> Rest assured, this person is actually a terrible negotiator. They’re good at being difficult and causing a scene, which can sometimes convince a waitress or shift manager to appease them. But this style of negotiating will get you nowhere when negotiating with a business partner (that is, an employer).
You need to pick your negotiation strategy based on the situation. Sometimes you do need to be bullheaded when insisting on a refund. That doesn't make you a bad negotiator when negotiating pay - you just use a different strategy when negotiating a pay raise.
But also in many cases asking for a refund itself is a waste of time, money and nerves. Another thing to consider is, what is worth negotiating for. +20% on your salary? Absolutely. 10% off a cupcake. Maybe not.
Seems crazy to tell them in an email "I sometimes get nervous in important phone calls." Why would you do that??? Just leave it at "I prefer to discuss this type of thing via email" ... no need to announce your incompetence.
> blushes I-i-i sometimes get nervous cough if maybe it could possibly be ok with you could we maybe do it with a phone call, whoops, I mean e-mail!! nervous laughter
To direct the recruiter while maintaining the illusion that they have control and are the more powerful party. When people feel like they are losing control is when they stop being cooperative and focus on self-preservation. It's actually really good advice to selectively reveal your weaknesses.
There's a mistake in the post regarding the cost to the company of selecting you (~$24k). They have runner-ups, and they most certainly didn't take down their postings yet, so they will not lose the $24k and start over again, they'll lose a bit more money negotiating with the runner-ups if they're still available, only if the negotiations dragged on forever would the cost keep going up for the company.
And to add, it's a large cost if the candidate takes the offer and doesn't work out. If a candidate is unhappy with the offer but accepts it, they are more likely to leave sooner than a candidate who is happy with the offer. Companies I've worked at would rather a bit of negotiation or a flat out "I won't work for what you can offer", than a candidate who leaves after a few months.
I've never seen a recruitment pipeline that stopped when they got an acceptable CV in, nevermind risk a lot of money on an offer stage. It keeps going until a contract is signed, and sometimes beyond, exactly to mitigate risk.
I wonder if nowadays you can just ask ChatGPT to negotiate for you. Personally, I hate negotiating salary and the games that come along with it. I usually go in with a number in my head and if they can't meet it, I just thank them for their time and say I'm not considering offers below my number.
The risk/downside is that my number could be too low, but that's something I'm willing to live with if it means I can avoid having to negotiate. If they immediately agree to your number, it probably means you asked for too little. Or the person you're dealing with also hates negotiating.
Every person is different, but I wonder what is it that you hate so much about negotiation, so much that you’d accept a lower salary even though if you had bills to pay.
Even I don’t like to push hard and use tactics like the ones you see in sales calls, but the last time I had to negotiate salaries, I just said that I was excited for the position and the company, and reminded them it would be difficult to accept what they were offering because it didn’t meet my expectations. Virtually everyone was convinced by said statements and came back with salary increases after that.
As for ChatGPT, there are tell tale markers when someone uses that, and because of its content-free nature of writing, it is very likely to backfire.
> Every person is different, but I wonder what is it that you hate so much about negotiation, so much that you’d accept a lower salary even though if you had bills to pay.
Why are you assuming that I'm constantly accepting lower salaries? I pick my number so that I can my bills and live a comfortable life. Sometimes they have to close a job req and open a new one with a higher pay grade to give me my number.
I've read a few times that employees don't care about the absolute number, as long as they feel like they are getting paid fairly compared to their peers. I was like that when I was younger but now I don't care. If Jeff does nothing and gets paid more than me, whatever. As long as I make a number I'm happy with then I'm happy.
> As for ChatGPT, there are tell tale markers when someone uses that, and because of its content-free nature of writing, it is very likely to backfire.
I just tried it, and it came up with:
> Thank you for the offer. I appreciate the opportunity to join your company. However, based on my skills, experience, and the market standards for this role in the industry, I was hoping for a salary closer to (your salary). I believe this reflects the value I can bring to the team and the responsibilities of the position.
Seems _good enough_. I'm sure if I spent more time with the prompt and actually told it what industry I'm in, it could write something less generic.
After lowballing myself and ending up working for some time for a lot less than what a friend of mine got for exactly the same position many moons ago, I started to just not give my number.
I’d typically explain in a friendly, non-threatening way how I’m sure they have a pay scale and pay ranges for particular positions, so why don’t we start with where they see me.
They’d usually push on a bit, and I’d stay friendly but resolute. You can always spin it in a way that “I really like what I’ve seen so far, so it’s not about the numbers. I’m flexible, I wouldn’t want you to pass on me just because of some random number I might say.”
For me this has worked wonders. Every single time I would’ve low balled myself. Highly recommended.
It’s a stupid game. You can totally opt to just not play it.
I hate the game and don’t like to negotiate either. Thanks for the advice.
Similarly once I was given an offer I for a job I wasn’t looking for. It was a nice jump higher than what I was making. But I was happy with my current job.
I politely turned it down. Went to my current boss, explained that I got an offer, turned it down because I wasn’t looking for change but felt like that offer showed I was worth more than they were paying and would appreciate a bump.
That’s great. Having honest, down to earth managers is very refreshing.
Important to note this does not make good advice / expectations - most bosses will not be as understanding, and the job you were happy with is now filled with resentment for not getting a raise.
Also the boss knows you're shopping around, and to start seeking a replacement. The trade-off of a brief raise might be worth it to keep you on long enough to find one.
A strategy you can follow is - Start with not budging to tell the number in your mind. There is typically a range of salary defined for each level. Let them make the first move where the recruiter will typically start with low or mid (if you did very well in interviews) value in the range. Negotiating 10-20% higher than that can be a tactic but avoid being too pushy.
