Ask HN: How do you deal with a low ball salary offer?

As the title says, the salary is almost half of what I'm earning at my current job so clearly I'm not considering it, but before rejecting the proposal it'd be nice to give it a shot and see if they can improve the offer. I'm pretty burned out from my current job and it'd be great to move to another place.

Have you dealt with a similar situation? How do you handled it and what was the outcome?

Just tell them "no thank you". do not waste your time.

1. Stay at current, unpleasant job. 2. Take a huge paycut.

But there are other jobs. So what you do is, you start applying elsewhere, and meanwhile you try to negotiate with the startup.

The chances are that they won't go up that much. That's OK, you can:

1. Stall them, and use existing offer for negotiating with another company that gives you an offer. Even just mentioning you have another offer is helpful.

2. Negotiate for something else. "Hey, this is 50% less than my current salary. Would you be willing to raise it by 20% and then have me work 4 days a week?" I haven't done the math to figure out if this makes sense, but there might be some combination of hours and higher offer that might work for you. Most startups are unlikely to say yes, but I have successfully worked shorter work weeks at startups.