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Salary negotiations for techies (2011)

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Re: Salary negotiations for techies (2011)

#191

Post by itsybitsycoder »

Gurkenmaster wrote: post #153
meddlepal wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You provide free food because you get more working time out of your employees. Any other benefit your pushing is quite honestly, bullshit. They're sitting together? Great; odds are they're talking about their job and that's only beneficial to the employer. The other problem with free food is that it starts to feel like an obligation to consume it. I like eating out about once a week otherwise I brown-bag it most of t…

>You provide free food because you get more working time out of your employees. I don't see a problem with that. If I work overtime I can leave earlier on another day. Quite a lot of my coworkers leave at 12am on fridays.

I would be pretty upset if I was still at work at 12am on any day, Friday especially...

Re: Salary negotiations for techies (2011)

#192

Post by [deleted] »

feedjoelpie wrote: post #175
vproman wrote: post #144

The most important salary negotiation tip: DON'T TELL THEM HOW MUCH YOU ARE CURRENTLY BEING PAID OR GIVE THEM A RANGE. Recruiters always ask this up front and INSIST that they must know. I have NEVER been denied the opportunity to interview for refusing to give a number upfront. If you're applying at a company, it means you've done at least a little research on what they should be expected to pay and you see somewher…

From the hirer side, maybe this is unreasonable given "No matter what, don't give them a number," but my past experiences on the other side of the table lead me to try and press a different dynamic. I try to get us and applicants talking salary during the first interview, before we even know if we fit each other at all. The rationale is: A) If how much money you want from us isn't even an option, we don't waste your…

[deleted]

Re: Salary negotiations for techies (2011)

#193

Post by itsybitsycoder »

Iftheshoefits wrote: post #108
hnriot wrote: post #106

interesting to read all these from the engineer's perspective. from the manager's side of the table things are quite different. If an employee comes to me and asks for a raise then I begin the process to replace them. We give reasonable raises, we pay fair market value and an engineer might make a little more elsewhere but they'll be giving back their RSUs and the opportunity to work on really cool stuff. If, however…

This is true at most employers, and is one of the biggest contributors to churn and the lower-than-it-should-be pay in our industry. Companies whose offer includes (implicit or explicit) statements about how cool the projects are are peddling the same employees-are-pets nonsense that the "free food/perks" companies peddle, and there is no shortage of labor ready to lap it up.

Yup, and high churn actually makes the projects less pleasant to work with IME. More turnover means the people updating the projects have a weaker understanding of how the projects work, so they create more bugs/cruft than an equally-skilled developer who has worked with the project longer. And by the time those developers know the projects inside-and-out, they are already looking to move on.

Re: Salary negotiations for techies (2011)

#194

Post by kephra »

jerguismi wrote: post #166
kephra wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have to agree, and even add: Never tell them first what you what want as payment. My method was always to say: Lets delay this unimportant money question. I'm a coder, I want to talk about coding, about your company culture, about your projects, about your testing environments, ... all those are much more important to me then salary. And when they come out with a price tag finally I often tell: Well thats a nice sa…

Sounds nice, but I would make a big difference between being a contractor and an employee. Where I live, hiring contractors is much less risky (because of employment laws etc), therefore for contractors it is quite natural to pay more. I'm an employer myself.

Hourly payment is good for employees, and bad for consultants.

I'm now consulting again, and I avoid selling hours, because hours do not scale. Instead I sell solutions, because a solution to a problem likely has a much higher value than the hours summed up.

Also, if you switch from consulting to being employed you can ask for much better terms, then anyone who had been unemployed before. Always add the term to your contract, to allow you stay self employed in addition to employement, to serve old customers. And if you leave a company, offer them a maintenance contract.

For employed people, sometimes the 'cost of living' argument can make wonders. e.g. I once had a query from Munich, and after we went several weeks till I accepted negitiation of salary, I came up with:

I'll play only €208 per month for my flat in Bremen, including heating, waste removal and water. I only pay €100 for my yacht per year, including boats house in winter and mooring in summer. Your offer sounds nice, but rentals are 5 times as expensive in Munich, then in Bremen, and I better do not talk about prices for mooring a yacht in southern Germany. Get me a similar fat and mooring in Munich, or what do you think about home office + Bahn card gold (to ride the train for free) to visit your location once a week + hotel costs.

And you can really get those, if you switch from consulting to employed, because the company does prefer employed.

