the upside is so much greater. Which means, first, that, to them, the job at your company is not a career; it's a temporary day job while they get set up to pursue their real goal. And second, that at any given time these kinds of employees will be a fairly small minority of all the people in the job market.
>>because they realize that the upside is so much greater.
the risks are also greater, I am 100% proactive about salary, I am 100% pretty aggressive and "disagreeable" (in the psych meaning of the term) about it as well
I however am not entrepreneurial because I have no desire to have that liability, or risk. I prefer working for a company instead of owning the company
> This kind of strategy seems a bizarre one for a company. "Let's figure out how to systematically pay our employees less than they're really worth."
so we established that the revenue of the company belongs to the employees that worked for it, but the company has to skimm at least the operating costs before payout as otherwise it would make a loss.
but most companies have an obligation to make profit, so there is no other way than to pay the employees less than what they're worth (because increasing revenue would also increase the value of employees accordingly)
In this world employee value would be set by the market for their skills, not how their output translates into revenue when pushed through the context of the business' products.
Some companies seem to lie about their top range number as well. If you pass the interview and ask you for a figure and you come back with their top range number, suddenly there are reasons you shouldn't be making that. I strongly suspect they have no intention of giving out that amount but are instead using it to entice people that are willing to accept less than they are worth. It plants the idea that one day you will be making that much at the company if you accept less for now.
This happened to me, range was $x-y for a position I was very well qualified for. They wanted 6-8 YOE while I had 12, I had 5+ years familiarity with the business domain alone, experience in all the tech, demonstrable experience doing what they wanted to do in the next 2 years. Comes time for salary negotiation and their first offer is exactly in the middle of X and Y not surprisingly. I list all the above, say it's pretty clear to me Y is a fair offer not to mention a pay cut from where I'm coming from (which had the added benefit of being true).
Basically they refused to pay me Y because there were folks working there who had been at the company for a while and weren't making that, with very little other justification. We eventually settled on a signing bonus to make up ~80% of the difference, and I got a raise that surpassed that difference within the first year. But I probably wouldn't have taken the role without the bonus and probably would have left within the first year without the raise.
It's still not clear to me why they listed that range if their justification for not paying the top of it was a set of factors that would have been the same for any applicant.
It makes some sense to hide it, because they're not just hiding it from you. They're hiding it from all candidates, and a policy of telling everyone (or hiding from everyone) can have an effect on just what sort of candidates they get.
If, in exceptional circumstances, they would pay 30% more than everyone else, they might want to hide this. Instead of saying "we do 95% to 135% of what everyone else offers", they say "we do 95% to 105% of what everyone else offers"... and suddenly they get fewer cranks and weirdos. But they still have the option of offering that 30% more, if they stumble upon some diamond in the rough.
They might want to, even if showing would bring in a few more good candidates. Is it disturbing the signal to noise ratio so much that it takes far longer and costs more to go through the whole process.
Of course, just because it might work this way in theory, it doesn't mean that it does in practice, especially consistently. So, it could be them chasing bad strategy that they can't determine to be bad strategy.
If they have a few more bad assumptions (like "our stated range is still good enough to get the decent candidates"), then they might be even more inclined to hide the range.
They're working through all sorts of bad tradeoffs too, just like you.
> How do you avoid wasting your time doing interviews
Simple. Only interview with companies you'd like to work with so much that you'd be willing to negotiate from a starting offer 2/3rds of what you want. When your interest in the company is sufficient, you'll be motivated to tell them that their offer is "a good starting point for discussion" and then make a counter-offer or ask for additional vacation, bonuses, or whatever you value.
Conversely, if interviewing for unattractive positions that pay well is motivated by non-negotiable financial considerations (mortgage, kids in college), then by all means, be up front about it.
>Simple. Only interview with companies you'd like to work with so much that you'd be willing to negotiate from a starting offer 2/3rds of what you want. When your interest in the company is sufficient, you'll be motivated to tell them that their offer is "a good starting point for discussion" and then make a counter-offer or ask for additional vacation, bonuses, or whatever you value.
This would only work in a hot market, for a desirable candidate. Not everyone has the luxury of interviewing places they really want to work at any cost.
> This would only work in a hot market, for a desirable candidate. Not everyone has the luxury of interviewing places they really want to work at any cost.
Yes, that would be an example of "non-negotiable financial considerations". I'm going of the statement of the original comment, implying they had the luxury of choosing only those positions that meet their compensation criteria.
This might come as a shock, but some people aren't motivated by money beyond the basic need to afford to live in the market the way they want. Some would be willing to take that offer if the position included a variety of attractive intangibles.
To put it another way, "total compensation package" for some people includes things that aren't money but have a value roughly equal to some amount of money for that person.
This may seem like I'm being dismissive but I don't want to work anywhere. I work because I have bills that need to be paid. I don't derive enjoyment from making other people wealthy. I legitimately cannot think of such a state as enjoying work nor enjoying working at any given company in particular.
Do you, and if so how did you cultivate that? If you don't mind answering.
Consider, thoroughly, the hypothetical lottery jackpot. What is it you would choose to do, pursue, aim for, if money were no object and you had nothing except your inner volition to drive you. Would you spend your days reading, exploring philosophy and knowledge? Or would you travel and see the world you've yet to traverse? Maybe you're an individual striving toward community and you want to focus on family, friendship, charity. Maybe a bit of everything?
Design, intentionally, the dream you would live if you could. My friend often responds cynically, saying if he is asked about his dream job he would be a space explorer like some Marvel movie. I hear him as flippant and he's clear he thinks it's a dumb idealistic pontificating exercise. . I go toward the path of okay, what would it take to BE that thing or pursue it...
If you can visualize and reason your way to how something might happen, you can reverse engineer it. You can think of it like chess. Position yourself with strength, understand openings midgame and endgame, but know there are many, many, undiscovered lines left in many positions. Now expand from 64,64 squares and so many moves to the infinite variability in Life. You have levers and positions you can exploit and transpose.
Circumstances will always have a hand as will pure luck, fate, or Higher Power, but... you have immense power to craft your reality and I mean this in no woo terms. You change your thoughts, your words, your actions and most crucially, your influence and environment.
I want to respond and thank you for taking the time to reply. I want to put that here first because what I am about to say will seem flippant.
But I literally want to do nothing. I don't want to do anything - I want to not exist. Life is suffering. I derive no enjoyment from anything. I just make other people happy and wealthy and then go home and suffer until I go back to work and suffer.
Neither do I, but within the scope that I have bills that need to be paid and thus need to work, there are organizations where that work is enjoyable, others where it's acceptable and even more where it would be unpleasant.
I want to not dread going to work, so I only entertain offers from outfits where the job and its environment appear enjoyable. "Acceptable" is below the bar I set unless I somehow end up desperate for money.
The attitude in my case wasn't cultivated. It stems from the fact that I like what I do and I'm very good at it.
I'll grant you, "enjoying work" is rarely, if ever, a thing. The choice might come down to "less bad", but there's still a range of work situations. By "companies you'd like to work with" I mean companies shipping products or services that resonate with you, using tech your interested in, and development processes you don't hate. I don't like working in fintech, for example, so that's a place I wouldn't interview unless I was in need of money. Others might really love the idea of working as staff at academic institutions, and be will to accept less money in exchange for other things.
Hello, I work in the games industry. You basically need some self-fulfillment to not burn out, be it in designing/implementing gameplay features, digging deep into some graphics/hardware level instructions to optimize, or simply working alongside non-programmers (artists, sound designers, VA's, writers, etc. Very diverse environment) to get something beyond a technical project finished.
How to cultivate that is pretty straightforward. I like games, and I can tolerate making games by leveraging my existing skills. I want to make my own games one day, but I need more financial stability for that. Of course, I can't say I feel as passionate about making someone else's game as I would my own, but industry gives me experience, lets me meet other kinds of talent, and lets me prepare savings for that day I try to do my own thing. That's how I keep motivation going.
I recently found out that i did not know the maximum. Only multiple offers and taking some risks allowed me to find out and it was well beyond what i had assumed.
You're spot on, and I don't know why people complain about "wasting their time interviewing" so much. Interviewing is both a valuable skill and a good information discovery process - as you mentioned.
If you are doing a lot of interviews and not getting jobs - then you need more practice doing them. If you're getting so many offers its boring, look for a way to interview for more demanding positions.
The thing is, as an employee you tend to look for a new job only if you start to feel unhappy. This puts you in a slightly needy position and does set the tone. I used to be self employed and learned to enjoy the negotiations. It is kind of crazy to have this binary situation of beeing either employee or contractor but i dont have a solution either.
>I don't know why people complain about "wasting their time interviewing" so much. Interviewing is both a valuable skill and a good information discovery process - as you mentioned.
for me:
- it's long, often 3 stages minimum, but more typically 5-6 rounds. do I really want to take 5-10 hours per job out of my month just to "figure out my worth?". As long as I can pay the bills and I'm not miserable at my job, I'm fine.
- if you have a job, it is hard to schedule around all these rounds. In addition, it feels stressful since by most intents, a company does not react well to hearing you are shopping around
- it generally makes use of skills that do not reflect my performance in a job. I am 6 years into industry, I don't and never needed to invert a binary tree on the spot. Meanwhile, actual skills like proper coding practices/architecture, code review feedback, test coverages/edge cases, and the ability navigate through the company to find the person you need are barely even mentioned.
- it's a sterile, artificial environment that more or less makes you put on airs to show "your best self". "why do you want to work for this company" is asked in nearly every interview setting and we all know your real answer is the wrong one, as opposed to using the time to show off how much you researched the company. Even if you basically jut googled "X engineer" and applied because the salary range fit you.
I can understand testing in juniors, because there is no license exam for an engineer, and maybe on the other side of the hump you can get to a point where the companies are trying to impress you. But that middle hump feels like the worst of both worlds.
>If you're getting so many offers its boring, look for a way to interview for more demanding positions.
if you're at that point, you're probably not going to find your answer on the internet. those sorts of jobs are word of mouth.
Only apply to businesses that advertise pay range, or at least a minimum pay, in their job listings. It is the law in CO/NYC/WA/CA, so all the highest paying businesses have to comply anyway, and any business that wants to compete with them will have to advertise pay range also.
Thus if a business does not advertise pay ranges, you can assume it will not be on the high end, at least not competitive with pay in the above regions.
Author here. These ranges are typically wide because your compensation depends on your interview performance and perceived seniority/value add to the company.
There's no way to tease this out before you interview, except that if you're looking for compensation that's significantly above the top of the band, it might be hard to get. (A little above the top is possible, and sometimes a lot is possible too... that's where the negotiation comes in.)
I feel like it's not a great look to say "I don't know enough about the role to give you my salary expectations at this point" while also asking "but what is the salary range for this position, given you don't know enough about me".
This may sound quaint but I find that being forthcoming and asking the question you have works.
During the latest job search, I would just ask for a range and say myself that "obviously where I fall in the range depends on my candidacy, I won't hold you to it."
If they tell you the range is something like $120K to $150K, it tells you what kind of seniority they are looking for - whether they know it or not - and how much they value people of that profile. If they tell you it's like $150K to $750K - then you know they are really wide open to range of experience and impact. Someone may say that a $600K wide range is meaningless but I don't think it is. If you're more junior you can count on being towards the left but still know they can afford to give you a bit more if they like you, and if you're very senior you can recognize that they have room for someone like you and have an appetite to pay. You'd be totally self-unaware to go into the process hoping for $750 and then landing at $150 but that's more on you.
So I am fine asking for a broad range - it's way more meaningful than no range.
It is very helpful, the bottom of the range tells you almost everything you need to know. I don’t care if the top is $1B per year if I am willing to accept $200k in order to decide which jobs to apply.
I think that's true when you're on the more junior side of things. When you're more senior, you're more interested in the ceiling. the $200k may not be enough but if you know it goes up to say $500k - you can consider interviewing.
That's not "completely unhelpful" - if your current job is $99k/yr or $400k/yr it answers your "should I bother spending time interviewing here?" question quite nicely.
The fact that the range is 100k isn't that big of an impediment to utility.
It can be a valid range - I've seen plenty of postings (internal at least) where the the seniority is flexible. Also a flexible location could also lead to a big range depending if you are based in NYC versus Iowa...
"Portfolios" in some form are often necessary. (In my space, writing samples.) If you have those ready to go, easier for everyone! But if you don't have a relevant portfolio, you'll need to either put something together or I'll pass. (I'm not really looking for a specific assignment but just something that's representative of the type of work.)
why would a software dev have a portfolio? The comparison to design or writing doesn't make sense. A graphic designer can point to logos or marketing material that is publicly available. I'm not going to put proprietary code on a portfolio nor am I going to spend multiple years building some open source project when I already have a full time job.
Software engineering must be the only profession where employment history means nothing. And yet... interviewers always want salary history to knock you down. If you don't care about the work I did in the past, then why do you care about how much I was given for that work?
For the same reason artists do -- to show a potential employer what you're capable of and what your style is. Look at it from the employer's point of view -- they have very little to go on when judging ability. If you can provide examples of your work, then you're reducing their uncertainty and giving yourself an edge for the position.
> I'm not going to put proprietary code on a portfolio nor am I going to spend multiple years building some open source project when I already have a full time job.
You don't have to do either of those things. Your portfolio doesn't have to include large, complex projects. A collection of smaller ones will do nicely. Or, even easier, is what I do: I just bring in the code for the most recent hobby project that I've completed.
> interviewers always want salary history to knock you down
You don't need to provide that history. At least, I never do. When I'm asked, I respond with what my salary expectation is, not what my salary history is.
They're asking more how it would happen, less for what purpose.
Artists automatically accumulate portfolios by doing work that gets displayed in public. Programmers who work on closed-source programs don't—unless they supplement their work-for-pay in ways that artists aren't expected to. The artist's history of work itself is how they get more work; the programmer's isn't.
>They're asking more how it would happen, less for what purpose.
open source projects in a relevant industry. IME it's never been required to have sample work to show off, but many agree that having some OS contributions or even small pet projects is one of the most valuable things to leverage, outside of actual work experience.
>The artist's history of work itself is how they get more work; the programmer's isn't.
No one is really going to care behind closed doors, but _technically_ there's plenty of concept/scrapped art owned by the company that they can't directly point to on their public portfolio. It's not quite as easy for artists either to show off what may have been their best work.
As I said, how I do this is to bring in the code for my hobby projects.
> The artist's history of work itself is how they get more work; the programmer's isn't.
It's just a recommended strategy, not a requirement. In general, it's a great idea to identify a customer's pain points and reduce them. When you're looking for a job, the companies you're talking to are the customers. The easier you make things for the interviewer, the more you can reduce their pain points, the better your chances for the position.
The person you replied to is annoyed they have to do that when it seems like others don't. They think they shouldn't have to and it isn't fair they do. Explaining how to do it fundamentally does not address their point.
If you're trying to explain how they can do it with the least amount of extra work, to minimize the impact of the extra expectation, please consider that not everyone has hobby projects. Even fewer people's hobby projects are presentable, and even fewer still can trust the other person not to draw some wild conclusion based on anything that might be in there.
I think everyone is clear on how the situation works, but not everyone is happy with it working that way.
