There isn't really much to do - you've already concluded negotiation of salary - your choice will be take what they offer or walk.
Your problem is you have only just worked out you negotiated poorly.
Ask HN: Negotiating Salary
131–140 of 172 posts
Re: Ask HN: Negotiating Salary
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm curious, what industry is offering roughly minimum wage (30k) to programmers in the US?
$30k is far beyond minimum wage in most of the world.
Yup. German minimun wage is 19.968 € (~ 24.353 $)
Interestingly a couple of high-wage countries that come to mind don't have a minimum wage at all: Switzerland, Denmark, Sweden.
Re: Ask HN: Negotiating Salary
#133Read "Ten Rules for Negotiating a Job Offer" https://haseebq.com/my-ten-rules-for-negotiating-a-job-offer...
Discussion (two weeks ago): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27160934
Re: Ask HN: Negotiating Salary
#134Disclaimer, I'm a CTO. Here's how I evaluate this if I was evaluating you: 1. I already have a salary budget already allocated for this role based on industry average for position and location (but location _could_ be irrelevant depending on skill mostly). 2. I look at your skillset and put you at the bucket for the position where you are at: low-med-high 3. I make my offer based on my evaluation. 4. If you are "wort…
I'm curious, what industry is offering roughly minimum wage (30k) to programmers in the US?
$30 per hour is way more than a $30,000 salary. Technically $30/hr is double that - roughly $60,000 per year. If you are a full-time employee in the U.S. then typically other benefits such as health insurance, 401k, vacation time, etc will be factored in, so typically if you were interviewing a U.S. citizen for the job, then whatever “hourly rate” the salaried employee would be at ($60k salary ~ $30/hr) should be multiplied by something like 1.3 or 1.5 for a contractor rate to account for the employee benefits they are not receiving from you. So $30 would become $40+ instead for a contract rate.
Re: Ask HN: Negotiating Salary
#135Disclaimer, I'm a CTO. Here's how I evaluate this if I was evaluating you: 1. I already have a salary budget already allocated for this role based on industry average for position and location (but location _could_ be irrelevant depending on skill mostly). 2. I look at your skillset and put you at the bucket for the position where you are at: low-med-high 3. I make my offer based on my evaluation. 4. If you are "wort…
'disclaimer', pet peeve coming up.
> Disclaimer, I'm a CTO.
That's not a disclaimer, it's.. a claim. It's not even a 'disclosure' (which is what people saying 'disclaimer' often mean) really, it's more like a 'source', or just.. remove the word?:
> I'm a CTO, here's how I evaluate [...]
Sorry, just bugs me.
Re: Ask HN: Negotiating Salary
#136I feel like the comments are fixated on a particular number. It's true, $30/hour is insultingly low for a software engineer. But, it's a data point. That's your current value, because that's what someone is willing to pay. You can say "yes" and start getting $30 every hour, right now. Writing this HN post, $0/hour. Reading this HN post, $0/hour. Saying yes to that offer, $30/hour! Regardless of whether you accept, you can interview at other places, and use that guaranteed price as an anchoring point. You can probably get $40/hour from someone else, and now that guaranteed price has gone up. You don't really have to negotiate because there's a forgone conclusion. Company A that pays you $30/hour can be told "company B offered $40/hour". They can match or you can walk -- you're guaranteed that $40/hour no matter what.
You're not really in power if you can't walk away from the negotiation with what you want. All these power plays to set the first number, or to talk about your value to the company, etc. don't have an inevitable conclusion. They could end with "that was a really moving speech and you're absolutely right that we should pay you $200/hour, welcome aboard", but most of the time they end with "great speech, anyway $30/hour is our final offer". If you don't have the option to say no and go make what you think you're worth, they win.
Finally, if you're really 10x more valuable than any other employee at the company you're interviewing at, you can probably just put them out of business in 6 months. I never hear of this happening, so maybe we're all not quite as great as we think we are.
