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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)

#121

Post by langitbiru »

castawayonaship wrote: post #23

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://le…

"other salary tools out there" -> I am developing one of them, called PredictSalary (https://predictsalary.com). To put in a nutshell, I try to utilize Deep Learning to predict salary range from job opportunities.

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

#122

Post by mytailorisrich »

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…

> It's a lot easier to get a pay bump when you're negotiating the offer, than it is to get a raise/promotion

That's absolutely key and always true.

This is also compounded by the fact that companies often have salary bands and that annual salary increases are usually a percentage of the existing salary.

So negotiating the best starting salary is very important and has effects years into the job.

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

#123

Post by mytailorisrich »

namdnay wrote: post #110
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…

As with all advice of this sort, it really depends on the company culture. My current employer for example has a very hard salary policy (basically a fixed number depending on age and which engineering college you went to, with yearly raises negotiated with unions - a very common occurrence in France unfortunately). Unless you’re interviewing for a position with >100 reports they will never risk upsetting this mechan…

At engineer level (who are 'cadres' in French) there's always individual salary negotiation unless perhaps you work for the government.

Now, your manager might try to convince you that's this is not the case so as not to give you a raise but they obviously do have adjustment margins.

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

#124

Post by mytailorisrich »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #41
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…

> My job is to fill the headcount that I've got, so as long as it fits within budget, whatever. Exactly, but the budget isn't infinite. Assuming equal talent, I'd much rather hire 5 people at market rate rather than 4 people at 25% over market rate. The net cost is roughly the same, but we can get much more accomplished with 1 more person on the team. Even better, on-call demands are spread out over more people and v…

I'd much rather hire 4 above average people than 5 average people.

Having more people adds its own cost and there is a Pareto law in people's contributions.

Edit: Basically, IMHO, in terms of assembling the best team to deliver the best results it's better to keep things as small as possible. But in terms of internal company politics it's better to grow the team as much as possible.

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

#125

Post by marvin »

shuckles wrote: post #54
legerdemain wrote: post #43

> Virtually any amount of money available to you personally is > mouse droppings to your prospective employer. > They will not feel offended if you ask for it. Two comments. (a) I interviewed with Wealthfront last year. They offered $160K, which was lower cash comp than any of my other offers. I tried to open the door to negotiation. The recruiter and the dev lead then got on the phone with me to awkwardly explain th…

In the case of Wealthfront, it may be a cultural matter as their CEO specifically believes that negotiating your offer is a negative indicator: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/20130708151000-56725-offer-co...

That statement is a textbook example of a domination strategy, and nothing else. People will lie through their teeth over money.

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

#126

Post by JoshTriplett »

mytailorisrich wrote: post #124
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My job is to fill the headcount that I've got, so as long as it fits within budget, whatever. Exactly, but the budget isn't infinite. Assuming equal talent, I'd much rather hire 5 people at market rate rather than 4 people at 25% over market rate. The net cost is roughly the same, but we can get much more accomplished with 1 more person on the team. Even better, on-call demands are spread out over more people and v…

I'd much rather hire 4 above average people than 5 average people. Having more people adds its own cost and there is a Pareto law in people's contributions. Edit: Basically, IMHO, in terms of assembling the best team to deliver the best results it's better to keep things as small as possible. But in terms of internal company politics it's better to grow the team as much as possible.

> I'd much rather hire 4 above average people than 5 average people.

That's assuming that negotiation skill is closely correlated with the skill you're actually hiring for, rather than being correlated with having read an article like this, or some other somewhat orthogonal knowledge.

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

#127

Post by cushychicken »

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…

Tip: California based firms are required to give you a salary range if you ask for it and they can't ask you for your salary history, just your comp expectations.

Same is true in Massachusetts.

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

#128

Post by mytailorisrich »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #126
mytailorisrich wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd much rather hire 4 above average people than 5 average people. Having more people adds its own cost and there is a Pareto law in people's contributions. Edit: Basically, IMHO, in terms of assembling the best team to deliver the best results it's better to keep things as small as possible. But in terms of internal company politics it's better to grow the team as much as possible.

> I'd much rather hire 4 above average people than 5 average people. That's assuming that negotiation skill is closely correlated with the skill you're actually hiring for, rather than being correlated with having read an article like this, or some other somewhat orthogonal knowledge.

The level of salary you pay is correlated to what type of people you attract and what type of people you keep.

If you want better than average people you have to be prepared to offer better that average compensation.

That's what it boils down to. The actual negotiation only moves things at the margin and the initial offer already tells if the company pays well or not. The company's reputation also already told that to candidates.

Of course it's indeed important for the candidate to get the best deal because, as mentioned in another comment, that has a knock-on effect over time.

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

#129

Post by JoshTriplett »

mytailorisrich wrote: post #128
JoshTriplett wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'd much rather hire 4 above average people than 5 average people. That's assuming that negotiation skill is closely correlated with the skill you're actually hiring for, rather than being correlated with having read an article like this, or some other somewhat orthogonal knowledge.

The level of salary you pay is correlated to what type of people you attract and what type of people you keep. If you want better than average people you have to be prepared to offer better that average compensation. That's what it boils down to. The actual negotiation only moves things at the margin and the initial offer already tells if the company pays well or not. The company's reputation also already told that t…

Absolutely agreed on all counts. To the extent this is a factor of the company's intended salary range rather than just the candidates negotiation skill, I'd agree that paying more for better folks is likely to pay off disproportionately in many cases.

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

#130

Post by zuhayeer »

travbrack wrote: post #120
zuhayeer wrote: post #27

Huge fan of this article. It gets a ton of credit for helping us incept and start Levels.fyi. Borrowing from Geico, internally we joke that 5 minutes can make you 15% or (way) more if you negotiate. And it's super true.

Thank you. edit: Any idea why levels.fyi numbers are so much higher than glassdoor? I haven't been able to find any explanation for this phenomenon. The glassdoor numbers I'm looking at are supposed to be total comp.

I suspect it's a combination of several things.

1) Outdated data. For our aggregate salary values, whenever possible we try to ensure our data is from within the last trailing year of information.

2) Leveling. Our salaries are broken down more granularly by level, something that's a little more ambiguous on Glassdoor. Since levels aren't explicitly defined, salaries might get brought down by incorrect bucketing.

3) Stock compensation. Until recently, Glassdoor hasn't done a great job of capturing the stock component of total compensation. That has likely led to deflated aggregate values.

I'm sure there's probably more to it than what meets the eye, but our focus has always been to make sure we have the most accurate information independent of other salary sites. Also why we collect offer letters / W-2s to corroborate our self reported data: https://levels.fyi/verified/

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