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Salary Negotiation: Make More Money, Be More Valued (2012)

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Re: Salary Negotiation: Make More Money, Be More Valued (2012)

#21

Post by cbsks »

jaaron wrote: post #5

Speaking as a hiring manager for 10+ years: If I've done my job right, I've sourced engineers experienced, confident and smart enough to negotiate and ask good questions around compensation. I want to make sure that we have an open conversation so that both sides can move forward to the actual job at hand. Tip: California based firms are required to give you a salary range if you ask for it and they can't ask you for…

> California based firms are required to give you a salary range if you ask for it

I didn't know that! Do you know what the actual law says? Are employers required to give the salary range for any open position on request? Or is it more limited than that?

Re: Salary Negotiation: Make More Money, Be More Valued (2012)

#22

Post by aiqq »

doopy1 wrote: post #20
quicklime wrote: post #17

> We’ve been talking about your employer as an abstraction, but in the instant case you’re talking to an actual person. Let’s call him Bob. It is Bob’s job to get you signed with the company as cheaply as possible, but Bob is not super motivated to do so, because Bob is not spending Bob’s money to hire you. Bob is spending Bob’s budget. Bob generally does not get large performance incentives for shaving money off of…

I think companies under a certain size and it's a different story.

in large companies companies incompetent individuals, such as this sample, occasionally slip through the net. but they get pruned out pretty soon, but no sooner than whoever hired this slacker.

Re: Salary Negotiation: Make More Money, Be More Valued (2012)

#23

Post by castawayonaship »

I loved this article and it's honestly life changing. It takes a bit of time to realize how much you're in the driver seat as a candidate. Especially with competing offers, there's no way you should be accepting an offer with less (unless its a small startup) if you have another offering more.

A 5 minute call that can increase net worth by large multipliers is probably worth preparing for. With the help of https://levels.fyi and other salary tools out there, it's incredible how open a lot of this information is. You just need to put in a bit of time and effort.

Re: Salary Negotiation: Make More Money, Be More Valued (2012)

#24

Post by ddlutz »

MuffinFlavored wrote: post #3

most of my bosses have made me feel petty when asking for an extra $10k/yr i've found that when working for corporations, it's all about the number you ask for up front. after that, it takes quite a bit to get more than the average 3-5% merit pay bump. how FANG companies work with the $500k/yr total comp for average engineers, i have no clue... i think from what i've seen from levels.fyi the most common salaries are…

Is $500k really "average" engineer compensation at top tech companies? That's the average compensation for an L6 at Google, which has an average tenure of 13.2 years https://www.levels.fyi/charts.html. Many people will max-out at L5 in there careers.

Compensation is really good in tech, but I don't think saying "$500k/yr total comp for average engineers" is helping anybody.

Re: Salary Negotiation: Make More Money, Be More Valued (2012)

#25

Post by braythwayt »

quicklime wrote: post #17

> We’ve been talking about your employer as an abstraction, but in the instant case you’re talking to an actual person. Let’s call him Bob. It is Bob’s job to get you signed with the company as cheaply as possible, but Bob is not super motivated to do so, because Bob is not spending Bob’s money to hire you. Bob is spending Bob’s budget. Bob generally does not get large performance incentives for shaving money off of…

First, I think you and the OP are correct. It’s not Barbara’s money, and Barbara’s career is driven by hiring and developing productive people. If her group is shipping good product, nobody in a growth company is sitting down and asking why a group that ships 30% more product costs 10% more per head.

That will come much later in the company’s trajectory.

One small exception to this from my n=1 experience is that all other things being equal, when hiring Barbara would rather pay at the low end of the range and then be generous with a raise, than pay at the top end of the range and have to fight to get you a raise.

That first performance review and raise set the tone for years to come, and good managers want it to be a happy experience for everyone.

—-

But that’s only if all other things are equal. Barbara doesn’t want to lose you to another employer by over-negotiating, so ask for what you want.

Let her worry about fighting for your first raise. That’s the job she signed up for.

Re: Salary Negotiation: Make More Money, Be More Valued (2012)

#26

Post by braythwayt »

pianoben wrote: post #11
MetallicCloud wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've read similar things about how most programming work is just plumbing together existing code fairly regularly on HN. Is that really what most people do? Is it a web development thing? That's not my experience at all, and it sounds mind numbingly awful.

How often do you write hashtables? JSON serializers? Mutexes? HTTP clients? Transaction managers? Connection pools? In my last job as a mobile engineer I can claim that I wrote code all day, and that's true to a point, but most of that code is shepherding data from one format to another, using libraries that I didn't write, causing the UI (whose framework was written by someone else) to update. And you know what? It'…

There is a “Red Queen’s Race” between the accelerating productivity gains of abstractions, frameworks, libraries, and other stacks we can leverage, balanced against the fact that each one is a leaky abstraction, and the leaks interfere with each other in weird, mysterious ways.

Programming with all these tools is wonderful. Debugging problems in such am environment, not-so-much. But net, it’s a massive win.

Re: Salary Negotiation: Make More Money, Be More Valued (2012)

#28

Post by cmckn »

ddlutz wrote: post #24
MuffinFlavored wrote: post #3

most of my bosses have made me feel petty when asking for an extra $10k/yr i've found that when working for corporations, it's all about the number you ask for up front. after that, it takes quite a bit to get more than the average 3-5% merit pay bump. how FANG companies work with the $500k/yr total comp for average engineers, i have no clue... i think from what i've seen from levels.fyi the most common salaries are…

Is $500k really "average" engineer compensation at top tech companies? That's the average compensation for an L6 at Google, which has an average tenure of 13.2 years https://www.levels.fyi/charts.html . Many people will max-out at L5 in there careers. Compensation is really good in tech, but I don't think saying "$500k/yr total comp for average engineers" is helping anybody.

> Is $500k really "average" engineer compensation at top tech companies?

(from my own experience) Absolutely not.

Re: Salary Negotiation: Make More Money, Be More Valued (2012)

#29

Post by taurath »

foolmeonce wrote: post #9
dudul wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think programming is moving away from automation. We're no longer writing code or fancy algorithms. We are plumbers connecting systems and APIs. However, the true value of the engineer in 2020 is that they're the one trying to make sense of idiotic product requirements. They're the ones turning shiny, half assed mockups into real products. That cannot be automated. If the value was only in pissing lines of code the…

I think the more successful shift in the last 20 years was to train non-CS Majors towards a minor in CS and inventing another dozen nonprogrammer "tech" roles. That could be the end of a lot of local engineering jobs as people from other majors can now actually manage the offshore programming in their field without as much miscommunication. At any rate it seems like a very different landscape than back when even othe…

I’m not so sure a CS degree prepares anyone to program things - maybe some very light embedded work. I’ve interviewed many a person with a CA degree or even a masters degree that can’t code well.

Re: Salary Negotiation: Make More Money, Be More Valued (2012)

#30

Post by awinder »

quicklime wrote: post #17

> We’ve been talking about your employer as an abstraction, but in the instant case you’re talking to an actual person. Let’s call him Bob. It is Bob’s job to get you signed with the company as cheaply as possible, but Bob is not super motivated to do so, because Bob is not spending Bob’s money to hire you. Bob is spending Bob’s budget. Bob generally does not get large performance incentives for shaving money off of…

The amounts of money never made any sense to me that some hiring managers will die on a hill over. In time I came to the realization that it’s very important for some people to have that “win” / upper hand in the new relationship, as like a tone setting sort of thing.
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