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Common mistakes in salary negotiation

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Re: Common mistakes in salary negotiation

#281

Post by bruce511 »

MobileVet wrote: post #257
bruce511 wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Paperwork is the same, but other work is not. The time, and marketing, costs of a property tend to go up with price. If I'm buying a 12 bedroom mansion, I'm going to expect a lot more photos, better staging, and so on in the marketing compared to a 1 bed apartment. Equally small, cheap, properties are likely to sell faster (bigger buying pool) than more expensive ones. That $20m mansion is going to take a lot more vi…

It is very dependent on the market. Right now in many parts of the US, the market is still flaming hot. Minimal effort is required. It sure isn’t worth 6% of the sale price, especially considering that the sale price is literally double what it was 2 years ago.

If you don't believe the realtor is worth 6%, then by all means skip past them. There are plenty of fixed-fee sites that guide you through the process, provide legal form docs, and so on.

Clearly not everyone needs, or wants, a realtor. But presumably there are enough who do to keep them in business. There are enough who don't to keep the "do it yourself" market in business as well.

Choice is good. What is good for you might not be good for the next person, and vice versa.

Re: Common mistakes in salary negotiation

#282

Post by el_benhameen »

klipt wrote: post #279
atomicnumber3 wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"the best negotiating advice is to have multiple offers" This is borderline "get in the job cannon and blast off to jobland" territory. Also - it can be terrifically difficult to line up multiple simultaneous offers because companies would rather explode their offer than generally let people get a better leverage. I know multiple companies who do this on purpose for this explicit reason. Is it inefficient from a mark…

It's generally easy to line up the interviews , at least at big companies you can pretty much pick your interview date. Then if you've done say 5 interviews (1 per day for a week), you can just wait for the first offer and use that as leverage to get the others to hurry up. Since they already have all the data they need.

I haven’t pursued it seriously so I don’t know how much you can hurry things along, but most of the interview processes I’ve seen are weeks long. Google even warns you up front that it’ll probably take on the order of months. So it’s kind of tricky to get them to all line up like that.

Re: Common mistakes in salary negotiation

#284

Post by LouisSayers »

pjot wrote: post #177
pdonis wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You left out: 4. Don't give a number at all. If you are interested in Company X, and you've gone far enough in the process to know they are interested in you, tell the recruiter that you would be interested in seeing a competitive offer from Company X, or something along those lines. At the end of the day, the best negotiating leverage you have is that if Company X actually does want to hire you, at some point they h…

> Don't give a number at all Can you give an example of how this plays out in real conversation? Answering “I’m not telling you” or similar to the recruiters question “what’s your expected compensation” seems like bogus advice

It's not as strange as you might think.

What I tend to do is just play a bit dumb. Basically,

"To be honest, it's been a while so I'm really not sure ... I'm applying at a number of companies so I'm really seeing what the market has to offer."

If it's a recruiter, you can then ask them for advice on what offers they've seen recently, or what bands they're working with.

Re: Common mistakes in salary negotiation

#285

Post by ryan_lane »

atomicnumber3 wrote: post #272
xyzelement wrote: post #111

I used to work in trading and I think some of the principles I learned there apply directly to salary negotiations. Two key things I think about all the time are price discovery and competition. Price discovery means that in some illiquid markets, you don't really know what a thing will trade at unless you try to trade it (which itself reveals some information to the counterparty but that's not important in the job c…

"the best negotiating advice is to have multiple offers" This is borderline "get in the job cannon and blast off to jobland" territory. Also - it can be terrifically difficult to line up multiple simultaneous offers because companies would rather explode their offer than generally let people get a better leverage. I know multiple companies who do this on purpose for this explicit reason. Is it inefficient from a mark…

If a company gives you an exploding offer, it's a strong signal that the culture of that company isn't good, or that they can't afford to hire quality candidates (or both). In companies like this you can assume you'll probably also get poor raises.

In practice, if you get an exploding offer, unless you already think it's an extraordinary offer and love the potential opportunity, you can tell them that you won't be able to make a decision within that time. If the company is worth working for, they'll remove it. If they won't remove it, it's probably best not to take the offer.

Re: Common mistakes in salary negotiation

#286

Post by sjf »

OJFord wrote: post #275
jgeada wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to Freaknomics, realtors get about 3% higher average closing prices on their own properties than when they're representing you as a customer. That is the delta when it is their money on the line vs yours.

3%? That's like a minor 'I want this to be done now' or someone else is coming for a second viewing tomorrow type bump, if that's even statistically significant, frankly that seems fine?

3% of a big number is... still pretty big. It's easily going to be five figures in most markets.

Re: Common mistakes in salary negotiation

#287

Post by bluedevilzn »

doctorpangloss wrote: post #121
spaceywilly wrote: post #34

“The key is to get multiple 400k offers in the same week” Wow why didn’t I think of that!

