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Ask HN: Is patio11's salary negotiation guide relevant in today's market?

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Re: Ask HN: Is patio11's salary negotiation guide relevant in today's market?

#121

Post by turtlebits »

FooBarBizBazz wrote: post #2

Whenever you have more than one offer, there is room for negotiation.

I hate negotiation with a passion. However, IME, just being semi transparent about your max offer lets anyone else come back with new numbers without having to ask for a specific number.

Another is to ask for additional benefits in monetary value. IE if one company that provides parking/commuter/better health coverage benefits, ask for an additional $X per year to the companies that don't.

That also make it like you're trying to equalize total comp instead of asking for an arbitrary higher number.

Re: Ask HN: Is patio11's salary negotiation guide relevant in today's market?

#122

Post by lwhi »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #120
lwhi wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because it is more precise. 'Alternative' or 'option', leave the question 'to what?'.

Unless we’re in a situation where violence concludes every interaction, “negotiated agreement” is the presumed conclusion of every interaction. I declined this job offer because I had BATNA. I declined this job offer because I had a better option. I negotiated more PTO because I had a BATNA. I negotiated more PTO because I had a better alternative.

It's an educational concept. Not something you'd use in a sentence like that.

I think you're being a pendent.

Re: Ask HN: Is patio11's salary negotiation guide relevant in today's market?

#123

Post by mixmastamyk »

sweetmeet99 wrote: post #68

I am a generalist. Not once in my twenty years of experience have I met anyone like me. I can write firmware just as well as I can design and implement UX and UI. Heck, I can design circuits or even products in fusion 360. Where are all these so called generalists? If you mean “fullstack”, that is only a small fraction of software, and the bar has lowered a lot since JavaScript has become ubiquitous (so you only need…

I can do all these things too, and learn more, but without recent professional experience on the resume, it’s not generally known or believed. (Part of the problem is that interviewers default to disbelief these days.)

No one is knocking on my door looking for generalists, and a large majority of job listings are short-sighted on specifics. i.e. no one cares about my computer architecture, QA, or sysad chops.

Re: Ask HN: Is patio11's salary negotiation guide relevant in today's market?

#124

Post by mixmastamyk »

cutemonster wrote: post #79
sweetmeet99 wrote: post #68

I am a generalist. Not once in my twenty years of experience have I met anyone like me. I can write firmware just as well as I can design and implement UX and UI. Heck, I can design circuits or even products in fusion 360. Where are all these so called generalists? If you mean “fullstack”, that is only a small fraction of software, and the bar has lowered a lot since JavaScript has become ubiquitous (so you only need…

Both firmware and UX, makes me wonder, what did you study? (Something closer to hardware and theory than to design and UX if I were to guess?)

A few decades ago everyone learned C/C+ in school. Then might take an interest in gui programming, later read a book on what makes good ui. Over a decade or three, quite doable.

Re: Ask HN: Is patio11's salary negotiation guide relevant in today's market?

#125

Post by BobaFloutist »

ike2792 wrote: post #110
jghn wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People can & will walk away for reasons other than competing offer. It also depends on how badly they want to get a new job. I both have and have seen others interview on the basis of "sure, why not" and if the pot isn't sweet enough then whatever. That said, people in this position should cite how sweet that pot needs to be upfront instead of after the fact. But that doesn't always happen.

Agreed. Regardless of reason, you need to be prepared to walk away if you are serious about negotiating.

Not really, you just have to convince them they are.

Sometimes you're desperate for a job and they have you over a barrel, but there's no reason they need to know that.

Re: Ask HN: Is patio11's salary negotiation guide relevant in today's market?

#126

Post by bradlys »

j0hnyl wrote: post #95
medvezhenok wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The magic incantation is competing offer . If they know you have alternatives, they are much more likely to negotiate. In fact the modern version of this guide is try to get several offers and negotiate them against each other (not you versus the company). Might be more difficult in the current market.

I'm not sure how this works in practice. This means that timing of the offers needs to align pretty closely. How long will a company let you sit on an offer before they move on? I've only ever interviewed or worked at companies that are at most a few hundred people. When I get an offer, I'm pressured for an answer within days. Once or twice I've been able to stretch that to like 2-3 weeks.

People just need to lie more often. In many cases, they will not verify anything. If they require proof, you can say everything was a verbal offer with no official documentation. That's often how it is because many recruiters don't want to go through the paperwork process before there's an agreement.

That said, I've found the "competing offer" element to be of little to no value. Even when I had 7 competing offers, not one of them negotiated more than maybe 10% on the amount. The one that gave me the largest bump didn't even need to know about competing offers - they just wanted to know what would get me to sign. I said X and they did it.