This isn't true at all. Even between two perfectly rational actors, there's a lot of hidden information in the hiring process, contradictory goals, and orthogonal goals. This demands negotiation.
At it's most basic, the company wants to pay me the least I will accept. I want to be paid as much as possible. These are contradictory, so some middle ground needs to be found. There's also a lot of hidden information, on both sides: What's the most the company is willing to pay? What's the least I'm willing to take? We can also have orthogonal goals: personally, I put a pretty high value on PTO, so there's room for trading salary expectations for additional time off.
By not negotiating, all you're doing is leaving money on the table. The company is going to represent it's interests, you have to represent yours.
If you already have an offer in hand, you shouldn't be negotiating through the recruiter. This is a hiring decision not buying a home. CC the recruiter, take their advice, but work with the hiring manager directly.
One of the worst things you can do in negotiation is talk to the wrong person. Instead of going you -> recruiter -> HR rep -> team lead -> hiring manager, you need to go you -> hiring manager. Talk to your recruiter, strategize, whatever, but everything else is playing telephone and it's very easy to get a yes from someone who's not allowed to say yes.
There's usually layers of approval for offers inside organisations, it's improbable anyone you're talking to is going to be able to make a decision independent of people outside your communication loop and they're all going to be talking to each other.
The distinction is - if there's one person with the authority to say yes to your salary requirements, and three people who only have the authority to say no, does it benefit you to go via those three people?
In some organisations it might benefit you! If your salary needs to be approved by a hierarch of the fourth level but you'll be reporting to a hierarch of the second level who'll be benefiting from your genius, they might be a highly motivated advocate in your favour.
In other organisations though, the more opportunities there are to say no, the higher chance of the answer being no.
Those are all good points. I also look at it from the perspective of having an "inside person" championing a package you both agree on, versus you convincing the recruiter to champion it enough for HR to champion it too.
The tricky part that it's not always clear who will be the best internal advocate.
Sometimes, it's the manager because they benefit the most from hiring you and the organization probably values their opinion, but some managers are pushovers with zero people skills and will be useless.
Sometimes, it's the recruiter because they are the most experienced with the hiring process and know what wheels to grease; sometimes they're useless because recruiters are often viewed as interchangeable cogs.
My experience has been hiring managers defer this to recruiters within the company simply because its not their job, and also may not have the authority.
There are some good things in here, like not closing the door on yourself early, not giving lowball numbers, the overall mindset that you're in a negotiation with a corporation that negotiates salaries all day every day. But what he describes is definitely not an outcome you can expect in this market if you are 3 months post-bootcamp.
There is the flipside also, which is that if you misrepresent your own value and cinch an offer higher than you're worth, you'll be first to go when downsizing comes -- moreso the higher the number.
As an aside, I looked at the post he talks about here ("how I got the job at airbnb") and this guy seems... kinda shiesty?
>There is the flipside also, which is that if you misrepresent your own value and cinch an offer higher than you're worth, you'll be first to go when downsizing comes -- moreso the higher the number.
This is really an edge case. I would err towards earning more, having more saveable income, and growing into your pay.
The trick in any such problem is not to believe your own PR. By all means, take the money if you can get it, but know that you may not be so lucky next time, and therefore do something with the extra money that doesn’t send you up the hedonic treadmill.
Being able to take a gamble on a company that could do something big or important, or flame out quickly, is a huge privilege, and only comes from generational wealth or having your assets widely outweigh your liabilities by living below your means.
Parent said "more saveable income", presumably meaning you use the extra money to save for a rainy day. You can also lose a lower-paying job, if the company gets into financial trouble, for example.
Which they basically absolutely do at the negociating stage.
You'll get 3000$ Cool !
But 25% of that is car/phone/meal vouchers
Oh no, we can't give you more because your experience is not an exact fit with us.
oh actually, it's 2250 - 10%, because we'll hire you on a 3 months basis trial, afterwards we'll give you the salary.
oh, and if you don't mind, we'll pay you partly in royalties because it's tax free... But to do that, you'll easily understand you must waive your I.P. on the stuff you make for us.
Ad nauseam.
I understand I'm not worth an Einstein but, could they just be honest and say: we want to pay you the less possible and we will pay you with anything that will help us avoid taxes... This always remind me how much in power they are.
Avoiding taxes is a great later negotiating card. If they say they "can't" give you the salary you want, you can come up with alternative payment methods. Like "how about X salary plus travel expenses?" etc.
EDIT: Okay, I did some clicking around and yes, it seems like this guy has had more than a passing interest in con-artistry. If anyone reading this can't get past that, I highly recommend reading some books or listening to podcasts on negotiation in general. It's a great skill to learn.
----
I can't comment on the other posts as I haven't read them, but I thought the negotiation ones were rather good overall. They line up with very well with other content I have read/watched/listened to from professional negotiators. I know these articles highlighted several things I have personally done wrong in past job offer negotiations.
It is important to note that most of this advice is mostly only applicable to white-collar seasoned professionals who are in the middle or later stages of their career. Essentially, people who have the luxury of taking their time to delay the hiring process as much as they can in order to maximize the number of concurrent offers.
If you are young and/or just getting started and are hungry to start your career, or were laid off and have been unemployed for 6-12 months with a dwindling emergency fund, you may have to take the first sensible offer you get. Especially if the job market is tough (like it is right now) or if you need that paycheck to keep a roof over your head. You can (and should!) always work on leveling up your career as you go along. Other, better opportunities WILL come along if you are properly tending to your skills and social network.
The idea that you can perform poorly if you are paid less is not really true. It's always best to earn the maximum. Expectations are set on you regardless of your compensation. Often your direct team lead / line manager who is doing your performance ranking isn't even completely in the loop on your total compensation.
