41–50 of 234 posts
Free food is such a no-brainer, if you're a manager. For £5 of pizza you can get £50-100 of work, easy, and the workers think they're getting the better deal...
I'm about to ask for a raise for the first time but I'm not entirely sure how to handle it. I've been with this company for 7 years and only received 2-3% increases the past 3 years. I interviewed at a competitor and they offered me a 20% increase, which I turned down. During negotiations should I simply ask for them to match? I don't want them to think I'm actively looking for a new job but want to get paid my worth…
A problem for many people is that it's hard to compute their exact value, or they are afraid to have that kind of discussion.
If you're being paid $75k a year, and you've added a significant amount to the bottom line, I doubt you'll have a hard time negotiating a $10-20-30k increase. Same goes for a new job: give them examples of achievements, and show how you were beneficial to the business.
Negotiating a new secondary offer is a great thing to do; it gives you additional leverage. If there's a chance a value creating employee will leave, there is no reason not to give a raise. You could use that offer to negotiate a 25-35% increase, if you can show the value you've created at your current company.
To put it bluntly, most employees are actually not worth that much. They get hired at the least amount possible, and they execute strategies, for the most part, set by a few people who are paid significant amounts.
I also like this Quora post: http://www.quora.com/What-kind-of-jobs-do-software-engineers.... Check out the first answer written by Amin Ariana; it explains things well.
The main tenet of this blog post is that you should argue for your compensation based on the amount of value you add to the company. That's nice in theory, but the techies' dilemma is that it's often difficult or impossible to put a hard number on the value they have added. How many customers were retained because you decreased response times by 100ms? How many customers were gained because of that slick UI you creat…
Your value to the company is how much it would cost, in time, effort, and money, to find a replacement(s).
Here is why we don't
IT has for the most part never been a money maker of a lot of companies. They see it as a loss leader. IT is seen as the "Oh boy here comes the IT budget again." Unless of course your business is making software for the masses. But then I have been at 3 companies like that and IT was always the first on the chopping block. You are paid only as much as it takes to replace you, unless you walk on water then you should be at Google or FaceBook.
The only way to get a 20 to 25k raise is to find another job. Unless of course you are doing the job of 4 people which in IT 99.9% of the times you are. Don't believe me? Go ask for a 20k raise if their eyebrows shoot up like Mr. Spock then you know how much you are worth. I sure hope you have another job lined up because that's the queue to them you are looking.
This has been my experience and I have done exactly what I have stated above.
I now do security and compliance. No more wake up calls, no more you can't go on vacation because Oct. through January is the time of the year where we make our money.
Oh and that 100K salary mark gets very hard to justify every year especially when the CFO looks at the books and has a list of who is making over 100K per year. Unless of course you live in California and NewYork then that's welfare wages.
For example, I was contracting a company that had most of their software development teams working as contractors. About 6 months into contracting there, I learned that they had made a strategic decision to try and hire everybody instead of contracting and the reason they did that was to save on money and more importantly, retention.
So they would ask me to convert, and I would pretty much blow them off for a couple months, and they would ask me again a couple months later. So after a few times of this routine, I knew I was in a better position to start the negotiations. Also, I had waited for several other contractors to convert and got some tidbits from them.
At the end of the day, I negotiated for much more than average salary in my market.
If you're contracting, it pays to be contracting with a staffing firm that knows the decision makers in the company.
I'm very happy to be with a company that has a standard policy of yearly 10-15% pay increases. We tend to do unexciting and sometimes just plain weird contract work for other companies, so my company has to pay us what we're worth to keep us around.
Another B.S. article about negotiating IT salary's. If IT salary's kept pace back before the Dot bomb days everyone would be making 150k starting. Here is why we don't IT has for the most part never been a money maker of a lot of companies. They see it as a loss leader. IT is seen as the "Oh boy here comes the IT budget again." Unless of course your business is making software for the masses. But then I have been at…
I think OP was referring to Engineers and Operations at software companies, not IT at an accounting firm.
Nice advice, but I feel like articles like this make marginal improvements to my comfort and skill at negotiation. I think perhaps it boils down to unfamiliarity: I've done it a very small number of times, and it feels alien and weird. Especially some of the language used. Compare that with a manager who has hired $x employees a month for a decade, and doesn't think anything of it. I wonder: Are there any videos avai…
Try out Ramit Sethi's videos ( http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=XY5SeCl_8NE ). I haven't watched any yet myself but I've heard they are good. He also has an article on negotiation at http://www.iwillteachyoutoberich.com/blog/salary-negotiation...
1. This conversation is painful/awkward 2. Prepping for negotiations is stressful
A tech employer in Vancouver once told me that if an engineer tries to negotiate for a higher salary that is a signal that they care only about money and that they wouldn't be good hire, regardless of their experience and skillset. This is one of the "big" tech companies in Vancouver, BC. Never mind the hundreds of small sweatshops here.
I told him that I didn't understand the question and so he said "How much do you need to live on?"
I asked him how much does it take for him to live on? He walked out and so did I.