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Salary expectations questions – How should you answer them? (2020)

fearlesssalarynegotiation.com

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Re: Salary expectations questions – How should you answer them? (2020)

#71

Post by x2tyfi »

goldeneye13_ wrote: post #36

I always recommend this article: https://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/01/23/salary-negotiation/ I think this topic is super important and I’m really glad I didn’t follow advice of saying your “expected salary or expected +20%”. Here my anecdotal SWE salary history: Worked at a startup for a bunch of years making 90k by the end Got offered a place at FAANG. Recruiter pushed me a little bit on expected salary but I didn’t gi…

I’ve had similar excited experiences. On one FAANG offer in 2020, I asked for time to think, as you mention. I already had awareness of pay bands and an idea of the range for this particular role from levels.fyi.

When I came back to the recruiter, I asked how much room she had to negotiate, and asked if she could put me “in the middle of the band”. She immediately said yes and it resulted in a bump of $75k/yr or so.

The thing to remember is that recruiters key metrics are about hires. They desperately want to get people in the door, especially after going through all of the effort to schedule interviews. They will happily help you out within reason.

Re: Salary expectations questions – How should you answer them? (2020)

#72

Post by michaelt »

goldeneye13_ wrote: post #67
johnnyanmac wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> to show other engineers that your idea of how much you should be payed could be completely wrong. Defintiely could be. But not in this economy. I'll take what I can get. But in general, it really is a matter of knowing your worth and what they could pay. IF you have a certain noteriety in a community of a domain and you get an offer, understand how much leverage you have vs. yet another front end web dev. Let alone…

Notice I’m not suggesting that people go for “hard” negotiation. You don’t loose anything by not revealing comp early. Worst case you will get offer that’s too low. But best case you get offered above what you expected.

> You don’t loose anything by not revealing comp early.

The benefit is, if they can't pay you enough to join them, you don't have to waste your time going through some six-interview multiday gauntlet.

Re: Salary expectations questions – How should you answer them? (2020)

#73

Post by scarface_74 »

willseth wrote: post #61
tomp wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

200 vs 220 is likely noise. The recruiter shouldn’t care about tha2, and neither should you. But £200k vs £400k is real! That’s the real span for e.g. hedge funds in London. Actually, it was a few years ago. Probably more now!

20k isn’t noise to most people in a 200k salary range.

And with most raises being 3%-4% a year, if you don’t negotiate that in the beginning, it’s going to take 3 years to reach that amount after you start

Re: Salary expectations questions – How should you answer them? (2020)

#74

Post by johnnyanmac »

goldeneye13_ wrote: post #67
johnnyanmac wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> to show other engineers that your idea of how much you should be payed could be completely wrong. Defintiely could be. But not in this economy. I'll take what I can get. But in general, it really is a matter of knowing your worth and what they could pay. IF you have a certain noteriety in a community of a domain and you get an offer, understand how much leverage you have vs. yet another front end web dev. Let alone…

Notice I’m not suggesting that people go for “hard” negotiation. You don’t loose anything by not revealing comp early. Worst case you will get offer that’s too low. But best case you get offered above what you expected.

I think another factor I didn't talk about was pay transparency. My state has it and it's slowly expanding so outside of like, Netflix's "100-600k" range you don't really have to play many games here. Know your worth and pick in that range internally. Go above if you really feel you can.

I do want to emphasize being careful with current times, though. I've heard of very mild negotiations (were talking a 5k counter offer or an extra week of vacation time) leading to rescindings in 2023. Which is unheard of from 2022 or before. They'd at least hold firm in the worst case. But we're still in the middle of this circus that is probably going well into 2025.

Re: Salary expectations questions – How should you answer them? (2020)

#75

Post by lethologica »

This whole game is so stupid to me. It really feels like the employer is trying to screw over the potential employee before they’ve even joined.

My default answer to these questions is now “what’s your budget?” And if they return with a non answer, or try and push me to give a number without giving one themselves, I walk.

I can’t think of anywhere else where the seller (in this case the employer “selling” a position) of something hides the price and expects the buyer (the potential employee) to magically come up with number that meets their criteria.

What a dumb game we’ve developed for ourselves.