There's a FAANG company on 1 Hacker Way. There's one on 1 Infinite Loop, Apple. There's on on Sand Hill Road, Ampitheatre Parkway actually, that's Google. Netflix, 100 Winchester Circle, that's a good one. You know, I think they're all in the same place, the FAANG District. Seriously though, I can only imagine how much I'd be laughed out of the room if I was some little shit 22 year old trying to negotiate a salary a…

I did that half a decade ago and got nearly 2x the original offer.

Re: Common mistakes in salary negotiation

#288

Post by xyzelement »

el_benhameen wrote: post #282
klipt wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's generally easy to line up the interviews , at least at big companies you can pretty much pick your interview date. Then if you've done say 5 interviews (1 per day for a week), you can just wait for the first offer and use that as leverage to get the others to hurry up. Since they already have all the data they need.

I haven’t pursued it seriously so I don’t know how much you can hurry things along, but most of the interview processes I’ve seen are weeks long. Google even warns you up front that it’ll probably take on the order of months. So it’s kind of tricky to get them to all line up like that.

It's still valuable info. Like let's say you actually made it thorough all the rounds at Google per your example, and are 'stuck' in hiring committee. That's a huge signal to you that you are in striking distance of the level you interviewed for, even if you don't ultimately make it this time.

That means you can for example use levels.fyi number for that level at Google as 'something that applies to me'

Re: Common mistakes in salary negotiation

#289

Post by pdonis »

pandaman wrote: post #264
pdonis wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why though? If you say 210, are you going to absolutely refuse any offer that's less than that? If you would, then you picked a bad number: you should have said 220. Or 230. Or 250. You've already hypothesized that the manager's actual range is 200-250; given that hypothesis, you should be targeting at least the top of that range, not the bottom 20%, if you're going to give a number at all. And if your objection to…

>If you say 210, are you going to absolutely refuse any offer that's less than that? I, for one, tell the number, which if was given to me during negotiation would result in acceptance on my part. > You've already hypothesized that the manager's actual range is 200-250 And I have not hypothesized the range, in my example I speculate why people believe they would have been offered more than they asked for if they did…

> I, for one, tell the number, which if was given to me during negotiation would result in acceptance on my part.

That's not the same as saying you would refuse any offer for less. So you haven't answered the question I actually asked.

> I have not hypothesized the range

Yes, you did. In the scenario we're discussing, you said the manager's range is 200-250.

> this is the hypothesis, not the actual range

In other words, you're moving the goalposts. Sorry, not playing that game. Of course you can make up any numbers you like, but at the end of the day my argument is still the same: it's to your disadvantage to anchor the conversation on a number first. And you don't have to: as I've pointed out in another subthread in this discussion, if the company genuinely wants to hire you, at some point they have to commit to an offer. You don't; you can always go away and talk to someone else. (If you object that you might not be able to, my response is that you're already assuming you might get a better offer, which means you're assuming you can go away and talk to someone else. See further comments below.)

> It's trivial to raise it if you suddenly decided you can get more

I don't see how. You've told them you'd accept an offer from them for 210, but now you're reneging. The fact that you might get another offer for more than 210 is a reason not to tell them the 210 number at all. It's not a reason to go back and revise the 210 number afterwards if you get a better offer.

> This is why negotiating down from already satisfactory for both sides comp is a bad strategy for the HM.

You're assuming that the company will interpret your giving them the 210 number up front as a sign that your negotiating position is strong. I think they will assume the opposite: that your negotiating position is weak. Someone who already has good offers on the table, or expects to get them soon, doesn't have to commit to a number up front. They can just say "Give me an offer you think is competitive and I'll consider it in the light of my other options".

Re: Common mistakes in salary negotiation

#290

Post by gen220 »

victor9000 wrote: post #103
irrational wrote: post #90

I work for a Fortune 100 company. Years ago they wanted to make sure that everyone in the same job was making the same amount of money (they were especially trying to make sure women were making as much as men). So they had an outside consulting group look at everyone’s salaries and adjusted them as needed to make sure they were all the same within $1. I ended up getting a $15k bump. They review it again every year t…

It sounds like a great way to miss out on talent that can command a salary higher than the average, while simultaneously attracting talent for whom this is a good deal.

On the other hand, they probably spend significantly less time bickering about their respective salaries.

IME, talented people can spend an absurd proportion of their time bickering about how ${other_talented_person} makes ${trivial_number}/year more than they do, all because they're ${some_trait}.

Overall, I could imagine this filter being both good and bad. I'm not confident whether it nets out good or bad, but you can't argue it's not a dramatically simpler system, and simple systems are often surprisingly better better. :shrug:

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