Re: Ask HN: Negotiating Salary
#137I know not the advice you're looking for but this thread makes me sad. For those wages, even at what your initial ask, it's impossible to get good developers in the US unless there are extenuating circumstances (someone's first job, etc). This company thinks you are worth less just because of where you're from and not what skills you bring to the table. If they offter you something you will take, accept it, but keep…
Counterpoint: a very senior financial services software consultant I’ve worked with told me multiple times he’d be happy to find a job paying under $100k that would allow him to return to India and work from there. He understood employers might find it challenging for him to be so far away and was willing to trade half his income for that point.
$30/hr ~> $60/k per year which in a huge swath of the USA is a pretty good annual income.
Re: Ask HN: Negotiating Salary
#138Disclaimer, I'm a CTO. Here's how I evaluate this if I was evaluating you: 1. I already have a salary budget already allocated for this role based on industry average for position and location (but location _could_ be irrelevant depending on skill mostly). 2. I look at your skillset and put you at the bucket for the position where you are at: low-med-high 3. I make my offer based on my evaluation. 4. If you are "wort…
'disclaimer', pet peeve coming up. > Disclaimer, I'm a CTO. That's not a disclaimer, it's.. a claim . It's not even a 'disclosure' (which is what people saying 'disclaimer' often mean) really, it's more like a 'source', or just.. remove the word?: > I'm a CTO, here's how I evaluate [...] Sorry, just bugs me.
No worries, valid point. I have ESL (English as Second Language) but noted.
Re: Ask HN: Negotiating Salary
#139Disclaimer, I'm a CTO. Here's how I evaluate this if I was evaluating you: 1. I already have a salary budget already allocated for this role based on industry average for position and location (but location _could_ be irrelevant depending on skill mostly). 2. I look at your skillset and put you at the bucket for the position where you are at: low-med-high 3. I make my offer based on my evaluation. 4. If you are "wort…
What "tests" do you mention? How do you evaluate people? Given the following information, how would you determine someone's skillset? - hobby projects on the same technology stack - open-source contributions (library with 15,000 monthly downloads) - hobby projects on a different technology stack - hobby projects on a different technology stack that made it into production with thousands of users - previous companies
In our company, our interview process goes like:
1. Paper screening the candidate. Looking at resume to see if they have skills for the job on paper. If so go to Personality Screening.
2. Personality Screening is done by talking to them and seeing if there's a cultural fit and also throw in some programming questions or feature discussions to see how they think.
3. Technical Screening by way of pair programming on a problem set that is based on the position that should show a mix of skills, tracing bugs or implementing features. If Frontend, mostly JavaScript and a Frontend Framework like React if needed.
As far as your questions go, we put weight on hobby projects but just so that we can see their code writing and some logic up front. As an example, I have seen one candidate with a recent Ruby on Rails project that had all their spaces and newlines everywhere, and I'm not talking about spaces or tabs here, think one chunk of code has 2 spaces, next had 3, another had 5, just everywhere that made the code super hard to read together with the messy logic/abstractions, from this, I assumed that they are still junior. On the contrary, I've seen a candidate that has really good code on a similar Ruby on Rails hobby project that reflected well on their work.
Re: Ask HN: Negotiating Salary
#140Disclaimer, I'm a CTO. Here's how I evaluate this if I was evaluating you: 1. I already have a salary budget already allocated for this role based on industry average for position and location (but location _could_ be irrelevant depending on skill mostly). 2. I look at your skillset and put you at the bucket for the position where you are at: low-med-high 3. I make my offer based on my evaluation. 4. If you are "wort…
I think the problem with your last point is that while you, as a CTO whose job it is to know this, know the market salary, the person you're hiring probably does not. Like, I am more experienced than the OP, and my sense of what market salaries are in different places for different skillsets is incredibly hazy. So in light of this, it probably makes more sense for a candidate to, as a rule, push back even without specific knowledge of "$50,000 would be a fair salary" (to use your example), in case it's true. It would be a lot easier of course if there were more salary transparency, but employers don't want that.