Performing poorly is what will trigger the PIP like process, compensation only comes up later. Further, it's rare for an org to truly let a manager slice up their compensation budget however the like (hey you can hire 2 juniors or 1 senior, your call).. so it often doesn't cost your direct line manager extra headcount just because you are on expensive end. Usually headcount is decided, and then the compensation required to fill that headcount is a secondary concern, as crazy as that seems.
Further, it's a rare interview process that doesn't shake out that you are at a lower seniority level than you are representing. Interviews may fail to shake out exact level of technical proficiency but I think most interviews do place you on the junior->senior spectrum fairly well.
Only once in my 20 year career have I almost gotten a job that in retrospect was way ahead of where I was at the time. 15 years later I ended up finally taking a similar job. But they didn't hire me!
It's not so much about performance. But especially in tiny companies, if you need to make redundancies, you are going to sort your spreadsheet of employees by cost descending. And if you look at the top spots and you're like "that guy really isn't our best employee" then you're going to be the first to go.
Financially, this will likely still work out well for you in the long run. But it may not be a great way to get top job stability.
You don't get top pay & top job stability, that's life.
Job stability implies staying somewhere for a long period of time, and that's generally not how you maximize compensation.
Compensation maximizing career management usually involves moving every ~5 years or so, depending on industry.
But I'd rather make more money AND have more opportunities/experiences than to rely on the continued benevolence of my single long term employer.
When they start sorting spreadsheets by compensation for layoff purposes, you are already in the wrong place at the wrong time. Being paid less for years and years so that you are lower down the spreadsheet isn't a career strategy.
I agree... but it's important to recognize that the smaller the difference between one's pay and one's expenses, the more impact any kind of disruption has. 'don't go bankrupt' isn't a requirement with a lot of leeway - the leeway to take risks comes when losing a job wouldn't lead to immediate bankruptcy.
However you'll find its a lot easier to save money as you make more money.
My savings rate AND my absolute dollars saved have gone up as I progressed through 20s/30s/40s/etc.
Increases in your rent or real estate taxes +/-5% don't matter as much when housing is a lower overall % of your income. This is a big hurdle in HCOL areas when you are starting out, so the faster you can move through that phase the better.
You don't get job stability. Period. If you're getting paid more, you can at least bank more for the downturns. But in general, unless you're being unfairly underpaid, your salary doesn't have a lot to do with if you get selected for a layoff or not, all other things being equal.
Any company over about 200 employees is not going to perform layoffs this way. They will perform layoffs by strategic function and job role, not by a descending sort on the payroll database. R&D roles tend to be more stable than most other role types, as long as the company is on a general growth trajectory for the overall strategy. Once a company stagnates, R&D roles tend to be the least stable. What roles are the biggest target for layoffs generally has more to do with the industry the company is in and where it is on the maturity cycle than whether or not an individual person is being paid +20% over their cohort. In any sufficiently larger company they don't even look at salary outliers, because it's irrelevant at that scale first of all, and because salary outliers usually exists for a reason secondly.
Also, people should just stop expecting job stability. The evidence is blatant and public that this simply isn't a thing for anyone. Instead, you should work on maximizing successful outcomes in your life and career regardless of which employer's logo is on your paycheck/badge. Having a budget, having an investment plan, and actively building up and managing your savings are just important life skills for success irrespective of how much you get paid and where you work. The more money you make, though, makes everything else easier. It is a fruitless and misguided plan to try to make /less/ just so you can "stay under the radar". Not only does it not work, but it's actually self-sabotaging.
Correct.
Being +/- some % compensation to a peer is less of a factor frankly than if you get along with your management.
There was a recent round of layoffs at my previous employer very last minute and chaotic. Skip level managers were given an hour to produce their list. My former skip level boss basically whacked everyone he disliked in one swoop as long as they weren't in operationally important roles he had no backup for.
> The idea that you can perform poorly if you are paid less is not really true.
Can confirm from my experience. The greater the salary, the better the working conditions. Companies that paid as little as possible also tried to squeeze out as much work as possible.
Yes this is in general the rule my wife & I have observed throughout our careers.
By and large companies that don't want to pay individuals appropriately also don't want to hire enough people, so everyone is stuck underpaid, overworked and miserable. They also tend to collect people in leadership roles who would not be hired anywhere else.. leaving their ICs all the worse.
My best paying jobs generally all had the best benefits and nicest people.
There are some examples of companies that are known in their industry to pay a premium "hazard pay" for working you to the bone, but they are something of an exception.
> Essentially, people who have the luxury of taking their time to delay the hiring process as much as they can in order to maximize the number of concurrent offers.
I think this isn't as clear-cut as you're making it; the advice also applies to earlier-stage engineers. The key observation for those cases is that there _is_ a big return from running as intense a process as you can manage.
I think lots of folks apply for a few jobs at a time, and the point here is that you would likely be better off applying for 100 roles at once, rather than browsing and applying for a handful every week (and then tapering off if you get through the filter into a process that seems promising).
It's true that more-junior engineers will have fewer options, but I think you can still directionally update on this advice. I would also advise more junior engineers to actually run the funnel calculations to get a feel for how many applications you need to send out per onsite, as the dropoff is quite grim and therefore you need to push way harder than you might hope.
> or were laid off and have been unemployed for 6-12 months with a dwindling emergency fund, you may have to take the first sensible offer you get. Especially if the job market is tough (like it is right now) or if you need that paycheck to keep a roof over your head.
Also, if you see yourself in such a situation and see yourself having to choose between competing offers, it may make sense to go for the offer that pay less money if this position will expand your long-term employability. It is better for your career to become a tech lead for an upcoming Y-Combinator using Rust, than making some 50k more to be a Senior Java Developer in a oil company from TX.