>Software engineering must be the only profession where employment history means nothing
Nah, Artists have it the worst when it comes to that. Especially early on.
SWE's for the most part leverage titles and company names a bit too much IMO. No licenses + very little way to verify actual contributions = tons of potential false positives.
> interviewers always want salary history to knock you down.
That's pretty much every single job in the history of ever. if it's not a minimum wage job, they are trying to minimize your compensation somehow.
Sure, employment history matters. But, if you're in a field where some job-seekers can point to relevant concrete work products they've created they may have an advantage over those who can't. Maybe that's not fair but it's the way it often is.
If I understand things correctly, current comp shouldn't be part of the equation or talks as far as your recruiter and company that you're interviewing with are concerned. The position will have a comp range. That is not related to what you may be currently earning.
That's not the point. The point is that most people wouldn't leave their current role without a bump, so if they'd known that up front they wouldn't have bothered with the interview.
If it's a well known company, I've found sites like levels [1] to be very informative and accurate. Otherwise I always just ask in the initial calls, no reason to beat around the bush. If you know what you want, you can ask what the salary range is and decide if it's worth it from there.
I ask in the initial calls even when I already know what the answer is. Sometimes, there's a discrepancy between the two that can be a clue that you should look more closely to see if the company is a straight-shooter or not.
You'll still be glad you asked up front, because that kind of BS tells you something about the company. Sure you wasted your time in the interviews, but you now know not to push back on their initial offer because you don't want to work for a company that'd pull that on you.
The sunk cost goes both ways. The company has likewise spent a lot of time and effort interviewing you and if they are extending you an offer and you say no, the process starts over for them.
Especially if you have a job already, when they want to hire you is when you have the maximum leverage.
That's only when most of the interviews aren't automated via codility and similar atrocities. If they built or contracted a process that is scalable, interviewing you will cost them like $5 and almost no time outside maybe the final call with your future boss whereas you'll waste a lot of time.
I've had some success by saying a ridiculously high number, and then quickly adding that "This is what it would take for me to accept an offer on the spot. As I learn more about the role and team and how well this would fit me, I expect that number to go down significantly."
Once they've responded to that I ask something along the lines of "By the way, what's the budgeted range for this role?" or "are you forbidden from sharing the range for this role" or something along those lines.
For some reason, recruiters seem more willing to share the range after I've anchored high – perhaps because they get insecure about whether they've misjudged my qualifications.
The most important advice is: let them talk first.
There are two cases:
1) You'll get more than you expected. Good for you.
2) You'll get an offer for less than your expectation. You'll see how much your work is worth for the company. Maybe it's time to submit your CV elsewhere.
Not talking about your salary history is a decent tip.
But negotiation isn't rocket science: you need to be thoughtful and honest to yourself and come up with an aspirational number (what you want, best case) and a floor (which you will not go below). Any number in between should be acceptable to you, by definition.
I find the hardest thing for people is being honest about the floor and being willing to walk away.
> I find the hardest thing for people is being honest about the floor and being willing to walk away.
The problem is that you almost certainly don't have enough information to predetermine a floor, because that almost certainly depends on what other options will be available to you in the near future. I mean, sure, technically your floor could be literally just the lowest amount that you could survive on, but most people anticipate that the options available to them allow them to go higher than that.
The floor should be the number that you don't feel bad about accepting. That indeed includes your perception of alternatives. If your floor is higher than what you're going to get, you'll miss a few jobs and then learn that your expectations should be lower. That makes the new floor acceptable.
There isn't really a shortcut, because if you feel like you've accepted an offer below your minimum and never applied for other jobs you'll feel like that forever. Which isn't a good foundation for the next years working in the role.
> If your floor is higher than what you're going to get, you'll miss a few jobs and then learn that your expectations should be lower. That makes the new floor acceptable.
Right, but this process is only acceptable if you believe that you have more than a few options in the near future.
I gave an honest floor salary to a company prior to interviewing. Their offer was 20% less than my floor. I think they thought it was my "best case" number despite very clear communication that it was my minimum to consider leaving my current role.
I walked away vaguely annoyed with the hiring company.
It can be safe to assume the floor is current salary plus whatever it would take for me to leave plus a little bit extra. I wouldn’t offer a floor lower.
So I can see making an offer below or near floor. 20 percent is awfully low, but I would have fun and make a counter. If they don’t move much you then it’s clearly time to move on. Really depends on what else is on the table.
> I gave an honest floor salary to a company prior to interviewing.
Never reveal what your honest floor is. That's just for you, so you know what is an acceptable negotiation range. Tell them what your expectation is, instead.
The point is that your aspirational number may be way, way off. Not saying the aspirational number is how I got twice the salary I planned to ask for as a junior while interviewing for my first job years ago.
There's no consistent and transparent pricing for individual skills on a resume, so you can't sum them up, adjusted by years of experience, and reach a rational number. Job titles can be similarly vague. Plus there's no premium for having a useful bundle of skills as a single hire (companies charge us for convenience and bundling all the time though!)
This seems hard, but plenty of analytical brain power could be applied towards this. But there's also no will for companies to reach pricing frequency and fidelity like a stock market or retail because the inefficiency is in their favor and I suspect the real numbers that would come out of that would be much higher.
I think part of the (perhaps unconscious) resistance to thinking clearly about the floor is that the hiring side (i.e. people who do this every day, rather than once every few years) have a knack for sussing out what that floor is and ensuring that that's what you get and not a penny more.
Maybe there is a kind of madman theory of salary negotiation as well, heh: throw out some numbers, don't think about it too much, randomly blow up the negotiation for any reason, or for no reason, etc.
For my part I just accept that I'll be getting the floor or very close to it.
Its more like a poker game. The more information you know, the more advantageous your position will be.
When recruiters ask me a range, I typically go 20%-30% above what I'm currently making as the starting point and about 10% below what I'm actually making as the floor. I also always tell the recruiter I'm open to negotiating.
This usually gets a reaction from the recruiter. They either tell me I'm asking too much and will give me the actual range the company is looking for or they say, "Oh that's perfect, its right in the range the company is looking for."
That information on its own will tell you whether its worth it to continue or not in 99% of the situations.
Salary negotiation is all about information asymmetry; typically the company holds all the cards and the candidate none. Not sure any article could help with that in any way.
This is only partially true. Sure the company has a lot of cards but they are playing a different game. They are Hikaru playing 12 blitz chess games at once, and potential employees are offering something, else they're not negotiating they're just working out the terms of their slavery.
Not exactly. Some candidates outright lie about competing offers or existing compensation. Less unscrupulous tactics are to give TC figures based on the peak of the stock price performance, which isn't technically a lie - you just forgot to cite the most up-to-date price.
the best part is the "exactly what to say" at the end:
"At this point, I don’t feel equipped to throw out a number because I’d like to find out more about the opportunity first – right now, I simply don’t have the data to be able to say something concrete. If you end up making me an offer, I would be more than happy to iterate on it if needed and figure out something that works. I promise not to accept other offers until I have a chance to discuss them with you."
i love it. I would have to have that right in front of me and read it word for word. And if I get pushed to reveal a number I would need to just pause and slowly repeat it again word for word like a robot.
I don't think how you say it is as critical as understanding the concept. When I am interviewing, I am usually talking to a few companies at the same time, so my answer is usually "While I don't want to throw out a number, just wanted to be transparent that I am talking to a few companies and have/expect to have another couple of offers before I make a decision. Obviously how those offers come in will be a factor in my expectations and I would of course let you know if we need to work on the numbers. So right now I would just be very happy to see your starting number and go from there"
maybe less words than that, so it's literally the mental model in my head. Repeating something like a robot is probably better than blurting out the number but having a real game plan and treating the recruiter as a partner is probably better.
yeah but I was raised to be a good kid and do what the teacher or adult authority figures tell me to do. Even though I'm an adult now, when a fast talking recruiter demands to know some numbers I have a hard time not just folding and giving in! I would need to print out those words and paste them on the wall and like practice 10 times with a friend playing the role of sneaky recruiter.
That's a funny and impressive sense of self awareness.
If I may, I wouldn't think of the recruiter as an authority figure (they have none...) Rather they are your partner. Their best case scenario is that you are a good candidate for their job and they get to fill it. Which is also your best case scenario!
So it's more about how do you get there together collaboratively - at least that's how I frame it in my mind. So when they ask for something I don't want to share I respond more from the frame that it's not the piece of info that would help right now but here's how we should play it.
> I would have to have that right in front of me and read it word for word. And if I get pushed to reveal a number I would need to just pause and slowly repeat it again word for word like a robot.
LOL. I'd probably read it like a bank heist hostage. Ideally, while blinking rapidly and visibly sweating on the Zoom meeting.
The hard part about these tips is they will lead you to waste a lot of time. Most companies have no real perspective on if they are in the 60th percentile by comp or the 95th percentile by comp for a role. Some companies will also slot you at different levels based on a number of factors including different levels meaning different things at different companies. If you're trying to get your first FAANG job and generally haven't worked in other high comp roles the advice certainly applies, in that you're likely to underestimate what's possible and shoot yourself in the foot early. If you're already at near top of market compensation you might get a better offer in the end but you're also going to go through 25 entire interview processes you don't have time for because neither side wants to establish compensation.
In my experience hiring, we know the benchmark numbers for the roles. Because we have current employees in those roles and we want to understand whether we're paying them fairly. Not out of some kind of deep kindness, but because otherwise they'll at some point get a better offer and leave.
But it differs across the company where we aim to be. For some roles we aim for 50th percentile, while for other areas we deliberately pay 90th percentile and adjust current employee salaries yearly (after performance review) to match that. Because those areas are important to our strategy/roadmap.
May sound unfair to those that aren't in those areas. But this is business, we're spending our money where the returns are highest for this company. If a role isn't a 90th percentile role for us, it might be somewhere else, and we are willing to accept higher turnover on the 50th percentile roles to make money available to get the people we really need on those other roles.
I am curious. Given you have identified an underpaid employee and want to make sure to keep her/him. Do you actively approach the employee and set the salary straight or do you just watch closely and say yes to the next pay raise?
In my experience, every company sees what they want to see when it comes to benchmarks. I've seen companies that think FAANG compensation doesn't exist in the marketplace at all and I've seen other companies that target above that level for roles.
There's a FAANG company on 1 Hacker Way. There's one on 1 Infinite Loop, Apple. There's on on Sand Hill Road, Ampitheatre Parkway actually, that's Google. Netflix, 100 Winchester Circle, that's a good one. You know, I think they're all in the same place, the FAANG District.
Seriously though, I can only imagine how much I'd be laughed out of the room if I was some little shit 22 year old trying to negotiate a salary at a gigantic company, where exactly 0 people I am talking to have any agency whatsoever, only 1 year after 150,000 people in the tech industry were laid off, the memories of dozens of my classmates getting their offers rescinded fresh in my mind. And then for what, to live alone in Sunnyvale for 13 months?
Every time this advice comes up I groan because it's so specific to a single type of individual and a single sector-economy convergence. If you're not a top engineer applying to companies with massive salary caps, or especially if you're not a typical dev/PM role this advice is generally crap and will waste your time.
My advice for people who don't fall into the above:
1) Spend time to actually figure out what you are realistically worth in a new role. Glassdoor, Levels.fyi, H1B comp reports, ask your friends, there are tons of resources to do this.
2) Set a "reach" salary based on #1 and ask for that up front. 20% above your target salary is a good starting point. This accomplishes two things: a) it immediately weeds out all the spam recruiters and low-balling companies without wasting hours of your time on interviews; and b) it puts you in the right place to negotiate with the companies that are serious rather than trying to play chicken the entire time.
3) Set a floor below which you walk away and stick to it. The floor is going to be different for different companies. If there's a company you really want to work for because they're doing interesting things and you like the people there, your floor should be lower than at a generic job you're just considering as a ladder rung.
Will this advice potentially get you less than the absolute max you could make? Sure. But if that's your only goal then you should hire a personal recruiter working for you.
FWIW I did all of those things this article says not to do and ended up making close to 200% of my previous total compensation (which I'm happy with).
Some recruiters didn't ask me for my compensation figures upfront. Google, Microsoft, Meta, Snap, LinkedIn, and some startup recruiters never asked me for my compensation numbers up front. The only ones that did, were to make sure neither of us were wasting each others' times. Usually that meant that I didn't continue to interview with them.
Most if not all recruiters asked me where I was in the interview process and which companies I was interviewing at. I mentioned every company I was interviewing with and where I was in the process with them. I probably got lucky here as I had around 50% onsite to offer rate so I was never left in a spot where I had no leverage.
My best offers were the ones where VPs called me to try to close the process, and I negotiated directly with them instead of the recruiter.
> FWIW I did all of those things this article says not to do and ended up making close to 200% of my previous total compensation (which I'm happy with).
The article mentions this:
> Let’s say that you currently work at a startup and make $150k in cash with some amount of equity. You go to levels.fyi or a similar site and look up Facebook’s salary bands for the role you’re targeting. Let’s say those bands for total comp are $250k-$350k. Hell, that’s way more cash than you’re making now, so you decide to share that range, thinking that if those are their bands already, it does no harm. That’s reasonable, except that let’s say Google ends up making you an offer, and it’s $400k (we’ve seen this scenario happen to a bunch of our users). Now you have to walk back what you said, in which case your recruiter will invariably ask why. And now you have to reveal, before you’re ready, that you have a Google offer, which means you’ll probably end up revealing that it’s for $400k. Now you’ve set an artificial ceiling for your Facebook counteroffer to be $400k as well, when in reality that ceiling may have been closer to $450k or even $500k.
The article is about optimizing for maximum comp, and your strategy is "sub optimal" because who knows if you could have gotten 250%+ of your previous comp had you negotiated better?
Slightly meta (relating to the website) and not this specific article, I got a popup toast saying
> Secret Zebra just left feedback for their FAANG interviewer:
I really enjoyed the interview, you did really well in giving me the right level of assistance to keep under the time constraints. It was also pretty useful that you had prepared some extra code for testing.
Apart from such toasts being unusual, I doubted that a review would be "just" left by someone. Googling the text brought me to https://interviewing.io/mocks/Reverse-Nodes-in-k-Group, which as per archive.org was at least as old as 2 June 2023[1]. Not terribly old, but feels scummy to be honest.
We're actually testing those popups right now. Cycling through a few preexisting ones to see if engagement moves at all, and then we'll make them realtime.
> Preparation and leverage means doing the work to make sure that you have multiple offers, that all your offers come in at the same time, and that you don’t tip your hand too early. Laying this foundation is 80% of the work. You’ll need to slow some companies down, speed some companies up, and hold off questions from recruiters until you’re ready to negotiate, and not before.
Laying this foundation is largely unachievable for people who are not full-time job seeking.
Even when you're doing nothing but applying and have a decently impressive combination of skills and experience, it can be quite difficult in certain environments to get a single offer, let alone multiple offers, let alone multiple offers coming in at the same time.
But if you're currently holding down a full-time job and are looking to make a move into a new role, the odds of everything lining up perfectly like this are going to be so low as to be unrealistic even for very talented people.
Say you're working a standard 9-to-5. Sure, you can submit applications during the evenings, but once you get your foot in the door, you're constrained by the business hours of the place where you're applying.
