Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Talking About Money

kalzumeus.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 412 posts

Re: Talking About Money

#11

Post by patio11 »

brador wrote: post #3

If consulting is making $30k/week/job then why keep running the personal businesses? Why not take the consulting and branch it out, and drop everything else as a distraction?

Because I enjoyed running the software business more than I enjoyed running the consultancy. Partly that is for difficult-to-explain personal reasons (I feel the sense of satisfaction with operating a software company that some people feel when painting things). Partly it is because of reasons which are endemic to consultancies, even successful consultancies. Feel free to ask if you're curious.

I also have a quirky relationship to money as a goal. Rather little would change about my life if my salary increased by $800k. My hobbies would remain books, video games, taking my wife and daughter on walks, and posting too much on HN.

Re: Talking About Money

#12

Post by ashark »

marktangotango wrote: post #9

>> Most important takeaway about salary negotiation, by the way: disclosing a previous salary is almost always against your interests because it pegs your new salary to that plus 5% rather than your value to the new firm minus a discount, which is a brutal mistake I had a phone screen with an HR drone once (Cerner Inc. to be exact \waves) part way thru she asked me my current salary. I declined to provide that inform…

I've never really gotten over the shock of discovering that anyone asks this, let alone that it's common (especially for larger companies).

Add it to the list of things in business that seem to me to be inappropriate/rude/immoral, I suppose.

Re: Talking About Money

#13

Post by davidw »

brador wrote: post #3

If consulting is making $30k/week/job then why keep running the personal businesses? Why not take the consulting and branch it out, and drop everything else as a distraction?

I was fortunate enough to be able to ask patio11 that same question at MicroConf Europe a few years back, and I was very heartened by the answer: it's not what he wanted to be doing.

Re: Talking About Money

#14

Post by waterside81 »

brador wrote: post #3

If consulting is making $30k/week/job then why keep running the personal businesses? Why not take the consulting and branch it out, and drop everything else as a distraction?

I'm going to hazard a guess and say it's not sustained i.e. he's not charging $30k/week for 52 weeks straight. He gets a gig here or there and that's what he charges.

I've charged $20k/week for consulting and it was week here or there, not for the whole year. But I may be wrong.

Re: Talking About Money

#15

Post by saryant »

L_Rahman wrote: post #2

As a recent graduate about to go into his first ever salary negotiation, I'm really grateful for the perspective this provides. My dad was a taxi driver (now drives for Uber) and my mother a stay-at-home mom. I was raised with the notion of earning enough to support myself. Anything beyond that is something I'm expected to figure out myself. Posts such as these are very helpful. A question though: 1. If I've had conv…

Re 2), you should make sure your salary is at market-level and more or less ignore equity. Chances are you'll be let go or the company will collapse before it's worth anything.

If you have a reasonable salary, equity is just a cherry on top, but if an employer tries to get you to trade cash today for a startup lottery ticket, say no.

This is especially important early in your career given the time value of money. An extra $10k/year in the first five years of your career, properly saved, could add north of $600k to your retirement when you get to that stage in life. That's an almost-certain payoff against a roll of the dice on a sliver of ever-diluted equity.

Re: Talking About Money

#16

Post by tikhonj »

I've always found the taboo about discussing salaries weird. In my experience, it's almost nonexistant among Russian immigrants to the US—at least the ones my family knows—and yet hasn't caused any real problems.

Sure, there are issues of status and perceived worth around salary—but hiding the numbers doesn't help. People still know your job title, understand your company and see your lifestyle. That's more than enough! Numbers only matter if you want to talk about relatively small differences—ones that matter far more for salary negotiation and evaluating a position than they do for cocktail party

Now, perhaps I'm just being simplistic, but the way I see it is genuinely simple: markets are about transferring information. To do this well, participants have to know what the prices are elsewhere. An arbitrary cultural taboo around the prices does nothing but impede the flow of information. The fact that it's asymmetric just makes it doubly worse.

Transparent salaries are about as capitalistic and idea as can be.

Unfortunately, by character, I'm also unlikely to take my own advice: I fear awkwardness disproportionately. Just one more reason why I deeply dislike arbitrary social rules.

Re: Talking About Money

#17

Post by davidw »

marktangotango wrote: post #9

>> Most important takeaway about salary negotiation, by the way: disclosing a previous salary is almost always against your interests because it pegs your new salary to that plus 5% rather than your value to the new firm minus a discount, which is a brutal mistake I had a phone screen with an HR drone once (Cerner Inc. to be exact \waves) part way thru she asked me my current salary. I declined to provide that inform…

We're fortunate enough to be in an industry where it's rare to be really desperate for a job, so I've come to take this kind of thing as a very strong indication that it's the kind of place that would really suck to work at in any case. From that point of view, the earlier all the BS floats to the surface, the better, so you can get on with looking for a good job.

Re: Talking About Money

#18

Post by Todd »

I always appreciate your transparency and believe that you're helping drive our industry forward. I often search for ideas on how to help within my area of influence. The closest I've found is Stack Exchange's salary matrix, and the related approach at Fog Creek.

I think publishing salaries has several benefits. For one thing, it removes the used car salesman approach to hiring. One result, which is more important, is that it can help eliminate wage disparity due to differences of gender or level of negotiating skills. It can also help prevent the corrosive effects that can occur if people do find out actual numbers (the morale-sapping that you discuss).

The problem with this approach, and one I'm trying to figure out is, what about the non-developer jobs? Assumedly, each group gets their own matrix. But if the admins can browse the matrices of the other groups, like the development team's, then there can be a similar corrosive effect. One option is to only discuss the salary matrix within your group and with HR. But then we're back to a different version of the tired old story. (Don't discuss the matrix outside of your group!) This leads me to believe that it's best to be completely open. It might also serve as an incentive for people to make an effort to grow into different areas. Any ideas appreciated.

Re: Talking About Money

#19

Post by davidw »

L_Rahman wrote: post #2

As a recent graduate about to go into his first ever salary negotiation, I'm really grateful for the perspective this provides. My dad was a taxi driver (now drives for Uber) and my mother a stay-at-home mom. I was raised with the notion of earning enough to support myself. Anything beyond that is something I'm expected to figure out myself. Posts such as these are very helpful. A question though: 1. If I've had conv…

> How do I ask for equity and how much should I ask for as the first hire (technical employee of a non-technical founder)?

That may not be a bad deal, but there are some warning flags that it raises:

* What does the non-tech guy bring to the table? Do they have hard evidence of their ability to make a company successful?

* This is well worth your time to read: http://jacquesmattheij.com/first-employee-or-cofounder

Re: Talking About Money

#20

Post by sanderjd »

davidw wrote: post #17
marktangotango wrote: post #9

>> Most important takeaway about salary negotiation, by the way: disclosing a previous salary is almost always against your interests because it pegs your new salary to that plus 5% rather than your value to the new firm minus a discount, which is a brutal mistake I had a phone screen with an HR drone once (Cerner Inc. to be exact \waves) part way thru she asked me my current salary. I declined to provide that inform…

We're fortunate enough to be in an industry where it's rare to be really desperate for a job, so I've come to take this kind of thing as a very strong indication that it's the kind of place that would really suck to work at in any case. From that point of view, the earlier all the BS floats to the surface, the better, so you can get on with looking for a good job.

Yeah except sometimes good engineering teams sit behind ugly HR practices, and hiring processes unfortunately expose you to HR far more than the actual job does.
Post reply on HN