Re: Salary negotiations for techies (2011)

#195

Post by jrjarrett »

feedjoelpie wrote: post #175
vproman wrote: post #144

The most important salary negotiation tip: DON'T TELL THEM HOW MUCH YOU ARE CURRENTLY BEING PAID OR GIVE THEM A RANGE. Recruiters always ask this up front and INSIST that they must know. I have NEVER been denied the opportunity to interview for refusing to give a number upfront. If you're applying at a company, it means you've done at least a little research on what they should be expected to pay and you see somewher…

From the hirer side, maybe this is unreasonable given "No matter what, don't give them a number," but my past experiences on the other side of the table lead me to try and press a different dynamic. I try to get us and applicants talking salary during the first interview, before we even know if we fit each other at all. The rationale is: A) If how much money you want from us isn't even an option, we don't waste your…

So as a recruiter, why not just state the salary range for the position, if that's fixed?

Then if the amount of money I want from you as a potential employee isn't an option, I won't waste both of our times in applying.

Re: Salary negotiations for techies (2011)

#196

Post by gknoy »

itsybitsycoder wrote: post #191
Gurkenmaster wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>You provide free food because you get more working time out of your employees. I don't see a problem with that. If I work overtime I can leave earlier on another day. Quite a lot of my coworkers leave at 12am on fridays.

I would be pretty upset if I was still at work at 12am on any day, Friday especially...

In the context of "leaving early", I suspect he meant that some of his coworkers left at lunchtime on Friday, after having worked longer earlier in the week.

Re: Salary negotiations for techies (2011)

#197

Post by feedjoelpie »

jrjarrett wrote: post #195
feedjoelpie wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the hirer side, maybe this is unreasonable given "No matter what, don't give them a number," but my past experiences on the other side of the table lead me to try and press a different dynamic. I try to get us and applicants talking salary during the first interview, before we even know if we fit each other at all. The rationale is: A) If how much money you want from us isn't even an option, we don't waste your…

So as a recruiter, why not just state the salary range for the position, if that's fixed? Then if the amount of money I want from you as a potential employee isn't an option, I won't waste both of our times in applying.

Because it's not fixed. We don't usually hire for a particular, specific level of talent/experience except in rare cases when we need to fill out a specific growth area. We just bring in people who seem interesting and then see if we can fit them somewhere.

Also, we're honestly pretty new at this. Our company's a little over two years old, and only in the past year have we gone from poaching people we already know and trust to interviewing people we've never met.

Re: Salary negotiations for techies (2011)

#198

Post by hnriot »

aridiculous wrote: post #133
hnriot wrote: post #106

interesting to read all these from the engineer's perspective. from the manager's side of the table things are quite different. If an employee comes to me and asks for a raise then I begin the process to replace them. We give reasonable raises, we pay fair market value and an engineer might make a little more elsewhere but they'll be giving back their RSUs and the opportunity to work on really cool stuff. If, however…

I'm really perplexed by this common attitude. Employees are sometimes happy. Sometimes they're miserable. Sometimes they're in-between — for complicated reasons, that may lie outside of work. Firing any employee that asks for a raise is so unbelievably short-sighted, binary, sociopathic, and potentially bad for business (morale, replacement costs, unknown costs), it's cartoonishly villainous. You sir, appear to have…

nobody said anything about firing anyone. That would be illegal for one thing.

Re: Salary negotiations for techies (2011)

#199

Post by hnriot »

johnward wrote: post #160
hnriot wrote: post #106

interesting to read all these from the engineer's perspective. from the manager's side of the table things are quite different. If an employee comes to me and asks for a raise then I begin the process to replace them. We give reasonable raises, we pay fair market value and an engineer might make a little more elsewhere but they'll be giving back their RSUs and the opportunity to work on really cool stuff. If, however…

"If an employee comes to me and asks for a raise then I begin the process to replace them." That makes you sound like a horrible manager.

maybe, but when an employee asks for a raise, or say they are quitting does that make them a horrible employee. so many people think that work is some big philanthropic organization set up to serve their needs.

Re: Salary negotiations for techies (2011)

#200

Post by jghn »

vproman wrote: post #144

The most important salary negotiation tip: DON'T TELL THEM HOW MUCH YOU ARE CURRENTLY BEING PAID OR GIVE THEM A RANGE. Recruiters always ask this up front and INSIST that they must know. I have NEVER been denied the opportunity to interview for refusing to give a number upfront. If you're applying at a company, it means you've done at least a little research on what they should be expected to pay and you see somewher…

While I don't normally believe in lying during a hiring process, a former boss once told me that the right way to answer the "how much do you make?" question is to say you're currently making what you want them to pay you, figuring that they'll tack a bit more on top of that.

I haven't decided if I'm open to lying like that or not, but I liked it.

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