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

Salary Negotiation: Make More Money, Be More Valued (2012)

kalzumeus.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 269 posts

Re: Salary Negotiation: Make More Money, Be More Valued (2012)

#111

Post by posedge »

TA1337 wrote: post #93

One thing that happened to me a few years ago that pretty surprised me, went something like this: I applied to 2 FAANGs, got offers from both. The recruiter from the first company to give me an offer, told me it is pretty much non negotiable, "we have a little wiggle room but don't expect much, it's an amazing offer". It was higher than my then salary, but not by a huge margin. Then company B got back to me with a si…

It amazes me that, under the right circumstances, the wiggle room can reach levels as high as 50%. I wonder what they were thinking when they made you the initial offer.

Re: Salary Negotiation: Make More Money, Be More Valued (2012)

#112

Post by rocqua »

namdnay wrote: post #110
quicklime wrote: post #17

> We’ve been talking about your employer as an abstraction, but in the instant case you’re talking to an actual person. Let’s call him Bob. It is Bob’s job to get you signed with the company as cheaply as possible, but Bob is not super motivated to do so, because Bob is not spending Bob’s money to hire you. Bob is spending Bob’s budget. Bob generally does not get large performance incentives for shaving money off of…

As with all advice of this sort, it really depends on the company culture. My current employer for example has a very hard salary policy (basically a fixed number depending on age and which engineering college you went to, with yearly raises negotiated with unions - a very common occurrence in France unfortunately). Unless you’re interviewing for a position with >100 reports they will never risk upsetting this mechan…

Would negotiating be harmful to your chances to work there though?

Re: Salary Negotiation: Make More Money, Be More Valued (2012)

#113

Post by drpebcak »

posedge wrote: post #111
TA1337 wrote: post #93

One thing that happened to me a few years ago that pretty surprised me, went something like this: I applied to 2 FAANGs, got offers from both. The recruiter from the first company to give me an offer, told me it is pretty much non negotiable, "we have a little wiggle room but don't expect much, it's an amazing offer". It was higher than my then salary, but not by a huge margin. Then company B got back to me with a si…

It amazes me that, under the right circumstances, the wiggle room can reach levels as high as 50%. I wonder what they were thinking when they made you the initial offer.

They were hoping to discourage him from asking for more. It’s always negotiable if the company wants to hire you, they just typically don’t want you to feel that way.

Re: Salary Negotiation: Make More Money, Be More Valued (2012)

#114

Post by lealanko »

quicklime wrote: post #17

> We’ve been talking about your employer as an abstraction, but in the instant case you’re talking to an actual person. Let’s call him Bob. It is Bob’s job to get you signed with the company as cheaply as possible, but Bob is not super motivated to do so, because Bob is not spending Bob’s money to hire you. Bob is spending Bob’s budget. Bob generally does not get large performance incentives for shaving money off of…

You (and the article) are ignoring smaller companies. In those, you often have the salary negotiations with the owner, or a partner. Your salary comes (effectively) out of their own pocket, and recruiting you is quite possibly a significant and risky investment for the entire company.

In these sorts of situations, negotiation is much harder on a personal level, since the company is not a faceless entity. The company does have a face, that's the face you have to look into when you state your salary request.

On the other hand, it's also harder to accept being underpaid, because if you don't get paid what you're worth, you know the extra profits will go (almost) directly into the pocket of a person you will see daily at work.

Re: Salary Negotiation: Make More Money, Be More Valued (2012)

#115

Post by etothepii »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #41
quicklime wrote: post #17

> We’ve been talking about your employer as an abstraction, but in the instant case you’re talking to an actual person. Let’s call him Bob. It is Bob’s job to get you signed with the company as cheaply as possible, but Bob is not super motivated to do so, because Bob is not spending Bob’s money to hire you. Bob is spending Bob’s budget. Bob generally does not get large performance incentives for shaving money off of…

> My job is to fill the headcount that I've got, so as long as it fits within budget, whatever. Exactly, but the budget isn't infinite. Assuming equal talent, I'd much rather hire 5 people at market rate rather than 4 people at 25% over market rate. The net cost is roughly the same, but we can get much more accomplished with 1 more person on the team. Even better, on-call demands are spread out over more people and v…

The issue is that the non-salary costs routinely make up an additional 50-100% of a head count and many of these are fixed. Thus to replace a team of 4 with a team of 5, you might need to negotiate their salary component down 30% not 20%. Thus the manager hiring the team of 4 appears to be paying 42% more.

Re: Salary Negotiation: Make More Money, Be More Valued (2012)

#116

Post by forrestthewoods »

legerdemain wrote: post #43

> Virtually any amount of money available to you personally is > mouse droppings to your prospective employer. > They will not feel offended if you ask for it. Two comments. (a) I interviewed with Wealthfront last year. They offered $160K, which was lower cash comp than any of my other offers. I tried to open the door to negotiation. The recruiter and the dev lead then got on the phone with me to awkwardly explain th…

> Would I really want to miss the opportunity to work for an exciting company over some marginal sum of money?

The reply to this seems obvious. Do you really want to miss the opportunity to hire a strong and promising candidate over some marginal sum of money?

Hiring is HARD. Hiring good engineers is almost impossible.

Re: Salary Negotiation: Make More Money, Be More Valued (2012)

#117

Post by legulere »

sokoloff wrote: post #7
jaaron wrote: post #5

Speaking as a hiring manager for 10+ years: If I've done my job right, I've sourced engineers experienced, confident and smart enough to negotiate and ask good questions around compensation. I want to make sure that we have an open conversation so that both sides can move forward to the actual job at hand. Tip: California based firms are required to give you a salary range if you ask for it and they can't ask you for…

Is there anything to prevent that range from being given as "$30K to $999K/yr"?

If they state 999K then that is what you should be asking for.

Re: Salary Negotiation: Make More Money, Be More Valued (2012)

#118

Post by break_the_bank »

diminish wrote: post #103

> At nearly 7,000 words, you probably don’t want to try reading this on an iDevice. Bookmark it and come back late what's wrong about idevices? i'm reading this one on android.

Guess that in 2012 the experience was poor. Maybe this website wasn’t responsive.

Re: Salary Negotiation: Make More Money, Be More Valued (2012)

#120

Post by travbrack »

zuhayeer wrote: post #27

Huge fan of this article. It gets a ton of credit for helping us incept and start Levels.fyi. Borrowing from Geico, internally we joke that 5 minutes can make you 15% or (way) more if you negotiate. And it's super true.

Thank you.

edit: Any idea why levels.fyi numbers are so much higher than glassdoor? I haven't been able to find any explanation for this phenomenon. The glassdoor numbers I'm looking at are supposed to be total comp.

Post reply on HN