Re: Salary expectations questions – How should you answer them? (2020)

#76

Post by FirmwareBurner »

lolinder wrote: post #41
FirmwareBurner wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Pointing out 20+ years of experience and listing accomplishments seems less important for a lot of businesses, than paying as little as possible. If paying as little as possible wasn't that important to them, they wouldn't be hiring in Warsaw in the first place, but in the Bay Area, Seattle, Zurich, London, Sydney, etc

Presumably we're talking about remote roles here, in which case this is nonsense. A Zurich developer is not worth more in a remote role than a developer in Warsaw. The only reason large cities have inflated salaries is because that's what you have to pay someone for them to live within range of your fancy office. If it's a remote role anyway, the companies that aren't out to exploit you will pay the same salary band…

Companies aren't moving to Warsaw to find the best talent in the world. That talent is mostly already in the super expensive tech hubs where the top software companies have flourished for decades and cross-pollinated creating a supply of experienced talent in the area.

It's much more easy to find an experienced tech lead even remotely, around London or SF, than say in some village in Bulgaria or Poland because no F500 tech company ever came out of there.

Companies like Google that have the infinite money glitch don't care about finding the best bargain employees, but most SW companies aren't Google.

Re: Salary expectations questions – How should you answer them? (2020)

#77

Post by [deleted] »

the_gipsy wrote: post #28
dijit wrote: post #4

Unless you end up with someone like me who has a budget and always pays the max. I usually ask "what do you expect to be paid" to understand if I'll make them happy or sad when discussing what I'll actually offer. This is not foolproof and has caused some issues with people coming in as very good negotiators and thinking my inability to budge is because I'm being hard-line, when in reality it's because- as mentioned,…

Are you not allowed to disclose salary first? Sorry to be blunt, but if you are allowed, then this sounds incredibly stupid.

[deleted]

Re: Salary expectations questions – How should you answer them? (2020)

#78

Post by reaperducer »

voytec wrote: post #30
FirmwareBurner wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Pointing out 20+ years of experience and listing accomplishments seems less important for a lot of businesses, than paying as little as possible. If paying as little as possible wasn't that important to them, they wouldn't be hiring in Warsaw in the first place, but in the Bay Area, Seattle, Zurich, London, Sydney, etc

I'm not interacting with companies seeking cheap labor in Poland - like Intel. Despite their quite active recruiters, all conversations with whom end up at "company policy doesn't allow me to discuss salary range". I've set up a small business with EU tax id over a decade ago and I'm issuing invoices to European countries (EU and Schengen) and North America. It's a trade-off of giving up European employment safety, p…

"company policy doesn't allow me to discuss salary range".

Walk.

Any company that puts policy over people isn't a good company.

Re: Salary expectations questions – How should you answer them? (2020)

#79

Post by thrw42A8N »

ewuhic wrote: post #68
petters wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why we Europeans like working at American companies (in Europe)

Now the question is where to find American companies willing to do B2B/freelance contract without location-adjusted bs.

Nowhere in Europe unless you want to never have free time during daytime. If they don't location adjust, they expect you to be available in their timezone.

If you're OK with that, just visit the US and make some friends. Go to meetups and conferences. You will definitely find something much better than any EU offer (while still wildly underpaid in California) - that's your starting point. Do a good job, underpromise and overdeliver, and ask for referrals.

Re: Salary expectations questions – How should you answer them? (2020)

#80

Post by Frost1x »

FirmwareBurner wrote: post #23
voytec wrote: post #19

I've talked to several recruiters and HR people who were prepared for quite a different answer than I gave to this question. I got the feeling that several interviews were carried out afterwards out of politeness or because the recruiter "had to" do it, but the interview ended before it began. Than, there's either ghosting or almost immediate (like up to an hour past the interview) copy-paste email along the lines of…

>Pointing out 20+ years of experience and listing accomplishments seems less important for a lot of businesses, than paying as little as possible. If paying as little as possible wasn't that important to them, they wouldn't be hiring in Warsaw in the first place, but in the Bay Area, Seattle, Zurich, London, Sydney, etc

To play the devils advocate there are some justifiable reasons to try and hire international employees. Maybe some component requires some physical proximity or has some large benefit. Maybe someone is exceptional at a global level and doesn’t want to move.

With that said I tend to agree, most companies are shopping around for a bargain if they can find one.

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