Most job interviews take place during normal business hours. You might be able to take your lunch hour to do a phone screen, or you might be able to take off a couple of days of PTO for an on-site interview.
But you can't work your normal 9-5 and then expect to do all your job interviews from 5-midnight.
You're right, but I imagine there is wiggle room - both in scheduling interviews from 5PM to 7-8PM, as well as trading day job business hours needed for interviews for "working late" (really making up the time) for stuff that isn't meetings or synchronous.
If you're hustling toward a $300-600k/yr gig, I think a lot of temporary insanity can be tolerated in furtherance of that goal. Remember also that salary increases compound over your working career.
Works well in theory but not in practice. Your peers/managers will soon notice and figure something’s up especially if each of the interviews has 5-6 rounds(which is what you’d usually expect for a position paying $300k-$600k)
> Remember also that salary increases compound over your working career.
Not true. As demostrated by 2021-2 outrageous offers where the market is now correcting itself.
I’ve found this advice to be far too prevalent and largely unrealistic. Nearly everything about the interview process is out of your control. Getting multiple, competing offers to line up is extremely hard.
It’s basically like saying “you win a race by being the fastest”. No duh! How you be the fastest is the hardest part.
Yeah it is so difficult to align these. I had two interview loops going and the other company was my clear favorite but the loop took like 2 months while the other was two weeks. So what I ended up doing is that I took the first job and now in a month or so I am going to quit and move to the other. It sucks but I literally had no other way because I cannot predict the result of the other interview and I cannot ask the other to wait freaking two months
Is it really? Maybe it depends on your market, but I've been able to do it... pretty much every time over the last 12 years. You apply to a bunch of places over ~2 weeks, then try to get the slow ones to speed up and/or the fast ones to slow down. If you've got an offer and are waiting to hear back from a few other companies, you can usually just say that and the first offer will wait a week or two.
Even when you're doing nothing but applying and have a decently impressive combination of skills and experience, it can be quite difficult in certain environments to get a single offer, let alone multiple offers, let alone multiple offers coming in at the same time.
It's even worse if you lack any impressive skills and experience.
Aside from the fact that interviewing itself is really bad for my mental health, despite being in the bottom of the percentiles on places like levels.fyi, I doubt I'd be able to match my currently salary with any job that I could actually get hired for. So, looking up this type of information just ends up discouraging me even more.
Knowing that finding a job is less about salary and more about just being able to get an offer makes most of this advice less than helpful.
I feel like these "tips" are from some kind of weird subculture I've never been part of. I've used 3rd party recruiters for almost 20 years and negotiation is always pretty transparent. I want X (which is more than I am currently making) and the recruiter finds a good fit. Sometimes the role is well above what I asked for.
Unless it's a boutique startup, I'm going to get into the role and find out right-quick what the salary bands are anyway, so the gaming seems silly. If it is some startup, I already provided the benefits I was looking for (and tradeoff for salary I would accept), so it doesn't seem to matter much.
So this is the exact same problem with Realtors. They will say that they have a fiducial responsibility to represent you and that they will try to get you the best price (either the most or least, depending on whether they are on the selling or buying side, respectfully). And they will do that, to some limited extent. But really their incentive is to close the deal. And that means telling you that this is the best price the counter party is willing to extend if they secretly think you will still do the deal.
Very much this. It is actually a real scandal that realtors make a share of the sale as opposed to a flat fee. The paperwork and all is the same regardless of if it's a condo or a mansion.
The time, and marketing, costs of a property tend to go up with price. If I'm buying a 12 bedroom mansion, I'm going to expect a lot more photos, better staging, and so on in the marketing compared to a 1 bed apartment.
Equally small, cheap, properties are likely to sell faster (bigger buying pool) than more expensive ones. That $20m mansion is going to take a lot more visits than the $200k apartment.
In other words, there is sufficient variability in the cost of selling to warrant a sliding fee. And generally the best way to do that is as a % of the sale. A % BTW which is negotiable based on how fast the realtor thinks the property will sell, and the sale price expected.
If you don't believe the realtor is worth 6%, then by all means skip past them. There are plenty of fixed-fee sites that guide you through the process, provide legal form docs, and so on.
Clearly not everyone needs, or wants, a realtor. But presumably there are enough who do to keep them in business. There are enough who don't to keep the "do it yourself" market in business as well.
Choice is good. What is good for you might not be good for the next person, and vice versa.
Realtors in the USA can charge 6% because they're part of a cartel. In other countries where I've lived (UK and China) real estate agents typically charge between 1% and 3%.
It's not the number of photos, as much as the quality.
Not just of the photo itself (any phone can take good pics) but in terms of how the shot is framed, how the room is styled, and so on. Basically you need a better photographer, to spend more time, and you also need to dress the room in the best way.
According to Freaknomics, realtors get about 3% higher average closing prices on their own properties than when they're representing you as a customer. That is the delta when it is their money on the line vs yours.
3%? That's like a minor 'I want this to be done now' or someone else is coming for a second viewing tomorrow type bump, if that's even statistically significant, frankly that seems fine?
A lot of the time a seller is not really trying to maximize their sale price.
They start out trying to but then time drags on and they “just want it to be done.” At that point the seller is also prioritizing a deal over maximization.
Agents, since they’ve gone through a tonne of these processes, are more immune to the mental load the sale takes on them. I’d bet they’re less likely to try and blow through those final steps.
You can see this kind of thing play out across industries. In SW, a comparison may be the seasoned dev has no problem ripping apart their candidate solution and rewriting it since that process takes them less effort than the junior.
Salary negotiation tips always assume a lot about your situation. Use your head. If you get paid shit then dont be the first to say a number. If you are above the posted range then dont decline to talk about salary before the offer stage and be disappointed when you cant negotiate above the posted range.
When I sense I'm being informationally interviewed by a recruiter or discussing a job I realize I'm not interested in I offer up high salary expectations to push up the overall pay expectations for filling the position.
I kind of figure the market knows what my skill set is valued at and gambling for an outsized payout isn't likely to work unless you're interviewing at the top tier. When discussing a job I am interested in taking I push my tier to the upper end but leave room for discussion.
I work for a Fortune 100 company. Years ago they wanted to make sure that everyone in the same job was making the same amount of money (they were especially trying to make sure women were making as much as men). So they had an outside consulting group look at everyone’s salaries and adjusted them as needed to make sure they were all the same within $1. I ended up getting a $15k bump. They review it again every year to make sure nobody makes more or less than anyone else in the same job. The end result is there are no salary bands and no negotiation. The salary is what it is. You can’t even get $5 more dollars. They did this years ago and so far it hasn’t seemed to negatively affect us.
It sounds like a great way to miss out on talent that can command a salary higher than the average, while simultaneously attracting talent for whom this is a good deal.
If the two traits are just randomly assorted, then sure, they'll rarely overlap at what is a statistically random rate.
But, if we can assume that the "rare talent" is anything other than straight out of college, they will have discovered that they are a rare talent, be aware of it themselves, and barring some sort of crippling neurosis, want to cash in on it. They might not even be skilled at negotiating... they'll just be aware that they have leverage.
We might even phrase the problem that way... that it's not so important that they have "negotiating skill", as it is that they have "leverage awareness".
You'd think that, and it's probably even the smart strategy for the employer... But I remember what the guy who wrote homebrew said about his Google interview process.
Once an HR culture develops, anything sane or intelligent probably goes out the window.
I also doubt that Kenny was having to do daily scrums and explain why the web ad wootigulizer algorithm hadn't had any progress since Monday. Long since in executive management, is my guess.
Let me just preface that inverting a binary tree.. Maybe they wanted a particular answer and it was an off day.
That said, the author of Homebrew would be the top authority in the field of OSX package management yeah? I mean, Apple hasn't even bothered to create a competitor and yet every tech bro at Google using a MBP is going to need to install and use it..
If it were that simple why would anyone need tips for salary negotiation? Even in pro sports, where the skills are extremely elite, all the performance stats and salaries are public, and the athletes have agents in their corner, the correlation between pay and performance is far from perfect, and negotiation mistakes can lead to players leaving huge sums on the table.
There's an old Dilbert comic that said something like "We want to hire engineers who are really good at what they do, but cannot compare two salary numbers and identify which one is larger"
The problem isn't that; it's all the information you don't have such as "how much are they theoretically willing to pay me," "who else would hire me," "how hard can I push before they just pull the offer," "do they have other candidates they liked," and so on. On top of that, lots of people in this career are not smooth talkers and they're risk-averse.
If there is a one off person who can command a higher salary, its unlikely they alone will make a huge difference to the company anyway.
If there are a lot of people who could command a higher salary in that role, the pay is too low.
Overall it seems like a pretty good system.
You could argue that the current system favors people who are good at negotiating, and not necessarily more skilled workers.
Whenever an employer talks about industry median pay, I ask if they want industry median work, or industry median talent and remind them that half of all will perform better.
There are lots of people who aren't choosing jobs based solely on which one pays the most. I have absolutely taken positions that paid much less than I can command elsewhere because the companies in question offered me nonmonetary benefits that were worth more to me than money.
Oh, there are band levels (at least, assuming we used band levels in the same way you mean), but everyone in that band level must make the same amount of money. And the band levels are fixed. It's not like talent acquisition can magically make up a new band level to give someone more money.
If everyone is making the same amount, then there is no band. Band = Range with midpoint. For example, Sr. Software engineer's pay band could be $120,000 - $180,000 with $150,000 roughly being the midpoint, with most people making around the midpoint mark. Now I'm curious what company it is :-)
On the other hand, they probably spend significantly less time bickering about their respective salaries.
IME, talented people can spend an absurd proportion of their time bickering about how ${other_talented_person} makes ${trivial_number}/year more than they do, all because they're ${some_trait}.
Overall, I could imagine this filter being both good and bad. I'm not confident whether it nets out good or bad, but you can't argue it's not a dramatically simpler system, and simple systems are often surprisingly better better. :shrug:
people are overly assuming ingrained bias from a shadowy cabal of hiring managers and not looking at different gendered funnels, attrition, and personal contribution to the outcomes all within the same roles
HIRED’s recruitment report, for example, found very gendered compensations asks to begin with
similarly, people discount the risk many men take to skew it. for everyone worried about coming across as “too bitchy” there are a bunch of men that came across as “too cocky” and got fired or rejected and kept trying until they were hired at a company who needs someone to “to make the tough decisions” like tough to swallow decisions
the observation discounts how many people are overly focused on moving up in one company, versus not being married to any particular company at all, and how gendered even that is, when the latter has a 30% pay bump compared to eking out 5% discretionary promotions within the same company
also discounted is how many men would also leave the workforce if there was a reliable option of being subsidized for house work and unpaid emotional labor, you’ll get workplace equality and wage normalization overnight with that patch to the culture, instead of focusing solely on trying to patch the workplace and acting confused when the same outcome persists
the incentives for men are work or homelessness, unsheltered, outside. there are no classified ads with discounted or free rent “for men only”, or working for the self accolade of proving you didn't do the easy option. these things are all connected to workplace outcomes
Nobody was talking about gender here until you used it as an excuse to reiterate talking points about how pay disparity is actually explained by women not asking for enough money or how men actually have it hard.
the person I replied to was in an environment about gender
> “they were especially trying to make sure women were making as much as men”
when the incentive models are unequal the behaviors of the market participants will be unequal
you’ll get workplace equality and wage normalization overnight with that patch to the culture, instead of focusing solely on trying to patch the workplace
The company has over 80,000 employees and women are more than 50% of the full time employees and the majority of managers are women (by a long shot). I'm not sure what needs patching to the culture.
It's obvious to those on the ground that there are vast differences between people doing the same job. You can say "we only want the best" and fire the pretty-good, but the tone that sets is incredibly harsh. You can try to promote your top performers, but L+1 is usually defined as a different nature and scope of work, not the same work done better. This creates perverse incentives like separating people from their mentors so that they can demonstrate leadership, or choosing the most complicated way of getting something done & involving a lot of people so that they can demonstrate scope. Managers play these games because if they don't, they lose their best workers to outside offers.
You: Ok recruiter, is there a budget/range set aside for this position ?
Recruiter: Yes it is $x-$y
You: Ok I can work with that. My expectation is ideally $x+ z% <= $y OR "Sorry that won't work for me. Bye"
Scenario 2:
Recruiter: Hey, what are your salary requirements ?
You: Ok recruiter, is there a budget/range set aside for this position ?
Recruiter: <crickets> Or goes "No but I am interested in learning what is your requirement ideally" ?
You: $Market-Rate + %YOUR_IDEAL_INCREMENT
Scenario 3:
Recruiter: What is your current salary ?
You: Recruiter, I can disclose that but that wouldn't matter as I am interested in hearing if there is a fixed budget for this role already ?
Recruiter: <crickets>
You: If you don't know the budget, regardless of what I make now, I wouldn't make a move unless I am making $MARKET_RATE + %INCREMENT
The point is that don't worry about being underpaid by asking first necessarily. You can ask for a number that works for YOU. Even if it was less than what they would have paid, why should you care if you are happy. Yes, do your research and know your market obviously.
IME you could have gotten the higher number if you'd avoided saying it.
Because you surrendered a number almost immediately, they have decided that you're inexperienced and so deserve less money.
I think a better strategy is to not answer: "OK, I think it's fine if you don't want to talk about salary right now. I'm sure you pay competitively. Let's focus on whether I'm a good fit with the team first."
After the engineering team has told the recruiter that they want to move forward with hiring you, you have more leverage to negotiate.
If you're finding that your opening bid is always rejected, it's probably because you don't know what's a good number to name. (Lots of people sneer at this but I don't think this is some failing on your part--companies pay tons of money for this kind of salary data which is how they know it.) In this case, you should just do anything you can to avoid naming a number first.
Sorry, I guess my brief summary wasn't clear, I basically do what you say and avoid the discussion as long as possible. You are 100% correct you are in a much better position when the technical folks want you vs some random recruiter.
Sure. Some candidates are extremely experienced in negotiation and know exactly how much they are worth. Those people should absolutely name numbers from the start to avoid having their time wasted. But those people also know who they are and know that they don't need to read advice about negotiation.
Most candidates have no idea what they're worth. Here's what I imagine is happening behind the scenes in your scenarios, assuming a normal candidate:
Scenario 1:
Recruiter: Great news. The candidate was happy with the offer and I didn't even need to ask for permission to offer higher comp. It's always extra time and work when I have to ask for $x+$y+$z.
Scenario 2:
Recruiter: Ha ha. This candidate has no idea what the market rate is. They must only be interviewing at crap companies. We'll offer the bottom of the pay band and they'll be overjoyed because it's 10% higher than they were asking for.
Scenario 3:
Exactly the same as scenario 2, except there was a brief moment when the recruiter wondered if the candidate knew how much they could get.
> Even if it was less than what they would have paid, why should you care if you are happy
This is a weird argument. It seems like you're saying "these scenarios are fine even if they lose you money." I would argue that "you should care" because most people would, all things being equal, like more money. The point of a job offer negotiation is to optimize a few different variables, of which "money" is generally a (or the) primary one.