This depends on what you want to do in your career. If you want to pursue a career in working in startups and early-stage tech companies, then working for a YC is better for you. A senior developer in TX is making way more than 50k. And working for an oil company in TX is good enough for your resume to get a serious look at 99% of the other traditional corporations.
Texas isn't some backwater. It's the second largest state with a long history in deep tech.
I hear working for oil and gas makes it hard to leave O&G because most companies have a hard time paying as well (aside from Big Tech, I guess), and maybe the ex-O&G engineer will go back to O&G for the higher pay sooner rather than later.
I wonder if the same dynamics, if it exists at all, apply to Big Tech alum.
I've got a few colleagues around the industry. Layoffs are super common, but so are the hiring sprints. And they generally use the same tech as any industry with a few exceptions. A lot of them never bought into the cloud because they have their own datacenters and their own bespoke compute and storage.
Your spidey sense is not failing you. Shiesty stuff kinda follows him around.
He was a professional poker player until he was involved in a cheating scandal. To hear him tell it he was a victim, but many in the poker community didn’t see it that way.
I've been told downsizing can be very random. "We'll keep PersonA because they're in the middle of a project that is running late, and our client won't tolerate a change, but PersonB just finished their project".
I doubt it's as random as all that - and I've known people who were forced out because of their salary (he went from sales to project management, but kept the salary, and they let him go at the first opportunity).
>As an aside, I looked at the post he talks about here ("how I got the job at airbnb") and this guy seems... kinda shiesty?
>He didn't stay at AirBnB for very long, has since moved onto... yup, crypto.
Can you explain why the author's background is relevant? The post seems to be decent advice to me, I don't see why it matters. One's work should stand for itself.
I only go to work to get paid. As such, I’m always thinking about money. How much more can I invest each month?
How might different risk investment allocations affect my retirement date?
The second I have enough money to quit and live the rest of my life as I want to, I will. If pessimistic retirement projections show a large success rate of funds through retirement, I’m gone! I don’t care how long I’ve worked for a place; I’m only there for the money and no other reason.
A lot of the same shit I do now between work but without work interrupting it and in the vicinity of a mansion and having built a family trust fund for their future.
> I know that the average software engineer in Silicon Valley makes roughly 120K a year salary.
Even allowing for inflation since 2016, this seems like a terrible way to start negotiating a salary: you just proclaimed yourself "average" and anchored yourself to a low number.
Proclaiming yourself average may not be such a bad thing if your experience consists of a 3 month bootcamp. If anything, proclaiming yourself "average" with that kind of background is vastly overselling yourself.
I would say it is actually pretty good negotiating strategy by subtly getting the hiring person to agree that 120k is the absolute floor and probably insultingly low, since who (especially at companies like Google and AirBnB) would willingly admit to hiring below-average or even average employees? "Everyone knows" that they want Only The Best (tm). Just the fact that they're talking about salary therefore implies that the applicant must be above average and confident behavior/being hard to get can easily reinforce that impression.
Who wants to hire the most adversarial person alive? yeah a company is not your friend and you should get as much as possible there is a point that you make yourself unhireble by showing that you are so mercenary that you'll be out the door the instant an x+1$ offer arrives.
People don't understand how wide the range of compensation in this space is.
I'll get pings from recruiters for jobs with compensation ranges from 1-3x. They are looking at the same LinkedIn page with my years of experience, career history and skills.
Often the companies that want to pay 1x are looking for quite a lot of experience & seniority, despite wanting to pay 1/3 the top of range I can achieve.
I've had job negotiations that they wanted me to manage 20 people, in-office, for less compensation than I was collecting as a remote IC.. and with more of it locked up in deferred stock with the slowest vesting schedule I had ever seen.
No. Mostly I've been offered as low as 1/3 my current salary.
And I know of places I can go for a 50% bump if I want to give up my personal life (I don't) for a couple years .
But I have helped peers in managing their careers / salary negotiations and found situations where people at my level were making 1/3 or 1/2 what I was.
I have also done the same and found people junior to me by quite a bit who were making more or less the same.
Compensation is path dependent and somewhat random.
> I sometimes get nervous during important phone calls, so discussing the offer over e-mail helps me to keep a clear head and communicate more clearly. I hope this is okay with you. :)
Personally I've always found the most important thing to offer negotiation is BATNA.
If your BATNA is going back to your current job, which is already decently paying and something you've made pretty easy by understanding it in depth, you're in a really good negotiating position from the start.
If your BATNA is unemployment, and you're not already wealthy, not so much. Some people find it tough to bluff that kind of thing, in which case, getting any job at all is going to do more for your future negotiating power than quibbling over the number. (I would still recommend quibbling, but only because most people won't retract the offer just because you counter these days!)
BATNA stands for Best Alternative To a Negotiated Agreement. In other words, it's your plan-b if you don't accept the current offer. It's a fairly common acronym when discussing negotiations, and is also spelled out in the article.
I believe that I read in Cracking the Coding Interview that big tech doesn't consider your current job as a comp, only pending offers. They won't increase an offer because you make more at your current job. I agree that candidates who are currently employed are generally seen in a much better light that candidates who are not currently employed.
> ” Now say you end up turning down their offer. They’ve spent over $24,000 just extending this single offer to you (to say nothing of opportunity costs), and now they’ll essentially have to start over from scratch.”
They definitely won’t start over from scratch. Most companies where I worked held on to reject one or two finalists until the selected one accepted the offer. Precisely to be able to go back and offer them the job without any significant cost if the first one in the ranking rejects the offer.
Since this final decisions are for minimal, very subjective reasons, I often saw a manager having second thoughts and kind of hoping the selected person to reject their offer so they can go with the other that, e.g. doesn’t have that experience in a stack, but seems nicer to work with.
In that scenario (not uncommon in my experience), the hiring manager has incentives to not raise the salary a bit.
