Salary Negotiation • Hacker News Board

Re: Salary Negotiation

#91

Post by jldugger » Fri, Jun 03, 2016, 5:27 PM UTC

> How to avoid the “What is your desired salary?” question

Already off to a bad start. Just like we assume that advertisements without a salary range will be shitty salaries, employers assume applicants who dodge this question have a shitty BATNA. A good answer to this question is "x% more than I'm making now, and high enough to outbid competing offers from companies A, B and C." But if you want to avoid answering the question, a good response is "you advertised at 80k-100k, and that is admissable, but you will need to beat offers from companies A, B and C."

Re: Salary Negotiation

#92

Post by vladimirralev » Fri, Jun 03, 2016, 5:27 PM UTC

jonknee wrote: post #57

vladimirralev wrote: post #47

This just seems like a walkthrough how to educate a shitty manager who got their "business-degree" from dilbert comic strips. The last thing a manager wants to do is to lowball a guy who's performance depends on his own good faith. If I have to explain to the manager why this is a bad idea and why he is putting me at disadvantage while keeping key information from me and using sleazy tactics he saw in the "boiler roo…

It turns out there are a lot more than 5 companies out there in the marketplace... And if you think you got a fair initial offer you almost certainly did not.

I referred to top5 just as an example of professionalism, possibly backed by tons of data and analytics internally too. Which to me means it's the best methodology currently known.

Well if I didn't get a fair initial offer then the manager must think the risk of me finding out will not affect his goals. I accept that, as long as they accept it too. But I don't want to find out I was lied to and then expect me to be loyal.

Re: Salary Negotiation

#93

Post by wccrawford » Fri, Jun 03, 2016, 5:27 PM UTC

dragonwriter wrote: post #43

billions wrote: post #42

Why are developers NOT paid proportional to output? A 5x developer should get paid more than a 2x dev but that doesn't seem to happen

> Why are developers NOT paid proportional to output? Because measuring business value of output of individual developers on a team is not easily done, and other output measures (e.g., SLOC) tend to be things that, if tied to pay, would create obvious adverse incentives.

Indeed. I had an employer that told me my output was too low for the first few years. Then we had a security audit (following an event) and my code was the only code that came through squeaky clean. They didn't talk about the amount of my output after that.

It's not easy to measure the value of someone's work, even years later, and certainly not immediately.

Re: Salary Negotiation

#94

Post by rm999 » Fri, Jun 03, 2016, 5:27 PM UTC

codegeek wrote: post #76

Whenever I am negotiating a salary, even if I have to reveal what I make now, I will end that statement with "But based on my experience and value that I bring to the table, I am expecting at least xyz for my new role otherwise it is not worth it for me to quit my current job". This way, you make the whole "current salary" irrelevant. The point is that any good employer will NEVER let go of a candidate who is an exce…

Completely agreed on negotiating without the "current salary" perspective.

I've always requested to keep my current salary secret, but I've never met a hiring manager/HR recruiter that's ok with this. I suppose knowing what I make comforts them that their offer isn't completely crazy, but I think it's also evidence of a disturbing bias against the unemployed/underemployed.

Re: Salary Negotiation

#95

Post by xviia » Fri, Jun 03, 2016, 5:28 PM UTC

kaybe wrote: post #88

mathattack wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think "teaching women to negotiate" is practical. Is Google or Facebook supposed to send candidates to negotiation classes before offer negotiation time? Is there evidence that a training class can overcome whatever combination of nature and nurture causes the discrepancy? Let the market drive the compensation level. If "the compensation for the position - take it or leave it" is too low, then the company won…

> Is there evidence that a training class can overcome whatever combination of nature and nurture causes the discrepancy? There is also the issue that the same behaviour is seen differently when coming from men and women. What is assertive in a man can be aggressive and offputting in a woman. Which means you'd have to have different kinds of courses for different genders, and it only starts there (more minority group…

How much of that is the result of intrinsic gender differences vs. learned culture?

Re: Salary Negotiation

#96

Post by maxxxxx » Fri, Jun 03, 2016, 5:29 PM UTC

billions wrote: post #42

Why are developers NOT paid proportional to output? A 5x developer should get paid more than a 2x dev but that doesn't seem to happen

How do you measure that? Most hard metrics like number of bugs fixed or lines of code are easily abused.