If saying a number first (as you do in all 3 of these scenarios) reduces the ultimate amount of money get (it generally does), you should not do that.
Wonder how the current job market situation affects these tricks. Some of those salaries seem pretty crazy to me but then again, how else are you going to pay for that ridiculously expensive house and college tuition.
I have a very simple rule of thumb that has worked exceptionally well for me. I never reveal salary expectations.
I learned this lesson many moons ago after not getting a job I really looked forward to because my honest expectations were too high, and later ending up in a situation where I got paid 70% of what a friend earned for exactly the same role because I low balled myself.
After those experiences I just say that if they’re willing to make an offer, we’ll go from there. If it’s a company who can’t work with this approach, I don’t want to work there anyway.
I used to work in trading and I think some of the principles I learned there apply directly to salary negotiations.
Two key things I think about all the time are price discovery and competition. Price discovery means that in some illiquid markets, you don't really know what a thing will trade at unless you try to trade it (which itself reveals some information to the counterparty but that's not important in the job case)
From that point of view, I am always surprised to hear people who hate interviewing, are reluctant to interview, etc. Interviewing is the only real way to learn "the market" - what offers to you would actually look like, and other information as well. Like if you always get offers at the low end of a range - or if you always fail interviews - is very good signal that you can act on.
Competition - when we traded bonds, we'd always go to multiple dealers for quotes. The dealers would know that we always ask at least X of their competitors by rule, so they knew that whatever number they gave us, we'd compare against others. That prompted them to strike the balance between a good deal for them and a price we'd actually accept. From that point of view, the best negotiating advice is to have multiple offers, because (1) you see what the highest one is (2) you can see how close or dispersed they are and you can infer something from that (3) they give you leverage. EG: let's say you want job X most, but job Y gave you $20K more on the offer or whatever. You can always tell job X "I'd love to work with you but it's hard to accept a lower offer, can you match?" This isn't even a game, you'd be saying this sincerely. Or, if your offers are close, you can push the highest one a bit because you know they aren't so far out of the norm with more confidence.
Unfortunately, a big problem is getting offers in the first place. Very hard to be the last candidate standing, and that's by design. Very little practice equals poor performance.
> From that point of view, I am always surprised to hear people who hate interviewing, are reluctant to interview, etc. Interviewing is the only real way to learn "the market"
Interviewing may be the best way to gather market information, but does that make it surprising that people hate doing it?
There are very few activities I hate more than taking part in a job interview (on either side of the desk). That it's useful and necessary doesn't make it any less unpleasant.
I can agree w that but with a caveat. There are lots of activities that fit that description (eg public speaking, exercise) that are good for you but many people hate. But there's also room to learn to enjoy and have fun with it. Maybe not available to everyone.
>but does that make it surprising that people hate doing it?
When an activity validates you, it's tough to imagine other people having the opposite experience with it. Imagine every time you went to a round of interviews you were offered riches and status. It would be tough to understand why others just didn't muster up the gumption to go downtown and get what they're worth.
I am the person y'all replying to. This is a good prompt for my mental model on interviewing.
I assume that the answer in any interview process I go into will be "no" 90%+ of the time. That's not some defeated pessimism, it's just reality that the process is hairy (how many people do you go on dates with before you get married?) and every single instance can fail for reasons that have to do with you (how you did that day, fit for the role) or not (hired internally, headcount went away, etc.)
While obviously it's frustrating to fail a round / not get an offer, there's less sting to it when you manage your expectations as above, and then add to it that the frequency of at-bats + the learning process can lead to a better outcome despite - and in fact - because of - the rejections.
So yes, there's a big mental/attitude component that helps you engage with this productively and see the process as something you're doing for yourself - and thus even the fails are part of the plan - versus stepping into some sort of meat grinder.
And to be fair to your comment about "offered riches and status" - I would not put it that way and the 90%+ fail rate is very real. That said, I definitely feel positive about work and have been lucky with opportunities and there's no question that extensive experience interviewing - and learning from the fails - has been key to that.
I think most people recognize that you don't get every job you apply for, but there are people who contact hundreds to thousands of organizations, apply with custom crafted letters and tailored resumes, put in thousands of hours of job searching time over months of time and get jobs well under the median of their cohort.
The assumption that other people's experiences are like yours is a key cognitive bias. A 90% fail rate means 10 offers after a hundred applications - that's an incredibly solid success rate. Now imagine some people have orders of magnitude more difficulty because their name is strange, or because their social class shows through in their dress or mannerisms.
If I can offer a comparison, most people on this forum have it made. It's like asking a group of models how difficult online dating is and having someone say "I can't fathom anyone having trouble keeping their weekends full of new people to date... It's just so easy!"
Also, I note that you seem to assume I'm talking about my own experiences; I'm not. I am a very well established professional in a lucrative field.
Because for some people, the activity itself is incredibly unpleasant regardless of the outcome.
> It would be tough to understand why others just didn't muster up the gumption to go downtown and get what they're worth.
If I were guaranteed to make a million dollars and/or gain high status by cleaning a cesspool, that wouldn't make cleaning the cesspool any more pleasant.
> From that point of view, I am always surprised to hear people who hate interviewing, are reluctant to interview, etc. Interviewing is the only real way to learn "the market" - what offers to you would actually look like, and other information as well. Like if you always get offers at the low end of a range - or if you always fail interviews - is very good signal that you can act on.
I don’t think anyone disputes the value of the information. It is just painful to obtain.
> You can always tell job X "I'd love to work with you but it's hard to accept a lower offer, can you match?"
It's of course very dependant on each country and the jobs market, but in my experience the issue would be even getting to have multiple offers in a short enough period of time. To the point that it happening could be called a coincidence, more than anything. Unless you are fiercely hunting for a job (aka. doing several interviews per week), I don't see how it would happen to get an offer and telling the company "well, wait for a couple weeks or a month for my answer" just to see if it happens that offers arrive from the other places and one gets to compare simultaneously.
Seems more likely that an offer comes, you accept or decline it, if declined then other will eventually come some time later, and one can compare them and maybe regret having declined the former, and so on.
Ditto. Almost every recruiter will ask you at the onset if you are interviewing with other places. They ask so they have a lever to speed up your process if necessary - eg "hey hiring manager, this dude's resume looks great and I had a good convo with him, but he's already had one round with AWS. We better line up our side of things ASAP"
As I mentioned in another comment, I try to be forthcoming with companies especially in cases where the transparency doesn't hurt me and helps everyone. So if the following is the case, I would say something like "Yup, I am in a pretty active search right now, I am talking to a handful of other companies. I am definitely interested in going through the process with you as well, so if you want I will keep you abreast of how my other conversations are going throughout this process" - I've found that this both creates credibility/good vibes and the company is often able to keep pace with the process and offer timing.
Elsewhere in this thread someone was asking how you can possibly get to a place where you have multiple offers around the same timeline - it's something like this.
Interviewing on the actual offer/price is not the same as interviewing about getting a chance to schedule a conversation about ability to qualify for being considered for an interview with a person who could evaluate your worthiness to fill in a position within known but flexible compensation band which may not be directly offered after all...
Of course, not always it is that convoluted, but the "beef" is often that much detached from the process.
That's a sound advice for bonds but jobs are largely not like that by design. It is kind of like dating, and asking for a price upfront makes it closer to whoredom and companies explicitly downgrade you for being in it only for the money. If you want to sell a bond and the other person's price is too low, you don't sell it and that's that. For interviews, you end up spending hours through the interview process and may not even know whether you will end up getting a salary quote at the end of it. Getting multiple quotes is a great idea, but putting it in action is harder than it appears. It may help to go with someone like a recruiter who can disintermediate the process. I've often thought someone like an agent for software professionals could make a great idea. That person's job is to get you great gigs and good prices and she makes a percentage of your salary so is aligned with getting you the best offers.
Typically you're not asking for a price(salary) upfront. Ideally you've done a bit of homework to figure out what positions can pay in the ballpark of what you want. Then you get their offer at the end of the interview process and negotiate as appropriate.
Yeah you may go through hours of interviews and not end up with an offer in some cases but think of it this way: you could potentially earn tens of thousands to over one hundred thousand extra dollar per year off that time investment in interviewing.
Attempting to line up multiple interviews and balancing offer timelines is hard, but the payoff can be huge. Considering that people spend 4 years or more working in college to get into their career, making a time investment of a few weeks to get a potentially large raise is nothing.
That's a signal you can more easily get from a practice interview. In a real interview, you have no idea why you were rejected.
Maybe you don't present well. Maybe you present perfectly well, but somebody else had slightly more experience dealing with a specific problem the company needs solved. Maybe they already decided to hire somebody, but needed to conduct interviews anyway to satisfy the lawyers.
Is there a good way to extract that information out of an interview? I always ask for feedback, but I rarely get it.
Is it though? Surely it could equally show progression - edging in to the next range up, so always offered the lower end (not the upper end of the range for the more junior role you've moved out of). Just a thought.
The signal varies and I think you need to calmly reflect on the data points which is hard. But I can imagine a few scenarios:
Let's say you recognize that you "underperform" versus your capability because you get insanely nervous. At some point you have to realize that your ability to grow depends on your ability to get your nerves under control. How you do that is the next question but that could be one observation.
You can seek patterns of what kind of interviews you tend to fail out on. Eg, is it coding, algorithmic, problem solving, behavioral, whatever. Once you have that zeroed in, you can ask yourself (and the internet): how can I get better at X type of interview.
More generally, you can seek for patterns of what kinds of questions surprised you and you had to make shit up on the spot, but could have been better prepped? EG if you go "hmm let's see" if you are asked about the coolest thing you've worked on or whatever, maybe that's the kind of topic you can pregame and have a story for.
Another maybe subtler thing is reading the interviewer. What are the things you were saying/doing where the interviewer was visibly happy/impressed vs confused, where did they say "that's great, go on" and where did they go "hmm.. but what about.." In the moment you may have just taken the "what about" as a prompt but in reality they may have seen you struggle and tried to help you - what can you do to prep for that type of questions next time?
I can go on - but the conclusion is something like this - I know a bunch of people who every interview they had, they think they nailed it and then they are totally shocked to not advance. And I know people who can reflect on what went poorly and adjust for next time. I don't know how to teach someone to recognize all the signals like this but it's definitely there to be perceived if one looks.
The other issue you run into is cost of getting to competing offers. In your example, you can just ask a dealer for a quote and they'll give it to you, with little to no work on your part. In tech, you have to go through multiple hours of interviews to get this information.
It's no wonder that people are resistant to go interview. Especially when you can get most of this information much more easily through levels.fyi.
I follow your logic but I am not sure it really works.
Agree levels.fyi is a great resource under the right conditions. EG, if Facebook wants to interview you as an E5 engineer, it's great to look up the range for that.
But if you are say a "senior developer" working outside of FAANG, what does it mean for you to know the E5 comp when you have no idea how that lines up against your profile? How would you know if FB would consider you for an E5 or even an E3 unless you interview and see how close you can get? The only other way is if you're already in a FAANG with very comparable levels. Otherwise, what's a "senior engineer" in one place may not pass the resume screen for a "junior" in another.
I agree with you that it obviously takes multiple hours to go through an interview, I am calling out that it's often well worth it, because: you may actually get an offer at the end, which you may take or use to negotiate with another company, and even if you constantly fail interviews there's a very actionable signal in that too. So the return on investment for those hours - ultimately being able to get a better/more lucrative job, seems like a good use of time.
Also it's not just a matter of getting several offers in a two week period. That's somewhat doable if you are unemployed. If you're trying to interview without your current employer freaking out, you have to space these things out. You can only have so many 'appointments' in a two week period.
"the best negotiating advice is to have multiple offers"
This is borderline "get in the job cannon and blast off to jobland" territory.
Also - it can be terrifically difficult to line up multiple simultaneous offers because companies would rather explode their offer than generally let people get a better leverage. I know multiple companies who do this on purpose for this explicit reason. Is it inefficient from a market perspective? Of course. But since when has that ever stopped the owner class from oppressing the workers?
It's generally easy to line up the interviews, at least at big companies you can pretty much pick your interview date.
Then if you've done say 5 interviews (1 per day for a week), you can just wait for the first offer and use that as leverage to get the others to hurry up. Since they already have all the data they need.
I haven’t pursued it seriously so I don’t know how much you can hurry things along, but most of the interview processes I’ve seen are weeks long. Google even warns you up front that it’ll probably take on the order of months. So it’s kind of tricky to get them to all line up like that.
It's still valuable info. Like let's say you actually made it thorough all the rounds at Google per your example, and are 'stuck' in hiring committee. That's a huge signal to you that you are in striking distance of the level you interviewed for, even if you don't ultimately make it this time.
That means you can for example use levels.fyi number for that level at Google as 'something that applies to me'
If a company gives you an exploding offer, it's a strong signal that the culture of that company isn't good, or that they can't afford to hire quality candidates (or both). In companies like this you can assume you'll probably also get poor raises.
In practice, if you get an exploding offer, unless you already think it's an extraordinary offer and love the potential opportunity, you can tell them that you won't be able to make a decision within that time. If the company is worth working for, they'll remove it. If they won't remove it, it's probably best not to take the offer.
This is highly dependent on the role. I have been tasked with growing teams where my mandate is to hire X number of engineers at various levels. If I found X hires and then hire X + 1 shows up and was a great fit, the company would make an exception. No exploding offers necessary.
On the other hand, sometimes you are hiring to fill a specific position rather than to generally grow a team. You have two candidates you like and you can't afford to let candidate 1 sit on the offer for three weeks. People treat it like it's nefarious on the part of the company to ever have an exploding offer, but sometimes it's just not practical.
It may not be nefarious, but it's antagonistic to the candidate getting the exploding offer. If you're hiring for a particular role and the candidate is dragging their feet on the offer, you've likely not made a strong enough offer. Making the offer exploding limits their ability to negotiate.
If you've made an offer to one candidate, and you're holding your response on another, you're already doing a disservice to that other candidate. They should know that you've extended an offer to someone else, and that you'll contact them if that offer falls through.
>>If a company gives you an exploding offer, it's a strong signal that the culture of that company isn't good, or that they can't afford to hire quality candidates (or both).
I work in games - what happens for us quite often is that we'll interview ~10 candidates and 2-3 are actually good enough to hire. So the process is to give the top candidate the offer with a few days to accept it, if they don't then we move on to the next candidate because they also want to know whether we are proceeding or not - otherwise it's just rude(to the candidate). How does that indicate poor culture?
I don't understand. OP suggested that giving people "explosive" offers is an indication of poor culture - I point out that the necessity to make a decision quickly is dictated by respect to candidates since we don't want to make people wait any longer than necessary. So again, how is this an indication of poor culture?
If you really believe you have a good culture, and attract the best talent, you should be able to offer your best candidate the position and wait for them to decline or accept. Other candidates may move on if you tell them you've extended an offer and are waiting to hear back, but forcing someones hand is a poor culture indicator, and being in a rush to hire in the majority of the cases indicates lack of planning.
>>Are there any gaming companies not known to have a poor culture?
Of course. Where I work the culture is very good, with strong emphasis against overtime, no crunch and very good benefits, and it's one of the biggest publishers in the industry.