But… otherwise is a very good, helpful article. Lots of good tips there.
> They definitely won’t start over from scratch. Most companies where I worked held on to reject one or two finalists until the selected one accepted the offer.
I've hired so many 2nd or 3rd choices when the first choice overnegotiated. In almost every case the person I passed over re-applied with us 3-6 months later. I'm not sure why, but I suspect that love of money does not always equate to a great software engineer.
Knowing the market value of a person (including oneself) is a business skill, and distinct from the skill of software engineering. Being bad at this means either overestimating or underestimating the value. Most people are going to underestimate their own worth if they need a job, but it shouldn't be too shocking when people err in the other direction sometimes.
I really loved the first half or so of this post. But they went off the rails a bit when they said that the hiring company will start over if you turn them down... that simply is not true. They move on to their next choice, and often have the 2nd choice offer ready to go in 5 minutes once you turn them down. Heck, you may be their 2nd choice for all you know. Or 3rd. Or 4th.
And the rest of the article then falls into role-playing contrived conversations, all of which can be skipped by being even more honest than they recommend. Simply say that you want an offer that is good enough to never make you second-guess your choice in joining them. That pretty much covers every conversation and scenario you can imagine, and you don't need to make up strategy for 3 potential layers of back and forth on who says what.
Seeing that this is from 2016, it does not really apply to the current market, which is BRUTAL. I have 20 years of experience, I just built my own SaaS service, and I have a pretty eclectic experience with languages and frameworks.
Forget interviews - I don't even get phone screens. Recruiters will ghost you, which is new. Usually you would not be able to get rid of them.
I think when an interview does come along, I will approach my salary demands gingerly.
That has not been my experience. It literally never happened to me. I actually proactively avoided recruiters back in the day because I found dealing with them exhausting.
It's a little hard to tell from there - I get the impression of a one-man shop where you perform multiple roles, with heavy emphasis on the technical? This might be a little hard to digest for your average recruiter, I feel they're rarely looking to hire entrepreneurs.
The market is though, but you should be getting at least phone screens. I suspect that maybe there's something that could be improved in your market positioning.
I have a similar amount of experience as you, and generally, ageism hasn't been a problem.
Start with the basics, have someone review your resume, no need for a professional, you probably can find a few people amongst your friend able to take a look and give a few suggestions. Ex-manager, ex-colleagues, even a former recruiter that was particularly cool and you really liked.
Recruiters sometimes get confused with resumes from people who can work in multiple languages and frameworks because they are not programmers. They won't understand that someone who worked with node will have an easier time understanding asyncio in python, that the way packages work in Go kind of remember the way you can write partial classes in different files in C#. They scan your resume trying to fill up a map where the keys are technologies and the values are years of experience, so, either you tailor your resume for each kind of opportunity or (better) send a cover letter expanding on your experience with the tech stack from the requirements.
Also, remember that now it is a buyer's market. You need to pro-actively apply for positions to keep your pipeline full. Long are the times where you just went to sleep, to wake up in the next morning and having 6 or 7 contact requests from recruiters in your linked-in.
Tech recruiter here with 8 years of experience running a recruitment agency and I have seen 1000s of people negotiating salary (in Switzerland).
I wouldn't never recommend doing what the author suggests, namely: "I’d prefer to discuss the details of the offer over e-mail."
The phone is always better. Busy business people such as recruiters prefer it. Especially, because nowadays everyone hides behind text. Only the phone or an in person meeting gives you the chance to really hear what is possible compensation-wise and then really get what you want.
My experience with recruiters on the phone has mostly been those recruiters pulling in one or two extra random people from their company on the call to hide behind as they try to lowball me with fifteen minutes of rambling about market conditions.
Dont talk about salary with recruiter. Demand to discuss your salary with person that is hiring you. They are looking to hire people, they have the say who gets hired and they decide on the number.
Talk to them not man in the middle that has no power. And person that will try everything to lowball you.
This is really good stuff. My negotiation skills really benefited from Voss's Never Split the Difference and this is exactly the kind of thing he'd suggest, I think.
Except:
> salary is almost always the hardest thing to give
This is not really true. There are many things that are much harder to change, like composition of social groups, databases, upper management, sales-dominated development, etc. Changing money is just poking an accountant to edit a number in a spreadsheet somewhere. (That said, there may be even easier things to change, but money is far from the hardest.)
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[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 195 ms ] threadYou need to pick your negotiation strategy based on the situation. Sometimes you do need to be bullheaded when insisting on a refund. That doesn't make you a bad negotiator when negotiating pay - you just use a different strategy when negotiating a pay raise.
How Not to Bomb a Job Offer - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21382224 - Oct 2019 (1 comment)
How Not to Bomb Your Offer Negotiation - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12476814 - Sept 2016 (125 comments)
> blushes I-i-i sometimes get nervous cough if maybe it could possibly be ok with you could we maybe do it with a phone call, whoops, I mean e-mail!! nervous laughter
Some recruiters may find it cute
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I've never seen a recruitment pipeline that stopped when they got an acceptable CV in, nevermind risk a lot of money on an offer stage. It keeps going until a contract is signed, and sometimes beyond, exactly to mitigate risk.
The risk/downside is that my number could be too low, but that's something I'm willing to live with if it means I can avoid having to negotiate. If they immediately agree to your number, it probably means you asked for too little. Or the person you're dealing with also hates negotiating.
Even I don’t like to push hard and use tactics like the ones you see in sales calls, but the last time I had to negotiate salaries, I just said that I was excited for the position and the company, and reminded them it would be difficult to accept what they were offering because it didn’t meet my expectations. Virtually everyone was convinced by said statements and came back with salary increases after that.
As for ChatGPT, there are tell tale markers when someone uses that, and because of its content-free nature of writing, it is very likely to backfire.