Re: Salary Negotiation

#97

Post by sokoloff » Fri, Jun 03, 2016, 5:29 PM UTC

ohjeez wrote: post #87

sokoloff wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just come right out and basically say the latter to inquiries and it's fairly prominent on my resume as well. I enjoy both what I do and the company I'm at, which puts a clear floor on what I'll entertain. If I can't get confidence early in the process, it leads to a lot of wasted time. In practical terms, that means I invest less than an hour before figuring that out. ("I'm pretty happy here and my current comp st…

> I just come right out and basically say the latter to inquiries and it's fairly prominent on my resume as well. How do you word it on your resume? (I'd like to steal the verbiage. )

Most people reading this resume online shouldn't bother contacting me. I'm happy at __XXX__ (the work, the business, and the leadership) and very well compensated here.

If you believe that you have a position for which you honestly think I'd be interested, please feel free to contact me. I insist however on restricting phone calls to principals only. I have too much to do in my day to field cold-calls from head-hunters looking to fill their Rolodexes with my name or the names of my colleagues. In fairness to my company and my colleagues, I won't assist you on a fishing expedition.

If you are a headhunter reading this, please take a moment to consider whether the position you have to fill truly fits like a glove, before investing your precious time (and mine) on a phone call. Headhunters are encouraged instead to e-mail, as this takes less of your time, and is less intrusive to my workday.

Thanks for your consideration.

(That's maybe a little aggressively anti-headhunter, especially if you're in job-search mode, which I'm not. I have nothing against recruiters per-se, but I also don't want to chit-chat on the phone with them unproductively for both of us...)

Re: Salary Negotiation

#98

Post by pyoung » Fri, Jun 03, 2016, 5:31 PM UTC

xviia wrote: post #62

mathattack wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've struggled with this a lot. I used to believe in making it a negotiation. The more I've seen, I've switched to paying for the position. Unless hard negotiation is part of the job description, it shouldn't be rewarded. I've also found that rewarding hard negotiators pushes companies down the path of paying men more than women for the same job. If you can't stay in business without underpaying a lot of people, your…

Without salary negotiation, the company gets to choose the price. Unfortunately, Silicon Valley has shown that it is willing to collude to keep that price down. Therefore, when companies argue that they're banning salary negotiation to "promote equality", you should assume that this equality is merely a gimmick to hide the true purpose: lower wages. If there really is a difference in negotiating ability between women…

Negotiations still take place, they just happen in a different format. For example if the Technical Lead is having trouble hiring due to low salaries for the positions, he would make the case to management that they need to raise the salary range for those positions. And the added benefit to this format (in a transparent organization) current employees would also get a raise which would probably help with attrition.

I think for very senior roles, individual negotiations still might make sense, as the value prop of those hires is highly variable and can have big impacts on the organization. But for roles like Software Eng I, and Software Eng II, etc... in the long run it is better for morale, attrition, and equality to use defined salary ranges. And you can still use bonuses to adjust compensation based on performance.

Re: Salary Negotiation

#99

Post by dpweb » Fri, Jun 03, 2016, 5:34 PM UTC

swombat wrote: post #5

We're really trying to nail a good way to deal with salary negotiations when onboarding people, at GrantTree - one that gets out of this "gotcha" approach to salary. So far the best we've figured out is to be the first ones to name a number, and be super-transparent about how we arrived at that number. The reasoning is that "in a salary negotiation the first person to quote a number loses", so since we (as the employ…

Asking the salary question of a prospect is un-necessary, and doing it to find opportunities to low ball someone, it's game-playing - it's wrong. The company should know about how much that person is worth. Low balling really isn't necessary to live up to your management responsbilities on the company side of it.

On the employee side, best to get out of the question as quick as possible. One thing to say is, I have offers higher than that already. They can find out your current salary, but the other offers, doesn't have to be disclosed.

Re: Salary Negotiation

#100

Post by hyperpape » Fri, Jun 03, 2016, 5:35 PM UTC

pillowkusis wrote: post #67

jknz wrote: post #48

What follows is an honest salary determination process, where no party has incentive to lie. It is also very fast. The rules are as follows. (Can't remember where I read about this.) The company and the candidate write on a piece of paper a salary. The company should write the number above which it is not willing to pay the candidate. The candidate writes the number under which she/he is not willing to work for that…

you still have a strong incentive to lie, do you not? Since the final salary is the average of the two numbers, employers want to go as low as they can and prospects want to go as high as they can. in fact, this system punishes honesty even more than the current one -- if I am honest and the other person is dishonest, the dishonest person wins because they will pull the average in the direction they want and I get a…

I think you're right. Unless both parties are completely ignorant of the others' goals and only play the game once, there is an incentive to lie.

If I don't know what you'll say (and can't play the chances with multiple candidates/employers), I should say what's true. Otherwise, it seems I could expect to gain in any given "game" by raising/lowering my request until I'm at 50% confidence that our ranges will overlap.