The first time I applied to work for a high frequency trading group in a hedge fund, my boss asked me what my desired comp would be? I replied 400k, to which he immediately responded saying that's extremely reasonable... So clearly, I f*** myself over in the negotiation.
No company in our capitalist society pays any worker at any level. What the worker thinks they are worth- they pay the worker the absolute bare minimum that they think they can get away with. Doesn't matter if it's an entry level job, or ( like mine) a high end algo trading outfit etc
That is the same principle in any market, not just the labor market. It is based on the laws of supply and demand, not what the product's "worth" is (how would you even know that at a large scale without price discovery?).
Exploitation is not about whether each party is making a lot of money, it is whether one party makes a disproportionate amount of money over the value the other party produces.
I think the word "exploitation" colloquially has the connotation of exploiting the poor as they cannot afford to leave the exploiting conditions.
Exploitation is labor is never usually headlined in the context of $400k/year salary. Technically, you're right. But we can take this to the limit, instead of $400k, let's say $4M/year for a job that's worth $5M/year? Are they "exploited". Yes, but not by the common use of the term.
Perhaps the reason for GP's take was that it robs away the colloquial definition of exploiration in an entirely different context where it's the least meaningful, i.e. exploitation of Bangladeshi child laborers vs. a programmer earning $400k year salary.
No, they are talking about the Marxist theory of exploitation, where excess profits belong to the workers. It is however not a very useful model in the real world when market principles like supply and demand have much more predictive power.
They're talking about exploitation in the Marxist sense, that excess profit belongs to the workers. Of course, I don't believe in the Labor Theory of Value, as supply and demand is a much more useful model of the world, but that's what they mean by exploitation, not what it's seen as colloquially.
I make around 600k. My employer has enough cash in the bank to give every single full time employee a bonus of more than half a million dollars. Net income per quarter is something like 100k per full time employee.
Yes, I am incredibly fortunate. Yes, I make a very very large amount of money compared to a typical american worker. Still, I capture only a fraction of the value I generate for my employer.
// I make around 600k ... Still, I capture only a fraction of the value I generate for my employer.
There seems to be a two way street here. Presumably if you could make 600K or more by yourself, you'd be doing that rather than working for your employer.
Your employer, likely way before you got there, created an environment where you could come in and earn this much. If they and companies of that profile didn't exist, would you have a place to earn even 200K? So maybe you actually are splitting the value you are generating half-way.
Would you agree at least that the founders and initial employees took on the most risk and did the bulk of the heavy lift to get the company to that place? EG does the proverbial guy who ran the company out of his garage for 5 years funding it on his credit card deserve outsized reward for the risk and work he put in?
Yes, but the way shares work is that someone paid either the original founders or the company itself for a share, then someone paid that person, and so on. The current shareholders are certainly profiting, but they exist only because the company needed them to exist in order to create the company as it is now.
> I capture only a fraction of the value I generate for my employer.
I think this is a misunderstanding of how companies perceive value. You could be making your company a billion dollars a year, but if any schmuck off the street could do the same you're not actually providing much value at all. Your value is the difference between what you provide and what a similar replacement worker would provide.
Right, Mr. Meat's value to their company is at least $600k otherwise they wouldn't be making that much. We have no idea how high above that it is though even though the company is extremely profitable because they might be easy to replace for 700k
You and those employees can quit and start their own business and you can capture 100% of that value for yourselves.
If you don't want to do that, doesn't that admit the company is providing that value, not you?
For example, I know a top salesman at Microsoft. He'd call up a customer, drop in, get ushered right in to see the CEO, and close another sale.
One day, he decided to capture that value he was provided by working for a startup. He did not close a single sale the entire year. He could not get an appointment with any CEO. He finally quit and got his old job back at Microsoft.
Microsoft has produced a lot of people who made gobs of cash at Microsoft, and left to form startups for the easy money. Only to get a very rude shock about how hard it is to make money with a company.
I agree it can be hard to line up multiple at the same time, but unless you're in a desperate situation you can get much the same effect by being prepared to walk. I've talked offers up by being entirely opened that I walked away from an offer of $X, because it was a clear signal to the place I was interviewing at that I was confident I could land more, and I was confident I could because that first offer helped confirm I understood the right salary levels.
It's not quite as powerful as having a simultaneous offer, but the point is not whether or not you go to a specific other company, but whether or not they believe a) you'll actually turn them down, b) you're worth roughly what you demand. Another offer, even if turned down will help in both respects.
Never accept an exploding offer. If they won’t give you more time, then let them see you’re prepared to let it lapse. It’s a ploy to create urgency when there is none, as is never in your interest as a candidate. I’d be very surprised if a single offer actually expired, it’s expensive to lose qualified candidates for the hiring company.
My background is consulting and earlier-stage startups in the UK which may mean we’re in a different environment to what you’re used to, but the teams are often lean, and sometimes strained by the time we’re out to hire.
Sourcing and screening often starts a few weeks/months before but generally we move quite quickly through technical to offer stages - I think its healthy and fair for both parties to keep expect these final stages around 1-2 weeks.
Interviewing takes quite a bit of time and energy from the tech team and can impact team health, delivery, and ultimately bottom line - where our salaries come from.
If we’re in the fortunate position to have a final candidate (or two - three), theres going to be an exploding offer because we need to get back to work, and we need to let other candidates know to move on.
As a candidate its very fair to line up your interviews with a few companies and tell them you would like to make a decision by a particular date. If they cant accommodate you or extend an offer with a deadline prior to that, its on them. In my last job hunt no company turned down this request and two adjusted their processes to accommodate it.
It's interesting you mention UK and urgency in the same sentence. In my experience, nothing in the UK happens quickly when it comes to permanent employees (I guess contractors are different). Everyone has 2-3 months of notice period, plus people usually take a month off between switching jobs to relax. So there's usually 3-4 months between when everyone agrees and when they eventually join.
The only time things happen quickly is when someone is jobless, or if they already handed in their notice, they were going to join company X and you manage to snipe them in that 3-4 month period before they've started at company X.
> In my last job hunt no company turned down this request and two adjusted their processes to accommodate it.
It’s not that companies don’t want to hire fast (or don’t need to), I’ve worked at startups (in UK too), big tech and worked on hiring.
But if the rush is in their side and they want you, that’s different to an exploding offer in many ways, in that they aren’t trying to pressure you to move fast to improve their negotiating position and worsen yours, they’re the ones on the weaker position, and to get you to move fast for them, that gives you leverage.
You decide if you care about the offer and the company/role etc. and then ask them for a deal that’ll make you cancel your other interviews now in that case.
This works well if you don't urgently need income and have significant additional job prospects. The power imbalance between employers and employees means that "just avoid the businesses that exploit you" is not an option for a large number of workers.
The only way to actually defeat exploding offers is collective action.
Perhaps you’re correct, but I’m not saying don’t take an offer from the company. More an advice to accept a little risk that the exploding offer won’t explode and carry on with your job hunt. My advice above was to keep as many cards in play as you can, and recognise where you have leverage (which includes sunk cost of qualifying you as a candidate to hiring company), and try to maximise that leverage as it normally gives you a better return than any in-role pay rise and promotion prospects once you start new role.
Recognising you don’t have much leverage and have no option but to be exploited is a sad reality to have to accept, but of course if your job prospects are not great then that can be the case, and then maybe at least you can wait until the last day before you accept an exploding offer, where you have more knowledge of how the rest of your interview pipeline is progressing.
> it can be terrifically difficult to line up multiple simultaneous offers
I've found that too. It seems like even if you apply at the same time, companies move at a variety of speeds. But there are things you can do to help align the offers temporally, at least a bit.
- At the start of each process, ask how long the process will take (how many interviews, number of weeks from start to offer). They'll generally tell you. If you do this for every company, you have an idea of which companies are fast and which companies are slow.
- The fast companies can be slowed down, a least a bit. It's Thursday and they want to schedule an interview for Monday? Say "Unfortunately I'm not available Monday to Wednesday next week, would Thursday next week work for you?" Answer emails the next day, or if they sent you one in the morning answer in the evening "after work".
- The slow companies can be sped up a bit. Firstly, ask for interviews sooner, they might go for it, who knows. If you get an offer from one company, send an email to all the other companies that you have an offer but you'd like to get their offer as well, that might speed them up.
None of this is guaranteed to work but it's worth trying.
IMHO, ability to do this varies based on role, market, experience, etc. In my past 3 job searches, I went the multiple opportunity route. I let each company know that I was in-process elsewhere, what my rough timeline was, and that if things got to offer stage that I wouldn't share that info between companies (i.e. bring your best offer). I stated these things not as demands, but in a friendly, agreeable way. e.g. "I'm very interested, but I also have anothet good opportunity as well and want to be able to choose what fits me best."
I have asked up front if people attach timelines to their offers or use exploding offers and just decline to interview. Those offers are, in my experience, always less competitive.
> I used to work in trading and I think some of the principles I learned there apply directly to salary negotiations.
I think exactly zero of those principles apply (assuming you are talking about stock exchange trades).
All these types of "technical analysis" on price-discovery during negotiations is fairly pointless.
There's only one rule that works when personally doing a trade with someone:(whether you're negotiating salary, buying a property or selling car) be likeable!
The more the other party likes you, the more flexible they are going to be on their price-points.
So, sure, the hiring manager has a band (say $100k to $140k). What you want is for him to make an offer at the top of his band ... or even higher - if you interview well they may decide on a more senior role for you.
This is why, even if your minimum is above his maximum, be likeable!
Even if you have already decided you don't want that job, be likeable!
Even if you don't want to work for that particular company, be likeable!
Even if you already have an offer in hand that is way above anything anyone else can offer you, be likeable!
What likeable means depends on context.
When selling a car, being upfront and having all the paperwork up to date, and all the services done on time and recorded as such, a clearance certificate to prove "not stolen", etc ... makes you likeable.
When negotiating a salary, gush about how nice their offices are, how their mission statement resonates with you, how wonderful the interviewers have been up to that point.[1] Make a list of things you admire about the company/its products/its vision ahead of time so that you can truthfully tell them all wonderful things about themselves.
Practice telling people horrible things in nice ways (called constructive criticism?). Practice, Practice, Practice! They will give you stupid challenges, maybe even broken code. How you respond must make them like you even more for the role.
You must come across as a collaborator and leverager, not as a coding genius. Coding geniuses are a dime a dozen. Competent coders who can act as a force multiplier for their team, their manager or their company are rare gems who get offered much more than genius coders.
Everywhere I've been at, or done work for, for over 25 years, has been filled with people who would rather work with pleasant people who are basically competent (or even slightly below average) than work with unpleasant people, no matter how good they are technically.
Look at highly paid surgeons: the ones making the most money are the ones filling every single one of their slots. They know - bedside manners matter.
[1] I spent a full day interview for a senior-ish (L5? L6? Dunno now) position at AWS. It was hard work, with challenges coming at me the whole day, coding, design, etc ... and yet I thanked every single interviewer for their time, and told them how much I appreciate them making the effort to interview me. I was warm, pleasant and friendly the whole day, not just civil, in spite of the constant set of new problems thrown my way.
Your main point was about salary negotiation (and I don't know much about that) but your example about interviewing is interesting to me:
> I spent a full day interview [...] and yet I thanked every single interviewer for their time, and told them how much I appreciate [...]
Where I work we became very sceptic about this trait in candidates, especially if someone is overdoing it. Then the suspicion rises whether they are overcomensating for another trait they believe about themselves.
I feel that being likable is table stakes and not something you would optimize for that much.
> Where I work we became very sceptic about this trait in candidates, especially if someone is overdoing it. Then the suspicion rises whether they are overcomensating for another trait they believe about themselves.
I'm also skeptical about overly positive candidates, but if their other visible traits are average, then there's no need for me to be paranoid.
The odds that there's a problem with them that I cannot determine during the interview is exactly the same as the odds for any other candidate.
Being that the odds are the same, I may as well get the person who everyone wants to work with.
>Look at highly paid surgeons: the ones making the most money are the ones filling every single one of their slots. They know - bedside manners matter.
If you are picking a surgeons based on this criteria, you are paying way too much for a 10 minutes conversation aka bedside manners. I personally will go with the rudest mf-er that will fix me right the first time.
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 331 ms ] threadI've generally taken what I want to make in the role and added 20% to it as a starting point. While this might limit me, it also keeps me from doing 100 onsite interviews only to discover their max is 2/3 of my expected comp.
> very few companies pay so much below market that it would be a nonstarter
I don't really agree with that statement as my experiences have been different.
I don’t think there’s a single other profession with as much compensation variability as software engineer. I’ve heard it described as bimodal or trimodal, but I’m not even sure that captures it.
There was a YC company on the hacker news homepage recently looking for senior AI engineer for 60k. Even by international standards that’s absurdly cheap , but this is a YC backed company, I don’t think their head is in the sand (though I do suspect YC coaches founders to play moneyball with hiring as YC companies as a whole seem to pay far below average).
There’s many companies that consider 150-200k as “standard”.
And there’s still many companies paying 400-600k for senior engineers. I thought in the “tech recession” with the interest rates up this wouldn’t be available for a while but an acquaintance who got laid off from Twitter did the “grind interview prep and interview a dozen companies simultaneously” strategy just this summer in 2023 and got multiple competing 500k+ offers (all liquid) for staff SWE including from some companies I didn’t realize paid that much like HubSpot.
Despite many great offers he also encountered many companies that tried to lowball by claiming “salaries are going down for engineers” but that turned out to be wishful thinking and/or a bluff on the company’s part given his final result.
So basically there is no “market rate” for senior engineers but to the extent there is one a huge percentage look to massively go under it. I don’t blame them as it’s part of the game but just be aware many companies say things like “we want the best and are willing to pay for it” but then lowball and try to bluff engineers into thinking “the market” is much lower than reality. Which they do because many many engineers fall for it.
Obviously a silly example, but the caliber of folks is totally different. If I am a job searcher, I want to know the employer understands and is willing to pay for my caliber because otherwise our ideas of what the role is and what it should pay could be vastly off.
Companies have their review schedules and the new hires would be boarded before the reviews. This would allow to hire at low ball and then give a "raise", effectively leveling it.
Not only aiming at below market figure saves company the money, this also serves as a retention tool.
So, it does pay to know an approx of the target comp band AND your own "happy" target. The hard part is to formulate it as a package.
I'm not going to waste my time if they want to play games like being secretive about the pay.
Which is the majority of employees. Because...
> employees who are more proactive and entrepreneurial about negotiating
...aren't going to remain employees for too long; they are going to end up starting their own businesses because they realize that the upside is so much greater. Which means, first, that, to them, the job at your company is not a career; it's a temporary day job while they get set up to pursue their real goal. And second, that at any given time these kinds of employees will be a fairly small minority of all the people in the job market.
the risks are also greater, I am 100% proactive about salary, I am 100% pretty aggressive and "disagreeable" (in the psych meaning of the term) about it as well
I however am not entrepreneurial because I have no desire to have that liability, or risk. I prefer working for a company instead of owning the company
so we established that the revenue of the company belongs to the employees that worked for it, but the company has to skimm at least the operating costs before payout as otherwise it would make a loss.
but most companies have an obligation to make profit, so there is no other way than to pay the employees less than what they're worth (because increasing revenue would also increase the value of employees accordingly)
please tell me where i'm wrong
Where did we establish this? Because it's not true, especially in a strictly legal sense.
they were really trying. this site is so strange.