Why are you assuming that I'm constantly accepting lower salaries? I pick my number so that I can my bills and live a comfortable life. Sometimes they have to close a job req and open a new one with a higher pay grade to give me my number.
I've read a few times that employees don't care about the absolute number, as long as they feel like they are getting paid fairly compared to their peers. I was like that when I was younger but now I don't care. If Jeff does nothing and gets paid more than me, whatever. As long as I make a number I'm happy with then I'm happy.
> As for ChatGPT, there are tell tale markers when someone uses that, and because of its content-free nature of writing, it is very likely to backfire.
I just tried it, and it came up with:
> Thank you for the offer. I appreciate the opportunity to join your company. However, based on my skills, experience, and the market standards for this role in the industry, I was hoping for a salary closer to (your salary). I believe this reflects the value I can bring to the team and the responsibilities of the position.
Seems _good enough_. I'm sure if I spent more time with the prompt and actually told it what industry I'm in, it could write something less generic.
I’d typically explain in a friendly, non-threatening way how I’m sure they have a pay scale and pay ranges for particular positions, so why don’t we start with where they see me.
They’d usually push on a bit, and I’d stay friendly but resolute. You can always spin it in a way that “I really like what I’ve seen so far, so it’s not about the numbers. I’m flexible, I wouldn’t want you to pass on me just because of some random number I might say.”
For me this has worked wonders. Every single time I would’ve low balled myself. Highly recommended.
It’s a stupid game. You can totally opt to just not play it.
Similarly once I was given an offer I for a job I wasn’t looking for. It was a nice jump higher than what I was making. But I was happy with my current job.
I politely turned it down. Went to my current boss, explained that I got an offer, turned it down because I wasn’t looking for change but felt like that offer showed I was worth more than they were paying and would appreciate a bump.
I got a raise. I was happy. He was happy.
Important to note this does not make good advice / expectations - most bosses will not be as understanding, and the job you were happy with is now filled with resentment for not getting a raise.
In a way, you need to also pretend to be dumb and with a big ego. If you're irrational, they'll think they might lose the deal and will offer more.
It resembles dating. The same tiptoeing and guessing what the other person is thinking.
At it's most basic, the company wants to pay me the least I will accept. I want to be paid as much as possible. These are contradictory, so some middle ground needs to be found. There's also a lot of hidden information, on both sides: What's the most the company is willing to pay? What's the least I'm willing to take? We can also have orthogonal goals: personally, I put a pretty high value on PTO, so there's room for trading salary expectations for additional time off.
By not negotiating, all you're doing is leaving money on the table. The company is going to represent it's interests, you have to represent yours.
One of the worst things you can do in negotiation is talk to the wrong person. Instead of going you -> recruiter -> HR rep -> team lead -> hiring manager, you need to go you -> hiring manager. Talk to your recruiter, strategize, whatever, but everything else is playing telephone and it's very easy to get a yes from someone who's not allowed to say yes.
The distinction is - if there's one person with the authority to say yes to your salary requirements, and three people who only have the authority to say no, does it benefit you to go via those three people?
In some organisations it might benefit you! If your salary needs to be approved by a hierarch of the fourth level but you'll be reporting to a hierarch of the second level who'll be benefiting from your genius, they might be a highly motivated advocate in your favour.
In other organisations though, the more opportunities there are to say no, the higher chance of the answer being no.
Sometimes, it's the manager because they benefit the most from hiring you and the organization probably values their opinion, but some managers are pushovers with zero people skills and will be useless.
Sometimes, it's the recruiter because they are the most experienced with the hiring process and know what wheels to grease; sometimes they're useless because recruiters are often viewed as interchangeable cogs.
There is the flipside also, which is that if you misrepresent your own value and cinch an offer higher than you're worth, you'll be first to go when downsizing comes -- moreso the higher the number.
As an aside, I looked at the post he talks about here ("how I got the job at airbnb") and this guy seems... kinda shiesty?
First, top comment on the last story: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12477191
And this, also in the same thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12477866
He didn't stay at AirBnB for very long, has since moved onto... yup, crypto.
Hate to say it but in this market you ain’t going to get a callback with 3mo bootcamp so i wouldn’t waste the time reading it
2016 was pretty wild.
This is really an edge case. I would err towards earning more, having more saveable income, and growing into your pay.
Being able to take a gamble on a company that could do something big or important, or flame out quickly, is a huge privilege, and only comes from generational wealth or having your assets widely outweigh your liabilities by living below your means.
You'll get 3000$ Cool !
But 25% of that is car/phone/meal vouchers
Oh no, we can't give you more because your experience is not an exact fit with us.
oh actually, it's 2250 - 10%, because we'll hire you on a 3 months basis trial, afterwards we'll give you the salary.
oh, and if you don't mind, we'll pay you partly in royalties because it's tax free... But to do that, you'll easily understand you must waive your I.P. on the stuff you make for us.
Ad nauseam.
I understand I'm not worth an Einstein but, could they just be honest and say: we want to pay you the less possible and we will pay you with anything that will help us avoid taxes... This always remind me how much in power they are.
But isn't that extra good since usually you get many months pay when downsizing?
So unless you spend more than that time on finding a new job, it's 100% a net good.
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I can't comment on the other posts as I haven't read them, but I thought the negotiation ones were rather good overall. They line up with very well with other content I have read/watched/listened to from professional negotiators. I know these articles highlighted several things I have personally done wrong in past job offer negotiations.
It is important to note that most of this advice is mostly only applicable to white-collar seasoned professionals who are in the middle or later stages of their career. Essentially, people who have the luxury of taking their time to delay the hiring process as much as they can in order to maximize the number of concurrent offers.