Re: Ask HN: Is patio11's salary negotiation guide relevant in today's market?

#127

Post by coreyp_1 »

RestlessMind wrote: post #116
coreyp_1 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure on the root cause. Like I said, there's several people that I know who are all experiencing the same things. I have 20 years experience and a phd. Others in my friend group have no degree whatsoever, but have a decade of experience. Several years ago, we were all offered multiple jobs at a time. Now, we are not even getting requests for interviews. EDIT: adding that, because we all live in a non-metropol…

I think fully remote expectation in non-metro areas can be a big hurdle. I know many startups here in SF who are looking to hire good candidates. But they want in-office presence at least a few days a week. Someone summed it up nicely for me - remote work gives you speed. Colocation (typically office) gives you velocity. A startup needs velocity.

With modern teleconferencing tools, it doesn't matter.

If you feel that in-person time is important, then do what we did at my current company: They hired me. I know everyone at the local state university, from professors to students. We hired from that pool. Everyone is still remote, but our local group gets together once a week for lunch. For $100-$150 a week (yes, it really is that cheap in this area), the company maintains a culture and personal interaction for a team of talented programmers (from me, who has a PhD and two decades of experience, down to the best students who just graduated, and others in-between) without the cost of maintaining an office.

We all work on different projects in the company.

Velocity happens with communication. Communication doesn't need to be in-person, but it does need to be real time. So use Teams, Zoom, Hangouts, or whatever. We have the tools for this already.

Final note: The company didn't intend to have half a dozen people in the same city, they just intended to hire me. It just so happens that I'm really good at finding talent in the places that everyone else is ignoring.

Re: Ask HN: Is patio11's salary negotiation guide relevant in today's market?

#128

Post by ericmcer »

brtkdotse wrote: post #71
ryandrake wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But man, a lot of the people out there absolutely still do not grok negotiating. Unless you have some kind of very unique skill or you have other offers and the company really, really wants you, how exactly are you supposed to negotiate? Every comp negotiation I've ever had with a company has gone kind of like this: [Company]: Here's your offer for $X. [Me]: I'd like $Y. [Company]: Your offer is for $X. [Me]: Well,…

Negotiation start and stop with BATNA - Best Alternative To Negotiated Agreement. The employers BATNA is they go to the pool of 35 other candidates. Yours is you go back to your job. If your job hunting first when your sick to death of your job, your BATNA isn’t very strong. If this is your only offer, your BATNA isn’t very strong. If you’re one paycheck away from being out of the street, your BATNA isn’t very strong…

Yeah this was always step 1 to negotiations as I learned it. The goal was always to try and schedule interviews so you could land multiple offers at one time. If you have 2-3 offers and an existing job your position is insanely strong.

If you are unemployed and this is your first offer in 3 months you cant really negotiate... just take it if it is a reasonable offer.

Re: Ask HN: Is patio11's salary negotiation guide relevant in today's market?

#129

Post by ttymck »

brtkdotse wrote: post #71
ryandrake wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But man, a lot of the people out there absolutely still do not grok negotiating. Unless you have some kind of very unique skill or you have other offers and the company really, really wants you, how exactly are you supposed to negotiate? Every comp negotiation I've ever had with a company has gone kind of like this: [Company]: Here's your offer for $X. [Me]: I'd like $Y. [Company]: Your offer is for $X. [Me]: Well,…

Negotiation start and stop with BATNA - Best Alternative To Negotiated Agreement. The employers BATNA is they go to the pool of 35 other candidates. Yours is you go back to your job. If your job hunting first when your sick to death of your job, your BATNA isn’t very strong. If this is your only offer, your BATNA isn’t very strong. If you’re one paycheck away from being out of the street, your BATNA isn’t very strong…

> See where I’m going with this?

No. Could you elaborate?

Re: Ask HN: Is patio11's salary negotiation guide relevant in today's market?

#130

Post by sotix »

cutemonster wrote: post #98
sotix wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s hard to extrapolate to the whole market, but I can provide my personal experience. I was laid off, and my unemployment benefits have stopped, so finding a job is a bit more desperate for me than it has been in the past. Now I’m dealing with algorithms technical interviews, but they don’t mesh well with my style of problem solving at all. I like to quietly think on a problem by myself first. If it’s an exceptiona…

When you say "a LeetCode hard", is that because the problem is literally on the LeetCode website, among the hard ones? Or is it similar to LeetCode problems, although not actually on their website? Does everyone remember all question titles by heart and that's why they say it was Leetcode questions, or is it more figuratively speaking :-) I hope you'll find a place with an interview process that works for you.

It was a difficult problem, and I was genuinely interested in the solution. So I searched online after the interview and found that leetcode called it a hard problem.
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