Basically they refused to pay me Y because there were folks working there who had been at the company for a while and weren't making that, with very little other justification. We eventually settled on a signing bonus to make up ~80% of the difference, and I got a raise that surpassed that difference within the first year. But I probably wouldn't have taken the role without the bonus and probably would have left within the first year without the raise.
It's still not clear to me why they listed that range if their justification for not paying the top of it was a set of factors that would have been the same for any applicant.
If, in exceptional circumstances, they would pay 30% more than everyone else, they might want to hide this. Instead of saying "we do 95% to 135% of what everyone else offers", they say "we do 95% to 105% of what everyone else offers"... and suddenly they get fewer cranks and weirdos. But they still have the option of offering that 30% more, if they stumble upon some diamond in the rough.
They might want to, even if showing would bring in a few more good candidates. Is it disturbing the signal to noise ratio so much that it takes far longer and costs more to go through the whole process.
Of course, just because it might work this way in theory, it doesn't mean that it does in practice, especially consistently. So, it could be them chasing bad strategy that they can't determine to be bad strategy.
If they have a few more bad assumptions (like "our stated range is still good enough to get the decent candidates"), then they might be even more inclined to hide the range.
They're working through all sorts of bad tradeoffs too, just like you.
“I understand that you’ll need time research to give a meaningful answer, so let’s reconnect once you’ve been able to put together a range. Thanks!”
3) Many recruiters will say yes to everything and anything to get you into the interview seat
And if you're juggling multiple FAANG offers in the same week, you probably don't need salary negotiation tips.
If they are remote jobs, you just accept them all, buy as many computers as the offers you accepted and multitask for n x the pay.
Simple. Only interview with companies you'd like to work with so much that you'd be willing to negotiate from a starting offer 2/3rds of what you want. When your interest in the company is sufficient, you'll be motivated to tell them that their offer is "a good starting point for discussion" and then make a counter-offer or ask for additional vacation, bonuses, or whatever you value.
Conversely, if interviewing for unattractive positions that pay well is motivated by non-negotiable financial considerations (mortgage, kids in college), then by all means, be up front about it.
This would only work in a hot market, for a desirable candidate. Not everyone has the luxury of interviewing places they really want to work at any cost.
Yes, that would be an example of "non-negotiable financial considerations". I'm going of the statement of the original comment, implying they had the luxury of choosing only those positions that meet their compensation criteria.
So… literally no-where then? Because anywhere that would offer 2/3rds is not a company I’d want to work for.
To put it another way, "total compensation package" for some people includes things that aren't money but have a value roughly equal to some amount of money for that person.
Do you, and if so how did you cultivate that? If you don't mind answering.
Design, intentionally, the dream you would live if you could. My friend often responds cynically, saying if he is asked about his dream job he would be a space explorer like some Marvel movie. I hear him as flippant and he's clear he thinks it's a dumb idealistic pontificating exercise. . I go toward the path of okay, what would it take to BE that thing or pursue it...
If you can visualize and reason your way to how something might happen, you can reverse engineer it. You can think of it like chess. Position yourself with strength, understand openings midgame and endgame, but know there are many, many, undiscovered lines left in many positions. Now expand from 64,64 squares and so many moves to the infinite variability in Life. You have levers and positions you can exploit and transpose.
Circumstances will always have a hand as will pure luck, fate, or Higher Power, but... you have immense power to craft your reality and I mean this in no woo terms. You change your thoughts, your words, your actions and most crucially, your influence and environment.
Good luck, oneironaut.
But I literally want to do nothing. I don't want to do anything - I want to not exist. Life is suffering. I derive no enjoyment from anything. I just make other people happy and wealthy and then go home and suffer until I go back to work and suffer.
I want to not dread going to work, so I only entertain offers from outfits where the job and its environment appear enjoyable. "Acceptable" is below the bar I set unless I somehow end up desperate for money.
The attitude in my case wasn't cultivated. It stems from the fact that I like what I do and I'm very good at it.
How to cultivate that is pretty straightforward. I like games, and I can tolerate making games by leveraging my existing skills. I want to make my own games one day, but I need more financial stability for that. Of course, I can't say I feel as passionate about making someone else's game as I would my own, but industry gives me experience, lets me meet other kinds of talent, and lets me prepare savings for that day I try to do my own thing. That's how I keep motivation going.
If you are doing a lot of interviews and not getting jobs - then you need more practice doing them. If you're getting so many offers its boring, look for a way to interview for more demanding positions.
for me:
- it's long, often 3 stages minimum, but more typically 5-6 rounds. do I really want to take 5-10 hours per job out of my month just to "figure out my worth?". As long as I can pay the bills and I'm not miserable at my job, I'm fine.
- if you have a job, it is hard to schedule around all these rounds. In addition, it feels stressful since by most intents, a company does not react well to hearing you are shopping around
- it generally makes use of skills that do not reflect my performance in a job. I am 6 years into industry, I don't and never needed to invert a binary tree on the spot. Meanwhile, actual skills like proper coding practices/architecture, code review feedback, test coverages/edge cases, and the ability navigate through the company to find the person you need are barely even mentioned.
- it's a sterile, artificial environment that more or less makes you put on airs to show "your best self". "why do you want to work for this company" is asked in nearly every interview setting and we all know your real answer is the wrong one, as opposed to using the time to show off how much you researched the company. Even if you basically jut googled "X engineer" and applied because the salary range fit you.
I can understand testing in juniors, because there is no license exam for an engineer, and maybe on the other side of the hump you can get to a point where the companies are trying to impress you. But that middle hump feels like the worst of both worlds.
>If you're getting so many offers its boring, look for a way to interview for more demanding positions.
if you're at that point, you're probably not going to find your answer on the internet. those sorts of jobs are word of mouth.
Thus if a business does not advertise pay ranges, you can assume it will not be on the high end, at least not competitive with pay in the above regions.
Like, ok your range is $150-250k, fan-fucking-tastic, that’s completely unhelpful
There's no way to tease this out before you interview, except that if you're looking for compensation that's significantly above the top of the band, it might be hard to get. (A little above the top is possible, and sometimes a lot is possible too... that's where the negotiation comes in.)
Any thoughts on how to approach that?
This may sound quaint but I find that being forthcoming and asking the question you have works.
During the latest job search, I would just ask for a range and say myself that "obviously where I fall in the range depends on my candidacy, I won't hold you to it."
If they tell you the range is something like $120K to $150K, it tells you what kind of seniority they are looking for - whether they know it or not - and how much they value people of that profile. If they tell you it's like $150K to $750K - then you know they are really wide open to range of experience and impact. Someone may say that a $600K wide range is meaningless but I don't think it is. If you're more junior you can count on being towards the left but still know they can afford to give you a bit more if they like you, and if you're very senior you can recognize that they have room for someone like you and have an appetite to pay. You'd be totally self-unaware to go into the process hoping for $750 and then landing at $150 but that's more on you.
So I am fine asking for a broad range - it's way more meaningful than no range.
If your salary range for, say, a senior staff engineer includes what you should be paying seniors: you’re wasting everyone’s time.
The fact that the range is 100k isn't that big of an impediment to utility.
That’s a strategy, for sure, but not a great one.
I think it's a horrible idea to hire someone with 5 years in tech X, 4 years in tech Z, and 6 years in method H, who wants to work for 140-150k.
I would rather interview people for a range, and if you find an awesome human - take them.
Or at least, that’s what it tells me as a 20 year veteran of this business.
Software engineering must be the only profession where employment history means nothing. And yet... interviewers always want salary history to knock you down. If you don't care about the work I did in the past, then why do you care about how much I was given for that work?
For the same reason artists do -- to show a potential employer what you're capable of and what your style is. Look at it from the employer's point of view -- they have very little to go on when judging ability. If you can provide examples of your work, then you're reducing their uncertainty and giving yourself an edge for the position.
> I'm not going to put proprietary code on a portfolio nor am I going to spend multiple years building some open source project when I already have a full time job.
You don't have to do either of those things. Your portfolio doesn't have to include large, complex projects. A collection of smaller ones will do nicely. Or, even easier, is what I do: I just bring in the code for the most recent hobby project that I've completed.
> interviewers always want salary history to knock you down
You don't need to provide that history. At least, I never do. When I'm asked, I respond with what my salary expectation is, not what my salary history is.
> For the same reason artists do
They're asking more how it would happen, less for what purpose.
Artists automatically accumulate portfolios by doing work that gets displayed in public. Programmers who work on closed-source programs don't—unless they supplement their work-for-pay in ways that artists aren't expected to. The artist's history of work itself is how they get more work; the programmer's isn't.
open source projects in a relevant industry. IME it's never been required to have sample work to show off, but many agree that having some OS contributions or even small pet projects is one of the most valuable things to leverage, outside of actual work experience.
>The artist's history of work itself is how they get more work; the programmer's isn't.
No one is really going to care behind closed doors, but _technically_ there's plenty of concept/scrapped art owned by the company that they can't directly point to on their public portfolio. It's not quite as easy for artists either to show off what may have been their best work.
> The artist's history of work itself is how they get more work; the programmer's isn't.
It's just a recommended strategy, not a requirement. In general, it's a great idea to identify a customer's pain points and reduce them. When you're looking for a job, the companies you're talking to are the customers. The easier you make things for the interviewer, the more you can reduce their pain points, the better your chances for the position.
If you're trying to explain how they can do it with the least amount of extra work, to minimize the impact of the extra expectation, please consider that not everyone has hobby projects. Even fewer people's hobby projects are presentable, and even fewer still can trust the other person not to draw some wild conclusion based on anything that might be in there.
I think everyone is clear on how the situation works, but not everyone is happy with it working that way.
Just like plumbing is literature, except with pipes.
Nah, Artists have it the worst when it comes to that. Especially early on.
SWE's for the most part leverage titles and company names a bit too much IMO. No licenses + very little way to verify actual contributions = tons of potential false positives.
> interviewers always want salary history to knock you down.
That's pretty much every single job in the history of ever. if it's not a minimum wage job, they are trying to minimize your compensation somehow.
You dont need multi year projects
Just show PoCs of complex stuff
Simple distributed apps? Compilers? Uefi drivers? Or small Libraries?
[1] https://levels.fyi/
Especially if you have a job already, when they want to hire you is when you have the maximum leverage.
Once they've responded to that I ask something along the lines of "By the way, what's the budgeted range for this role?" or "are you forbidden from sharing the range for this role" or something along those lines.
For some reason, recruiters seem more willing to share the range after I've anchored high – perhaps because they get insecure about whether they've misjudged my qualifications.
But negotiation isn't rocket science: you need to be thoughtful and honest to yourself and come up with an aspirational number (what you want, best case) and a floor (which you will not go below). Any number in between should be acceptable to you, by definition.
I find the hardest thing for people is being honest about the floor and being willing to walk away.
The problem is that you almost certainly don't have enough information to predetermine a floor, because that almost certainly depends on what other options will be available to you in the near future. I mean, sure, technically your floor could be literally just the lowest amount that you could survive on, but most people anticipate that the options available to them allow them to go higher than that.
There isn't really a shortcut, because if you feel like you've accepted an offer below your minimum and never applied for other jobs you'll feel like that forever. Which isn't a good foundation for the next years working in the role.
Right, but this process is only acceptable if you believe that you have more than a few options in the near future.
If you don't expect much options, just accept one and continue looking for the next one?
I walked away vaguely annoyed with the hiring company.
(OTOH, maybe it's a mistake to low-ball a candidate by such a large percentage, regardless. It sounds like a recipe for a discontent employee.)
So I can see making an offer below or near floor. 20 percent is awfully low, but I would have fun and make a counter. If they don’t move much you then it’s clearly time to move on. Really depends on what else is on the table.
Never reveal what your honest floor is. That's just for you, so you know what is an acceptable negotiation range. Tell them what your expectation is, instead.
This seems hard, but plenty of analytical brain power could be applied towards this. But there's also no will for companies to reach pricing frequency and fidelity like a stock market or retail because the inefficiency is in their favor and I suspect the real numbers that would come out of that would be much higher.
Maybe there is a kind of madman theory of salary negotiation as well, heh: throw out some numbers, don't think about it too much, randomly blow up the negotiation for any reason, or for no reason, etc.
For my part I just accept that I'll be getting the floor or very close to it.
Its more like a poker game. The more information you know, the more advantageous your position will be.
When recruiters ask me a range, I typically go 20%-30% above what I'm currently making as the starting point and about 10% below what I'm actually making as the floor. I also always tell the recruiter I'm open to negotiating.
This usually gets a reaction from the recruiter. They either tell me I'm asking too much and will give me the actual range the company is looking for or they say, "Oh that's perfect, its right in the range the company is looking for."
That information on its own will tell you whether its worth it to continue or not in 99% of the situations.
Which is exactly why the whole article tells you to not reveal any information and to get as much as possible. You agree with the article..
"At this point, I don’t feel equipped to throw out a number because I’d like to find out more about the opportunity first – right now, I simply don’t have the data to be able to say something concrete. If you end up making me an offer, I would be more than happy to iterate on it if needed and figure out something that works. I promise not to accept other offers until I have a chance to discuss them with you."
i love it. I would have to have that right in front of me and read it word for word. And if I get pushed to reveal a number I would need to just pause and slowly repeat it again word for word like a robot.
maybe less words than that, so it's literally the mental model in my head. Repeating something like a robot is probably better than blurting out the number but having a real game plan and treating the recruiter as a partner is probably better.
This is actually a really fantastic idea. You should absolutely do this.
If I may, I wouldn't think of the recruiter as an authority figure (they have none...) Rather they are your partner. Their best case scenario is that you are a good candidate for their job and they get to fill it. Which is also your best case scenario!
So it's more about how do you get there together collaboratively - at least that's how I frame it in my mind. So when they ask for something I don't want to share I respond more from the frame that it's not the piece of info that would help right now but here's how we should play it.
But your script is definitely a good start!
LOL. I'd probably read it like a bank heist hostage. Ideally, while blinking rapidly and visibly sweating on the Zoom meeting.
But it differs across the company where we aim to be. For some roles we aim for 50th percentile, while for other areas we deliberately pay 90th percentile and adjust current employee salaries yearly (after performance review) to match that. Because those areas are important to our strategy/roadmap.
May sound unfair to those that aren't in those areas. But this is business, we're spending our money where the returns are highest for this company. If a role isn't a 90th percentile role for us, it might be somewhere else, and we are willing to accept higher turnover on the 50th percentile roles to make money available to get the people we really need on those other roles.
Wow why didn’t I think of that!
Seriously though, I can only imagine how much I'd be laughed out of the room if I was some little shit 22 year old trying to negotiate a salary at a gigantic company, where exactly 0 people I am talking to have any agency whatsoever, only 1 year after 150,000 people in the tech industry were laid off, the memories of dozens of my classmates getting their offers rescinded fresh in my mind. And then for what, to live alone in Sunnyvale for 13 months?
https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/10rko7k/mo...