If you are young and/or just getting started and are hungry to start your career, or were laid off and have been unemployed for 6-12 months with a dwindling emergency fund, you may have to take the first sensible offer you get. Especially if the job market is tough (like it is right now) or if you need that paycheck to keep a roof over your head. You can (and should!) always work on leveling up your career as you go along. Other, better opportunities WILL come along if you are properly tending to your skills and social network.
Performing poorly is what will trigger the PIP like process, compensation only comes up later. Further, it's rare for an org to truly let a manager slice up their compensation budget however the like (hey you can hire 2 juniors or 1 senior, your call).. so it often doesn't cost your direct line manager extra headcount just because you are on expensive end. Usually headcount is decided, and then the compensation required to fill that headcount is a secondary concern, as crazy as that seems.
Further, it's a rare interview process that doesn't shake out that you are at a lower seniority level than you are representing. Interviews may fail to shake out exact level of technical proficiency but I think most interviews do place you on the junior->senior spectrum fairly well.
Only once in my 20 year career have I almost gotten a job that in retrospect was way ahead of where I was at the time. 15 years later I ended up finally taking a similar job. But they didn't hire me!
Financially, this will likely still work out well for you in the long run. But it may not be a great way to get top job stability.
Job stability implies staying somewhere for a long period of time, and that's generally not how you maximize compensation.
Compensation maximizing career management usually involves moving every ~5 years or so, depending on industry.
But I'd rather make more money AND have more opportunities/experiences than to rely on the continued benevolence of my single long term employer.
When they start sorting spreadsheets by compensation for layoff purposes, you are already in the wrong place at the wrong time. Being paid less for years and years so that you are lower down the spreadsheet isn't a career strategy.
However you'll find its a lot easier to save money as you make more money.
My savings rate AND my absolute dollars saved have gone up as I progressed through 20s/30s/40s/etc.
Increases in your rent or real estate taxes +/-5% don't matter as much when housing is a lower overall % of your income. This is a big hurdle in HCOL areas when you are starting out, so the faster you can move through that phase the better.
The solution, then, seems to be: Be one of the best employees, particularly if you're getting paid more than most of them.
Also, people should just stop expecting job stability. The evidence is blatant and public that this simply isn't a thing for anyone. Instead, you should work on maximizing successful outcomes in your life and career regardless of which employer's logo is on your paycheck/badge. Having a budget, having an investment plan, and actively building up and managing your savings are just important life skills for success irrespective of how much you get paid and where you work. The more money you make, though, makes everything else easier. It is a fruitless and misguided plan to try to make /less/ just so you can "stay under the radar". Not only does it not work, but it's actually self-sabotaging.
There was a recent round of layoffs at my previous employer very last minute and chaotic. Skip level managers were given an hour to produce their list. My former skip level boss basically whacked everyone he disliked in one swoop as long as they weren't in operationally important roles he had no backup for.
Can confirm from my experience. The greater the salary, the better the working conditions. Companies that paid as little as possible also tried to squeeze out as much work as possible.
By and large companies that don't want to pay individuals appropriately also don't want to hire enough people, so everyone is stuck underpaid, overworked and miserable. They also tend to collect people in leadership roles who would not be hired anywhere else.. leaving their ICs all the worse.
My best paying jobs generally all had the best benefits and nicest people.
There are some examples of companies that are known in their industry to pay a premium "hazard pay" for working you to the bone, but they are something of an exception.
I think this isn't as clear-cut as you're making it; the advice also applies to earlier-stage engineers. The key observation for those cases is that there _is_ a big return from running as intense a process as you can manage.
I think lots of folks apply for a few jobs at a time, and the point here is that you would likely be better off applying for 100 roles at once, rather than browsing and applying for a handful every week (and then tapering off if you get through the filter into a process that seems promising).
It's true that more-junior engineers will have fewer options, but I think you can still directionally update on this advice. I would also advise more junior engineers to actually run the funnel calculations to get a feel for how many applications you need to send out per onsite, as the dropoff is quite grim and therefore you need to push way harder than you might hope.
Also, if you see yourself in such a situation and see yourself having to choose between competing offers, it may make sense to go for the offer that pay less money if this position will expand your long-term employability. It is better for your career to become a tech lead for an upcoming Y-Combinator using Rust, than making some 50k more to be a Senior Java Developer in a oil company from TX.
EDIT: I meant 50k MORE
Texas isn't some backwater. It's the second largest state with a long history in deep tech.
I wonder if the same dynamics, if it exists at all, apply to Big Tech alum.
He was a professional poker player until he was involved in a cheating scandal. To hear him tell it he was a victim, but many in the poker community didn’t see it that way.
https://upswingpoker.com/girah-jungleman-qureshi-scandal/
I doubt it's as random as all that - and I've known people who were forced out because of their salary (he went from sales to project management, but kept the salary, and they let him go at the first opportunity).
>He didn't stay at AirBnB for very long, has since moved onto... yup, crypto.
Can you explain why the author's background is relevant? The post seems to be decent advice to me, I don't see why it matters. One's work should stand for itself.
If no amount of money will ever make you stop thinking about money, you don't need negotiating advice, you need a psychologist.
How might different risk investment allocations affect my retirement date?
The second I have enough money to quit and live the rest of my life as I want to, I will. If pessimistic retirement projections show a large success rate of funds through retirement, I’m gone! I don’t care how long I’ve worked for a place; I’m only there for the money and no other reason.
Just I don't really like this approach of ending with a suggestion to "see a psychologist".
It's like this conversation:
Alice: Alcohol is bad for you!
Bob: But I can't relax and have as great conversations in social settings or connect with people properly.
Alice: That's just an excuse! If you can't enjoy yourself without alcohol there must be something wrong with you!
Bob: Okay, maybe there's something wrong with me. What should I do.
Alice: Go see a therapist.
