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Common mistakes in salary negotiation

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Re: Common mistakes in salary negotiation

#301

Post by moduspol »

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

You can just say, "I've been advised that it's in my interests to not share a number."

And it's true. You have been advised that way by threads and comments like these.

If you get any pushback, it'll be that they just want to ensure they're not wasting time, and you can always respond that if they'd share the compensation details of the position, you'll be happy to tell them if it's acceptable.

Re: Common mistakes in salary negotiation

#302

Post by GVIrish »

distant_hat wrote: post #173
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…

That's a sound advice for bonds but jobs are largely not like that by design. It is kind of like dating, and asking for a price upfront makes it closer to whoredom and companies explicitly downgrade you for being in it only for the money. If you want to sell a bond and the other person's price is too low, you don't sell it and that's that. For interviews, you end up spending hours through the interview process and ma…

Typically you're not asking for a price(salary) upfront. Ideally you've done a bit of homework to figure out what positions can pay in the ballpark of what you want. Then you get their offer at the end of the interview process and negotiate as appropriate.

Yeah you may go through hours of interviews and not end up with an offer in some cases but think of it this way: you could potentially earn tens of thousands to over one hundred thousand extra dollar per year off that time investment in interviewing.

Attempting to line up multiple interviews and balancing offer timelines is hard, but the payoff can be huge. Considering that people spend 4 years or more working in college to get into their career, making a time investment of a few weeks to get a potentially large raise is nothing.

Re: Common mistakes in salary negotiation

#303

Post by chadash »

ryan_lane wrote: post #285
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…

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 ab…

This is highly dependent on the role. I have been tasked with growing teams where my mandate is to hire X number of engineers at various levels. If I found X hires and then hire X + 1 shows up and was a great fit, the company would make an exception. No exploding offers necessary.

On the other hand, sometimes you are hiring to fill a specific position rather than to generally grow a team. You have two candidates you like and you can't afford to let candidate 1 sit on the offer for three weeks. People treat it like it's nefarious on the part of the company to ever have an exploding offer, but sometimes it's just not practical.

Re: Common mistakes in salary negotiation

#304

Post by saagarjha »

pandaman wrote: post #255
saagarjha wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I was an important hire I probably have a handful of 230s in my hand already. It’s easy for me to not bother with a company who may or may not push from 200 to 250.

If you had a handful of 230s you would not negotiate? That's quite rare, most companies optimize hiring for the most probable case, not for the outliers.

I mean if I had a couple why would I bother with the one that’s lowballing me?

Re: Common mistakes in salary negotiation

#305

Post by pandaman »

saagarjha wrote: post #304
pandaman wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you had a handful of 230s you would not negotiate? That's quite rare, most companies optimize hiring for the most probable case, not for the outliers.

I mean if I had a couple why would I bother with the one that’s lowballing me?

Because you could use your offers against each other as a leverage, dropping any of the offers decreases your leverage. Most people want more leverage when negotiating, not less.

Re: Common mistakes in salary negotiation

#306

Post by NoMoreNicksLeft »

nitwit005 wrote: post #217
NoMoreNicksLeft wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You'd think that, and it's probably even the smart strategy for the employer... But I remember what the guy who wrote homebrew said about his Google interview process. Once an HR culture develops, anything sane or intelligent probably goes out the window.

Writing a popular app is hardly the same as being the top authority in a field. I guarantee when Google hires someone like Ken Thompson, they do not get the normal Google hiring experience.

I also doubt that Kenny was having to do daily scrums and explain why the web ad wootigulizer algorithm hadn't had any progress since Monday. Long since in executive management, is my guess.

Re: Common mistakes in salary negotiation

#307

Post by vkou »

bomewish wrote: post #260
vkou wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was also told my FAANG offer was non-negotiable. After declining it, for reasons of pay and location, I got a call back 5 minutes later, with a better location, and ~12% more money on the table. (Junior position in 2012)

Is it just me or does that seem really scummy on the part of the company??

No scummier than a candidate that's not seriously interviewing for a job, and is instead just fishing for counter-offers.

Re: Common mistakes in salary negotiation

#308

Post by pdonis »

pandaman wrote: post #296
pdonis wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 wor…

>That's not the same as saying you would refuse any offer for less. So you haven't answered the question I actually asked. The question is ambiguous, in some cases I stood on my number and would not take anything less, in other cases I renegotiated for other compensation e.g. less base, for much higher sign up bonus. Don't see how is this relevant though. Essentially, after each side called a number, no matter the or…

> You claim that if the employer calls the number first, the final number will magically be higher than if the candidate called the number first.

No, I claim that, on net, you will end up with a better final deal if you do not give any number until after you have an offer and you are ready to respond to it. See further comments below.

> In your model, if employer said 200 first and you, using your strategy responded with 250, and while the employer is thinking or negotiating further, you've got an offer for 260 from another company

My strategy would be to not respond with a number to any offer until I have all of the offers I expect to get on the table (either that or those companies have told me definitely that they are not interested in going any further, so I can cross them off my list of possibles). My only response to an offer before that point would be to say "Ok, thanks very much for your offer, let me do some thinking about it and get back to you".

> I think you are personalizing things too much, nobody really cares.

It's not a matter of "personalizing", it's a matter of recognizing that, just like you, the company is trying to get the best deal they can. I'm not saying they will always try to negotiate you down if you give them a number before they've made you an offer. They might, as you say, decide it's not worth it to do that and just write you an offer at that number. But if they do do that, you are almost certainly leaving money on the table that you could have gotten if you had not given them a number and waited for them to make an offer.

And if, in that scenario, you then come back and tell them you want more because someone else made you a higher offer, you're, as I said before, reneging on what you already told them, and you're now saddling them with additional work they didn't even think they would need to do--they thought it was just a matter of writing you an offer at the number you said and you accepting it, boom, done. If you expected that you might get a higher offer, you shouldn't have given them the lower number in the first place.

> The HM has a vacancy that needs to be closed ASAP

Yes, but "ASAP" doesn't have to mean "as soon as you give them a number that's within their range". They might prefer that, but that doesn't mean you should. If they are genuinely interested in hiring you, they will be willing to negotiate if they have to. And it will be to your advantage to make them have to by not giving them a number up front.

Re: Common mistakes in salary negotiation

#309

Post by umeshunni »

NoMoreNicksLeft wrote: post #149
emodendroket wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, it sounds that way, if we assume that negotiating skill and job performance are tightly correlated. But why should we assume that?

If the two traits are just randomly assorted, then sure, they'll rarely overlap at what is a statistically random rate. But, if we can assume that the "rare talent" is anything other than straight out of college, they will have discovered that they are a rare talent, be aware of it themselves, and barring some sort of crippling neurosis, want to cash in on it. They might not even be skilled at negotiating... they'll…

There's an old Dilbert comic that said something like "We want to hire engineers who are really good at what they do, but cannot compare two salary numbers and identify which one is larger"

Re: Common mistakes in salary negotiation

#310

Post by [deleted] »

umeshunni wrote: post #309
NoMoreNicksLeft wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the two traits are just randomly assorted, then sure, they'll rarely overlap at what is a statistically random rate. But, if we can assume that the "rare talent" is anything other than straight out of college, they will have discovered that they are a rare talent, be aware of it themselves, and barring some sort of crippling neurosis, want to cash in on it. They might not even be skilled at negotiating... they'll…

There's an old Dilbert comic that said something like "We want to hire engineers who are really good at what they do, but cannot compare two salary numbers and identify which one is larger"

[deleted]
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