My advice for people who don't fall into the above:
1) Spend time to actually figure out what you are realistically worth in a new role. Glassdoor, Levels.fyi, H1B comp reports, ask your friends, there are tons of resources to do this.
2) Set a "reach" salary based on #1 and ask for that up front. 20% above your target salary is a good starting point. This accomplishes two things: a) it immediately weeds out all the spam recruiters and low-balling companies without wasting hours of your time on interviews; and b) it puts you in the right place to negotiate with the companies that are serious rather than trying to play chicken the entire time.
3) Set a floor below which you walk away and stick to it. The floor is going to be different for different companies. If there's a company you really want to work for because they're doing interesting things and you like the people there, your floor should be lower than at a generic job you're just considering as a ladder rung.
Will this advice potentially get you less than the absolute max you could make? Sure. But if that's your only goal then you should hire a personal recruiter working for you.
Some recruiters didn't ask me for my compensation figures upfront. Google, Microsoft, Meta, Snap, LinkedIn, and some startup recruiters never asked me for my compensation numbers up front. The only ones that did, were to make sure neither of us were wasting each others' times. Usually that meant that I didn't continue to interview with them.
Most if not all recruiters asked me where I was in the interview process and which companies I was interviewing at. I mentioned every company I was interviewing with and where I was in the process with them. I probably got lucky here as I had around 50% onsite to offer rate so I was never left in a spot where I had no leverage.
My best offers were the ones where VPs called me to try to close the process, and I negotiated directly with them instead of the recruiter.
The article mentions this:
> Let’s say that you currently work at a startup and make $150k in cash with some amount of equity. You go to levels.fyi or a similar site and look up Facebook’s salary bands for the role you’re targeting. Let’s say those bands for total comp are $250k-$350k. Hell, that’s way more cash than you’re making now, so you decide to share that range, thinking that if those are their bands already, it does no harm. That’s reasonable, except that let’s say Google ends up making you an offer, and it’s $400k (we’ve seen this scenario happen to a bunch of our users). Now you have to walk back what you said, in which case your recruiter will invariably ask why. And now you have to reveal, before you’re ready, that you have a Google offer, which means you’ll probably end up revealing that it’s for $400k. Now you’ve set an artificial ceiling for your Facebook counteroffer to be $400k as well, when in reality that ceiling may have been closer to $450k or even $500k.
The article is about optimizing for maximum comp, and your strategy is "sub optimal" because who knows if you could have gotten 250%+ of your previous comp had you negotiated better?
> Secret Zebra just left feedback for their FAANG interviewer: I really enjoyed the interview, you did really well in giving me the right level of assistance to keep under the time constraints. It was also pretty useful that you had prepared some extra code for testing.
Apart from such toasts being unusual, I doubted that a review would be "just" left by someone. Googling the text brought me to https://interviewing.io/mocks/Reverse-Nodes-in-k-Group, which as per archive.org was at least as old as 2 June 2023[1]. Not terribly old, but feels scummy to be honest.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20230602224912/https://int
Laying this foundation is largely unachievable for people who are not full-time job seeking.
Even when you're doing nothing but applying and have a decently impressive combination of skills and experience, it can be quite difficult in certain environments to get a single offer, let alone multiple offers, let alone multiple offers coming in at the same time.
But if you're currently holding down a full-time job and are looking to make a move into a new role, the odds of everything lining up perfectly like this are going to be so low as to be unrealistic even for very talented people.
I would. It's not like it's impossible, it's just more work.
Say you're working a standard 9-to-5. Sure, you can submit applications during the evenings, but once you get your foot in the door, you're constrained by the business hours of the place where you're applying.
Most job interviews take place during normal business hours. You might be able to take your lunch hour to do a phone screen, or you might be able to take off a couple of days of PTO for an on-site interview.
But you can't work your normal 9-5 and then expect to do all your job interviews from 5-midnight.
If you're hustling toward a $300-600k/yr gig, I think a lot of temporary insanity can be tolerated in furtherance of that goal. Remember also that salary increases compound over your working career.
> Remember also that salary increases compound over your working career.
Not true. As demostrated by 2021-2 outrageous offers where the market is now correcting itself.
Are many people taking salary cuts? Layoffs?
Enough so to bring them back to where they started?
It’s basically like saying “you win a race by being the fastest”. No duh! How you be the fastest is the hardest part.
I find that thought calming.
It's even worse if you lack any impressive skills and experience.
Aside from the fact that interviewing itself is really bad for my mental health, despite being in the bottom of the percentiles on places like levels.fyi, I doubt I'd be able to match my currently salary with any job that I could actually get hired for. So, looking up this type of information just ends up discouraging me even more.
Knowing that finding a job is less about salary and more about just being able to get an offer makes most of this advice less than helpful.
You have to stall the urgent folks and push the slow ones.
It did take a lot of burning vacation time.
Unless it's a boutique startup, I'm going to get into the role and find out right-quick what the salary bands are anyway, so the gaming seems silly. If it is some startup, I already provided the benefits I was looking for (and tradeoff for salary I would accept), so it doesn't seem to matter much.
I asked, "what's the budget?"
They gave me their budget and I did it with a few thousand off. Worked well and I was surprised.
The time, and marketing, costs of a property tend to go up with price. If I'm buying a 12 bedroom mansion, I'm going to expect a lot more photos, better staging, and so on in the marketing compared to a 1 bed apartment.
Equally small, cheap, properties are likely to sell faster (bigger buying pool) than more expensive ones. That $20m mansion is going to take a lot more visits than the $200k apartment.
In other words, there is sufficient variability in the cost of selling to warrant a sliding fee. And generally the best way to do that is as a % of the sale. A % BTW which is negotiable based on how fast the realtor thinks the property will sell, and the sale price expected.
It sure isn’t worth 6% of the sale price, especially considering that the sale price is literally double what it was 2 years ago.
Clearly not everyone needs, or wants, a realtor. But presumably there are enough who do to keep them in business. There are enough who don't to keep the "do it yourself" market in business as well.
Choice is good. What is good for you might not be good for the next person, and vice versa.
They start out trying to but then time drags on and they “just want it to be done.” At that point the seller is also prioritizing a deal over maximization.
Agents, since they’ve gone through a tonne of these processes, are more immune to the mental load the sale takes on them. I’d bet they’re less likely to try and blow through those final steps.
You can see this kind of thing play out across industries. In SW, a comparison may be the seasoned dev has no problem ripping apart their candidate solution and rewriting it since that process takes them less effort than the junior.
I kind of figure the market knows what my skill set is valued at and gambling for an outsized payout isn't likely to work unless you're interviewing at the top tier. When discussing a job I am interested in taking I push my tier to the upper end but leave room for discussion.
But, if we can assume that the "rare talent" is anything other than straight out of college, they will have discovered that they are a rare talent, be aware of it themselves, and barring some sort of crippling neurosis, want to cash in on it. They might not even be skilled at negotiating... they'll just be aware that they have leverage.
We might even phrase the problem that way... that it's not so important that they have "negotiating skill", as it is that they have "leverage awareness".
But that said, not every company is trying to hire the best people. As you note, they're expensive.
Once an HR culture develops, anything sane or intelligent probably goes out the window.
I guarantee when Google hires someone like Ken Thompson, they do not get the normal Google hiring experience.
That said, the author of Homebrew would be the top authority in the field of OSX package management yeah? I mean, Apple hasn't even bothered to create a competitor and yet every tech bro at Google using a MBP is going to need to install and use it..
If there is a one off person who can command a higher salary, its unlikely they alone will make a huge difference to the company anyway.
If there are a lot of people who could command a higher salary in that role, the pay is too low.
Overall it seems like a pretty good system. You could argue that the current system favors people who are good at negotiating, and not necessarily more skilled workers.
IME, talented people can spend an absurd proportion of their time bickering about how ${other_talented_person} makes ${trivial_number}/year more than they do, all because they're ${some_trait}.
Overall, I could imagine this filter being both good and bad. I'm not confident whether it nets out good or bad, but you can't argue it's not a dramatically simpler system, and simple systems are often surprisingly better better. :shrug:
people are overly assuming ingrained bias from a shadowy cabal of hiring managers and not looking at different gendered funnels, attrition, and personal contribution to the outcomes all within the same roles
HIRED’s recruitment report, for example, found very gendered compensations asks to begin with
similarly, people discount the risk many men take to skew it. for everyone worried about coming across as “too bitchy” there are a bunch of men that came across as “too cocky” and got fired or rejected and kept trying until they were hired at a company who needs someone to “to make the tough decisions” like tough to swallow decisions
the observation discounts how many people are overly focused on moving up in one company, versus not being married to any particular company at all, and how gendered even that is, when the latter has a 30% pay bump compared to eking out 5% discretionary promotions within the same company
also discounted is how many men would also leave the workforce if there was a reliable option of being subsidized for house work and unpaid emotional labor, you’ll get workplace equality and wage normalization overnight with that patch to the culture, instead of focusing solely on trying to patch the workplace and acting confused when the same outcome persists
the incentives for men are work or homelessness, unsheltered, outside. there are no classified ads with discounted or free rent “for men only”, or working for the self accolade of proving you didn't do the easy option. these things are all connected to workplace outcomes
> “they were especially trying to make sure women were making as much as men”
when the incentive models are unequal the behaviors of the market participants will be unequal
you’ll get workplace equality and wage normalization overnight with that patch to the culture, instead of focusing solely on trying to patch the workplace
To get a similar level of representation more commonly
You: Ok recruiter, is there a budget/range set aside for this position ?
Recruiter: Yes it is $x-$y
You: Ok I can work with that. My expectation is ideally $x+ z% <= $y OR "Sorry that won't work for me. Bye"
Scenario 2:
Recruiter: Hey, what are your salary requirements ?
You: Ok recruiter, is there a budget/range set aside for this position ?
Recruiter: <crickets> Or goes "No but I am interested in learning what is your requirement ideally" ?
You: $Market-Rate + %YOUR_IDEAL_INCREMENT
Scenario 3:
Recruiter: What is your current salary ?
You: Recruiter, I can disclose that but that wouldn't matter as I am interested in hearing if there is a fixed budget for this role already ?
Recruiter: <crickets>
You: If you don't know the budget, regardless of what I make now, I wouldn't make a move unless I am making $MARKET_RATE + %INCREMENT
The point is that don't worry about being underpaid by asking first necessarily. You can ask for a number that works for YOU. Even if it was less than what they would have paid, why should you care if you are happy. Yes, do your research and know your market obviously.
Recruiter: How much are looking for?
Me: Could you please provide a range for the role?
Recruiter: no, please let us know what you want
Me: relatively high but not crazy number
Recruiter: No, that's too high
Me (in my head): why did you ask me then
Me: Ok, please let me know what is reasonable
Recruiter: some number that may or may not be acceptable
Me: asks for a bit more if number was close to acceptable
Because you surrendered a number almost immediately, they have decided that you're inexperienced and so deserve less money.
I think a better strategy is to not answer: "OK, I think it's fine if you don't want to talk about salary right now. I'm sure you pay competitively. Let's focus on whether I'm a good fit with the team first."
After the engineering team has told the recruiter that they want to move forward with hiring you, you have more leverage to negotiate.
If you're finding that your opening bid is always rejected, it's probably because you don't know what's a good number to name. (Lots of people sneer at this but I don't think this is some failing on your part--companies pay tons of money for this kind of salary data which is how they know it.) In this case, you should just do anything you can to avoid naming a number first.
Most candidates have no idea what they're worth. Here's what I imagine is happening behind the scenes in your scenarios, assuming a normal candidate:
Scenario 1: Recruiter: Great news. The candidate was happy with the offer and I didn't even need to ask for permission to offer higher comp. It's always extra time and work when I have to ask for $x+$y+$z.
Scenario 2: Recruiter: Ha ha. This candidate has no idea what the market rate is. They must only be interviewing at crap companies. We'll offer the bottom of the pay band and they'll be overjoyed because it's 10% higher than they were asking for.
Scenario 3: Exactly the same as scenario 2, except there was a brief moment when the recruiter wondered if the candidate knew how much they could get.
This is a weird argument. It seems like you're saying "these scenarios are fine even if they lose you money." I would argue that "you should care" because most people would, all things being equal, like more money. The point of a job offer negotiation is to optimize a few different variables, of which "money" is generally a (or the) primary one.
If saying a number first (as you do in all 3 of these scenarios) reduces the ultimate amount of money get (it generally does), you should not do that.
I learned this lesson many moons ago after not getting a job I really looked forward to because my honest expectations were too high, and later ending up in a situation where I got paid 70% of what a friend earned for exactly the same role because I low balled myself.
After those experiences I just say that if they’re willing to make an offer, we’ll go from there. If it’s a company who can’t work with this approach, I don’t want to work there anyway.
Two key things I think about all the time are price discovery and competition. Price discovery means that in some illiquid markets, you don't really know what a thing will trade at unless you try to trade it (which itself reveals some information to the counterparty but that's not important in the job case)
From that point of view, I am always surprised to hear people who hate interviewing, are reluctant to interview, etc. Interviewing is the only real way to learn "the market" - what offers to you would actually look like, and other information as well. Like if you always get offers at the low end of a range - or if you always fail interviews - is very good signal that you can act on.
Competition - when we traded bonds, we'd always go to multiple dealers for quotes. The dealers would know that we always ask at least X of their competitors by rule, so they knew that whatever number they gave us, we'd compare against others. That prompted them to strike the balance between a good deal for them and a price we'd actually accept. From that point of view, the best negotiating advice is to have multiple offers, because (1) you see what the highest one is (2) you can see how close or dispersed they are and you can infer something from that (3) they give you leverage. EG: let's say you want job X most, but job Y gave you $20K more on the offer or whatever. You can always tell job X "I'd love to work with you but it's hard to accept a lower offer, can you match?" This isn't even a game, you'd be saying this sincerely. Or, if your offers are close, you can push the highest one a bit because you know they aren't so far out of the norm with more confidence.
Interviewing may be the best way to gather market information, but does that make it surprising that people hate doing it?
There are very few activities I hate more than taking part in a job interview (on either side of the desk). That it's useful and necessary doesn't make it any less unpleasant.
When an activity validates you, it's tough to imagine other people having the opposite experience with it. Imagine every time you went to a round of interviews you were offered riches and status. It would be tough to understand why others just didn't muster up the gumption to go downtown and get what they're worth.
I assume that the answer in any interview process I go into will be "no" 90%+ of the time. That's not some defeated pessimism, it's just reality that the process is hairy (how many people do you go on dates with before you get married?) and every single instance can fail for reasons that have to do with you (how you did that day, fit for the role) or not (hired internally, headcount went away, etc.)
While obviously it's frustrating to fail a round / not get an offer, there's less sting to it when you manage your expectations as above, and then add to it that the frequency of at-bats + the learning process can lead to a better outcome despite - and in fact - because of - the rejections.
So yes, there's a big mental/attitude component that helps you engage with this productively and see the process as something you're doing for yourself - and thus even the fails are part of the plan - versus stepping into some sort of meat grinder.
And to be fair to your comment about "offered riches and status" - I would not put it that way and the 90%+ fail rate is very real. That said, I definitely feel positive about work and have been lucky with opportunities and there's no question that extensive experience interviewing - and learning from the fails - has been key to that.