Bob: Sees therapist
Bob: Still can't enjoy or relax
Bob: How long should I try this and for how long should I skip being able to enjoy social situations or relax?
Alice: Keep trying!
Bob ends up trying, but never gets anywhere, then dies.
Even allowing for inflation since 2016, this seems like a terrible way to start negotiating a salary: you just proclaimed yourself "average" and anchored yourself to a low number.
I would say it is actually pretty good negotiating strategy by subtly getting the hiring person to agree that 120k is the absolute floor and probably insultingly low, since who (especially at companies like Google and AirBnB) would willingly admit to hiring below-average or even average employees? "Everyone knows" that they want Only The Best (tm). Just the fact that they're talking about salary therefore implies that the applicant must be above average and confident behavior/being hard to get can easily reinforce that impression.
Yup. That's the way to go as a freelancer. You announce your rate and either they book you or not.
If you get a better deal just switch. The MBA caricature type will just despise you for taking the worse deal anyways.
There deal gotta be better though and 1USD is certainly not worth the risk alone.
Never ever had I seen a CEO that much in shock.
Often the companies that want to pay 1x are looking for quite a lot of experience & seniority, despite wanting to pay 1/3 the top of range I can achieve.
I've had job negotiations that they wanted me to manage 20 people, in-office, for less compensation than I was collecting as a remote IC.. and with more of it locked up in deferred stock with the slowest vesting schedule I had ever seen.
One company pays you 50€/h and think you're expensive, another pays you 150€/h and thinks it's a bargain.
And I know of places I can go for a 50% bump if I want to give up my personal life (I don't) for a couple years .
But I have helped peers in managing their careers / salary negotiations and found situations where people at my level were making 1/3 or 1/2 what I was.
I have also done the same and found people junior to me by quite a bit who were making more or less the same.
Compensation is path dependent and somewhat random.
Then I heard that their salary band was 90-110K (and was fixed, but variable depending on your COL band).
"That might get you an Associate PM..."
I personally wouldn't send something like this.
"I would prefer to discuss the offer over email".
Is enough.
If your BATNA is going back to your current job, which is already decently paying and something you've made pretty easy by understanding it in depth, you're in a really good negotiating position from the start.
If your BATNA is unemployment, and you're not already wealthy, not so much. Some people find it tough to bluff that kind of thing, in which case, getting any job at all is going to do more for your future negotiating power than quibbling over the number. (I would still recommend quibbling, but only because most people won't retract the offer just because you counter these days!)
They definitely won’t start over from scratch. Most companies where I worked held on to reject one or two finalists until the selected one accepted the offer. Precisely to be able to go back and offer them the job without any significant cost if the first one in the ranking rejects the offer.
Since this final decisions are for minimal, very subjective reasons, I often saw a manager having second thoughts and kind of hoping the selected person to reject their offer so they can go with the other that, e.g. doesn’t have that experience in a stack, but seems nicer to work with.
In that scenario (not uncommon in my experience), the hiring manager has incentives to not raise the salary a bit.
But… otherwise is a very good, helpful article. Lots of good tips there.
I've hired so many 2nd or 3rd choices when the first choice overnegotiated. In almost every case the person I passed over re-applied with us 3-6 months later. I'm not sure why, but I suspect that love of money does not always equate to a great software engineer.
And the rest of the article then falls into role-playing contrived conversations, all of which can be skipped by being even more honest than they recommend. Simply say that you want an offer that is good enough to never make you second-guess your choice in joining them. That pretty much covers every conversation and scenario you can imagine, and you don't need to make up strategy for 3 potential layers of back and forth on who says what.
Forget interviews - I don't even get phone screens. Recruiters will ghost you, which is new. Usually you would not be able to get rid of them.
I think when an interview does come along, I will approach my salary demands gingerly.
Now, I would probably buy them dinner.
I have a similar amount of experience as you, and generally, ageism hasn't been a problem.
Start with the basics, have someone review your resume, no need for a professional, you probably can find a few people amongst your friend able to take a look and give a few suggestions. Ex-manager, ex-colleagues, even a former recruiter that was particularly cool and you really liked.
Recruiters sometimes get confused with resumes from people who can work in multiple languages and frameworks because they are not programmers. They won't understand that someone who worked with node will have an easier time understanding asyncio in python, that the way packages work in Go kind of remember the way you can write partial classes in different files in C#. They scan your resume trying to fill up a map where the keys are technologies and the values are years of experience, so, either you tailor your resume for each kind of opportunity or (better) send a cover letter expanding on your experience with the tech stack from the requirements.
Also, remember that now it is a buyer's market. You need to pro-actively apply for positions to keep your pipeline full. Long are the times where you just went to sleep, to wake up in the next morning and having 6 or 7 contact requests from recruiters in your linked-in.
I wouldn't never recommend doing what the author suggests, namely: "I’d prefer to discuss the details of the offer over e-mail."
The phone is always better. Busy business people such as recruiters prefer it. Especially, because nowadays everyone hides behind text. Only the phone or an in person meeting gives you the chance to really hear what is possible compensation-wise and then really get what you want.
Btw I wrote this guide years ago: https://iwangulenko.gumroad.com/l/5-salary-negtiation-hacks?...
My experience with recruiters on the phone has mostly been those recruiters pulling in one or two extra random people from their company on the call to hide behind as they try to lowball me with fifteen minutes of rambling about market conditions.
Talk to them not man in the middle that has no power. And person that will try everything to lowball you.
Except:
> salary is almost always the hardest thing to give
This is not really true. There are many things that are much harder to change, like composition of social groups, databases, upper management, sales-dominated development, etc. Changing money is just poking an accountant to edit a number in a spreadsheet somewhere. (That said, there may be even easier things to change, but money is far from the hardest.)