The assumption that other people's experiences are like yours is a key cognitive bias. A 90% fail rate means 10 offers after a hundred applications - that's an incredibly solid success rate. Now imagine some people have orders of magnitude more difficulty because their name is strange, or because their social class shows through in their dress or mannerisms.
If I can offer a comparison, most people on this forum have it made. It's like asking a group of models how difficult online dating is and having someone say "I can't fathom anyone having trouble keeping their weekends full of new people to date... It's just so easy!"
Also, I note that you seem to assume I'm talking about my own experiences; I'm not. I am a very well established professional in a lucrative field.
> It would be tough to understand why others just didn't muster up the gumption to go downtown and get what they're worth.
If I were guaranteed to make a million dollars and/or gain high status by cleaning a cesspool, that wouldn't make cleaning the cesspool any more pleasant.
I don’t think anyone disputes the value of the information. It is just painful to obtain.
It's of course very dependant on each country and the jobs market, but in my experience the issue would be even getting to have multiple offers in a short enough period of time. To the point that it happening could be called a coincidence, more than anything. Unless you are fiercely hunting for a job (aka. doing several interviews per week), I don't see how it would happen to get an offer and telling the company "well, wait for a couple weeks or a month for my answer" just to see if it happens that offers arrive from the other places and one gets to compare simultaneously.
Seems more likely that an offer comes, you accept or decline it, if declined then other will eventually come some time later, and one can compare them and maybe regret having declined the former, and so on.
The only general purpose advice here is the price discovery. If you want to know, you need offers.
As I mentioned in another comment, I try to be forthcoming with companies especially in cases where the transparency doesn't hurt me and helps everyone. So if the following is the case, I would say something like "Yup, I am in a pretty active search right now, I am talking to a handful of other companies. I am definitely interested in going through the process with you as well, so if you want I will keep you abreast of how my other conversations are going throughout this process" - I've found that this both creates credibility/good vibes and the company is often able to keep pace with the process and offer timing.
Elsewhere in this thread someone was asking how you can possibly get to a place where you have multiple offers around the same timeline - it's something like this.
Of course, not always it is that convoluted, but the "beef" is often that much detached from the process.
Inreviewing is expensive. I think coding tests are a strategy to make it more expensive for a candidate.
Even if you are one of the best, getting a single offer can be full 2 days work - if you count the time spent searching, applying, etc.
Yeah you may go through hours of interviews and not end up with an offer in some cases but think of it this way: you could potentially earn tens of thousands to over one hundred thousand extra dollar per year off that time investment in interviewing.
Attempting to line up multiple interviews and balancing offer timelines is hard, but the payoff can be huge. Considering that people spend 4 years or more working in college to get into their career, making a time investment of a few weeks to get a potentially large raise is nothing.
Can you elaborate on that? I'm not seeing why these are good signals to act on.
Maybe you don't present well. Maybe you present perfectly well, but somebody else had slightly more experience dealing with a specific problem the company needs solved. Maybe they already decided to hire somebody, but needed to conduct interviews anyway to satisfy the lawyers.
Is there a good way to extract that information out of an interview? I always ask for feedback, but I rarely get it.
Let's say you recognize that you "underperform" versus your capability because you get insanely nervous. At some point you have to realize that your ability to grow depends on your ability to get your nerves under control. How you do that is the next question but that could be one observation.
You can seek patterns of what kind of interviews you tend to fail out on. Eg, is it coding, algorithmic, problem solving, behavioral, whatever. Once you have that zeroed in, you can ask yourself (and the internet): how can I get better at X type of interview.
More generally, you can seek for patterns of what kinds of questions surprised you and you had to make shit up on the spot, but could have been better prepped? EG if you go "hmm let's see" if you are asked about the coolest thing you've worked on or whatever, maybe that's the kind of topic you can pregame and have a story for.
Another maybe subtler thing is reading the interviewer. What are the things you were saying/doing where the interviewer was visibly happy/impressed vs confused, where did they say "that's great, go on" and where did they go "hmm.. but what about.." In the moment you may have just taken the "what about" as a prompt but in reality they may have seen you struggle and tried to help you - what can you do to prep for that type of questions next time?
I can go on - but the conclusion is something like this - I know a bunch of people who every interview they had, they think they nailed it and then they are totally shocked to not advance. And I know people who can reflect on what went poorly and adjust for next time. I don't know how to teach someone to recognize all the signals like this but it's definitely there to be perceived if one looks.
The other issue you run into is cost of getting to competing offers. In your example, you can just ask a dealer for a quote and they'll give it to you, with little to no work on your part. In tech, you have to go through multiple hours of interviews to get this information.
It's no wonder that people are resistant to go interview. Especially when you can get most of this information much more easily through levels.fyi.
Agree levels.fyi is a great resource under the right conditions. EG, if Facebook wants to interview you as an E5 engineer, it's great to look up the range for that.
But if you are say a "senior developer" working outside of FAANG, what does it mean for you to know the E5 comp when you have no idea how that lines up against your profile? How would you know if FB would consider you for an E5 or even an E3 unless you interview and see how close you can get? The only other way is if you're already in a FAANG with very comparable levels. Otherwise, what's a "senior engineer" in one place may not pass the resume screen for a "junior" in another.
I agree with you that it obviously takes multiple hours to go through an interview, I am calling out that it's often well worth it, because: you may actually get an offer at the end, which you may take or use to negotiate with another company, and even if you constantly fail interviews there's a very actionable signal in that too. So the return on investment for those hours - ultimately being able to get a better/more lucrative job, seems like a good use of time.
This is borderline "get in the job cannon and blast off to jobland" territory.
Also - it can be terrifically difficult to line up multiple simultaneous offers because companies would rather explode their offer than generally let people get a better leverage. I know multiple companies who do this on purpose for this explicit reason. Is it inefficient from a market perspective? Of course. But since when has that ever stopped the owner class from oppressing the workers?
Then if you've done say 5 interviews (1 per day for a week), you can just wait for the first offer and use that as leverage to get the others to hurry up. Since they already have all the data they need.
That means you can for example use levels.fyi number for that level at Google as 'something that applies to me'
In practice, if you get an exploding offer, unless you already think it's an extraordinary offer and love the potential opportunity, you can tell them that you won't be able to make a decision within that time. If the company is worth working for, they'll remove it. If they won't remove it, it's probably best not to take the offer.
On the other hand, sometimes you are hiring to fill a specific position rather than to generally grow a team. You have two candidates you like and you can't afford to let candidate 1 sit on the offer for three weeks. People treat it like it's nefarious on the part of the company to ever have an exploding offer, but sometimes it's just not practical.
If you've made an offer to one candidate, and you're holding your response on another, you're already doing a disservice to that other candidate. They should know that you've extended an offer to someone else, and that you'll contact them if that offer falls through.
I work in games - what happens for us quite often is that we'll interview ~10 candidates and 2-3 are actually good enough to hire. So the process is to give the top candidate the offer with a few days to accept it, if they don't then we move on to the next candidate because they also want to know whether we are proceeding or not - otherwise it's just rude(to the candidate). How does that indicate poor culture?
That's your indication. There are a lot of people who want to work in games, but that doesn't mean it's a good culture.
Are there any gaming companies not known to have a poor culture? That industry is well known to be exploitative, with low pay.
Of course. Where I work the culture is very good, with strong emphasis against overtime, no crunch and very good benefits, and it's one of the biggest publishers in the industry.
No company in our capitalist society pays any worker at any level. What the worker thinks they are worth- they pay the worker the absolute bare minimum that they think they can get away with. Doesn't matter if it's an entry level job, or ( like mine) a high end algo trading outfit etc
Exploitation is labor is never usually headlined in the context of $400k/year salary. Technically, you're right. But we can take this to the limit, instead of $400k, let's say $4M/year for a job that's worth $5M/year? Are they "exploited". Yes, but not by the common use of the term.
Perhaps the reason for GP's take was that it robs away the colloquial definition of exploiration in an entirely different context where it's the least meaningful, i.e. exploitation of Bangladeshi child laborers vs. a programmer earning $400k year salary.
Yes, I am incredibly fortunate. Yes, I make a very very large amount of money compared to a typical american worker. Still, I capture only a fraction of the value I generate for my employer.
There seems to be a two way street here. Presumably if you could make 600K or more by yourself, you'd be doing that rather than working for your employer.
Your employer, likely way before you got there, created an environment where you could come in and earn this much. If they and companies of that profile didn't exist, would you have a place to earn even 200K? So maybe you actually are splitting the value you are generating half-way.
I think this is a misunderstanding of how companies perceive value. You could be making your company a billion dollars a year, but if any schmuck off the street could do the same you're not actually providing much value at all. Your value is the difference between what you provide and what a similar replacement worker would provide.
If you don't want to do that, doesn't that admit the company is providing that value, not you?
For example, I know a top salesman at Microsoft. He'd call up a customer, drop in, get ushered right in to see the CEO, and close another sale.
One day, he decided to capture that value he was provided by working for a startup. He did not close a single sale the entire year. He could not get an appointment with any CEO. He finally quit and got his old job back at Microsoft.
It's not quite as powerful as having a simultaneous offer, but the point is not whether or not you go to a specific other company, but whether or not they believe a) you'll actually turn them down, b) you're worth roughly what you demand. Another offer, even if turned down will help in both respects.
My background is consulting and earlier-stage startups in the UK which may mean we’re in a different environment to what you’re used to, but the teams are often lean, and sometimes strained by the time we’re out to hire.
Sourcing and screening often starts a few weeks/months before but generally we move quite quickly through technical to offer stages - I think its healthy and fair for both parties to keep expect these final stages around 1-2 weeks.
Interviewing takes quite a bit of time and energy from the tech team and can impact team health, delivery, and ultimately bottom line - where our salaries come from.
If we’re in the fortunate position to have a final candidate (or two - three), theres going to be an exploding offer because we need to get back to work, and we need to let other candidates know to move on.
As a candidate its very fair to line up your interviews with a few companies and tell them you would like to make a decision by a particular date. If they cant accommodate you or extend an offer with a deadline prior to that, its on them. In my last job hunt no company turned down this request and two adjusted their processes to accommodate it.
The only time things happen quickly is when someone is jobless, or if they already handed in their notice, they were going to join company X and you manage to snipe them in that 3-4 month period before they've started at company X.
The notice periods do get factored in both planning and _sometimes_ the deciding on a candidate.
It’s not that companies don’t want to hire fast (or don’t need to), I’ve worked at startups (in UK too), big tech and worked on hiring.
But if the rush is in their side and they want you, that’s different to an exploding offer in many ways, in that they aren’t trying to pressure you to move fast to improve their negotiating position and worsen yours, they’re the ones on the weaker position, and to get you to move fast for them, that gives you leverage.
You decide if you care about the offer and the company/role etc. and then ask them for a deal that’ll make you cancel your other interviews now in that case.
This works well if you don't urgently need income and have significant additional job prospects. The power imbalance between employers and employees means that "just avoid the businesses that exploit you" is not an option for a large number of workers.
The only way to actually defeat exploding offers is collective action.
Recognising you don’t have much leverage and have no option but to be exploited is a sad reality to have to accept, but of course if your job prospects are not great then that can be the case, and then maybe at least you can wait until the last day before you accept an exploding offer, where you have more knowledge of how the rest of your interview pipeline is progressing.
I've found that too. It seems like even if you apply at the same time, companies move at a variety of speeds. But there are things you can do to help align the offers temporally, at least a bit.
- At the start of each process, ask how long the process will take (how many interviews, number of weeks from start to offer). They'll generally tell you. If you do this for every company, you have an idea of which companies are fast and which companies are slow.
- The fast companies can be slowed down, a least a bit. It's Thursday and they want to schedule an interview for Monday? Say "Unfortunately I'm not available Monday to Wednesday next week, would Thursday next week work for you?" Answer emails the next day, or if they sent you one in the morning answer in the evening "after work".
- The slow companies can be sped up a bit. Firstly, ask for interviews sooner, they might go for it, who knows. If you get an offer from one company, send an email to all the other companies that you have an offer but you'd like to get their offer as well, that might speed them up.
None of this is guaranteed to work but it's worth trying.
I think exactly zero of those principles apply (assuming you are talking about stock exchange trades).
All these types of "technical analysis" on price-discovery during negotiations is fairly pointless.
There's only one rule that works when personally doing a trade with someone:(whether you're negotiating salary, buying a property or selling car) be likeable!
The more the other party likes you, the more flexible they are going to be on their price-points.
So, sure, the hiring manager has a band (say $100k to $140k). What you want is for him to make an offer at the top of his band ... or even higher - if you interview well they may decide on a more senior role for you.
This is why, even if your minimum is above his maximum, be likeable!
Even if you have already decided you don't want that job, be likeable!
Even if you don't want to work for that particular company, be likeable!
Even if you already have an offer in hand that is way above anything anyone else can offer you, be likeable!
What likeable means depends on context.
When selling a car, being upfront and having all the paperwork up to date, and all the services done on time and recorded as such, a clearance certificate to prove "not stolen", etc ... makes you likeable.
When negotiating a salary, gush about how nice their offices are, how their mission statement resonates with you, how wonderful the interviewers have been up to that point.[1] Make a list of things you admire about the company/its products/its vision ahead of time so that you can truthfully tell them all wonderful things about themselves.
Practice telling people horrible things in nice ways (called constructive criticism?). Practice, Practice, Practice! They will give you stupid challenges, maybe even broken code. How you respond must make them like you even more for the role.
You must come across as a collaborator and leverager, not as a coding genius. Coding geniuses are a dime a dozen. Competent coders who can act as a force multiplier for their team, their manager or their company are rare gems who get offered much more than genius coders.
Everywhere I've been at, or done work for, for over 25 years, has been filled with people who would rather work with pleasant people who are basically competent (or even slightly below average) than work with unpleasant people, no matter how good they are technically.
Look at highly paid surgeons: the ones making the most money are the ones filling every single one of their slots. They know - bedside manners matter.
[1] I spent a full day interview for a senior-ish (L5? L6? Dunno now) position at AWS. It was hard work, with challenges coming at me the whole day, coding, design, etc ... and yet I thanked every single interviewer for their time, and told them how much I appreciate them making the effort to interview me. I was warm, pleasant and friendly the whole day, not just civil, in spite of the constant set of new problems thrown my way.
> I spent a full day interview [...] and yet I thanked every single interviewer for their time, and told them how much I appreciate [...]
Where I work we became very sceptic about this trait in candidates, especially if someone is overdoing it. Then the suspicion rises whether they are overcomensating for another trait they believe about themselves.
I feel that being likable is table stakes and not something you would optimize for that much.
I'm also skeptical about overly positive candidates, but if their other visible traits are average, then there's no need for me to be paranoid.
The odds that there's a problem with them that I cannot determine during the interview is exactly the same as the odds for any other candidate.
Being that the odds are the same, I may as well get the person who everyone wants to work with.
If you are picking a surgeons based on this criteria, you are paying way too much for a 10 minutes conversation aka bedside manners. I personally will go with the rudest mf-er that will fix me right the first time.
But that's you personally. The clear majority of people prefer the friendliest mf-er that fixes them right the first time.