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Salary negotiations for techies (2011)

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Re: Salary negotiations for techies (2011)

#111

Post by jacques_chester »

tim333 wrote: post #93
dustingetz wrote: post #73

here's an idea: The market for developers is a lemon's market. That means, if you have 100 good cars selling at $2000, and 100 lemon cars selling at $1000, all the lemons will sell first, because the people making purchasing decisions aren't expert enough to tell the difference. So it is very rare to be paid based on value, because why would a [CEO|CTO|hiring manager|whatever] pay $1M for this guy, when he can pay $1…

It's probably an issue which is why to get rich it's good to own equity in the company. Take for example Brian Acton, turned down for a job at Facebook in 2009, cofounded Whatsapp, acquired by Facebook in 2014 for $19bn.

Almost all people who turn down jobs at Facebook go on to not be billionaires.

Re: Salary negotiations for techies (2011)

#112

Post by patio11 »

kelseyfrancis wrote: post #41
gaius wrote: post #12

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 once had a major tech company tell me during negotiations that "you can't really put a price on free meals", which I thought was a truly absurd thing to say.

I have heard this line enough with regards to Google that I believe it is Standard Operating Procedure. Your counterparty knows they are in a negotiation. They have been in thousands of negotiations. They have a written list of words to say because they win negotiations.

You can adapt to this environment, for example by coming in with prepared messaging of your own, and not meekly acquiescing to their first offer when their second offer is their first offer plus the food they were going to give you anyhow. (News you can use guys: this is also Standard Operating Procedure.)

Re: Salary negotiations for techies (2011)

#113

Post by vacri »

jsprogrammer wrote: post #99
tomp wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> IT has for the most part never been a money maker of a lot of companies. They see it as a loss leader. Exactly. I'm pretty sure that IT is harder and requires more training/practice than e.g. finance or sales, but profits from those two are very easy to quantify and it's quite obvious who the deal-maker was, whereas IT is mostly teamwork and doesn't have obvious profits.

Shut down the IT and watch all those profits disappear. As in, finance/sales guy can't pull up his daily/weekly/monthly/quarterly/yearly numbers. Oh, and your customers are gone too because you can no longer deliver any product or added-value. So, no income (except investments).

There are very few unnecessary jobs in today's economically-rationalised world. Fire the cleaning staff, and see how long your other staff hang around with piling-up garbage and a lack of toilet cleaning/stocking. Fire the receptionists and watch as a ton of work moves elsewhere because you're too hard to get hold of.

Re: Salary negotiations for techies (2011)

#114

Post by noname123 »

NinjaTime wrote: post #44

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…

(Sigh). I wish I was making 150K starting salary. Unfortunately, I'm not and I live in BosWash which makes me part of the below-welfare-wage numbers. I wish folks could have more attitudes like NinjaTime so that they can become the enlightened masses.

Nothing is more discouraging than watching Joe and Jane from high school and college getting promotions at their consulting, law and medical careers knowing that I was way smarter than they were. Cue Kurt Vonneghan, "The real horror is waking up one day and realizing your high school class is running the country"; well, I'm just slightly disgusted that just the undeserving plebes, not the popular high school kids are buying McMansions and starter luxury cars!

Well, at least I'm part of the enlightened. I got my security clearance (no H1B competition), my personal contracting sole proprietorship (line-by-line deduction), Cisco/Oracle/MCSE certificates (certified scrum-master), and I intend to stick it all the way to the Man!

Re: Salary negotiations for techies (2011)

#115

Post by nitrogen »

hnriot wrote: post #104
No1 wrote: post #40

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…

there are all kinds of intangibles not mentioned here. what if you have an idea that transforms the company's sales numbers or you dream up a better way of doing the builds that reduces integration bugs. So many ways an employee contributes intangibly. you're right, pay is basically what your peers make +/-

These "intangibles" can still have a value assigned. Each integration bug eliminated by an improved build process can have a cost assigned to it by using the average time and money cost of previously fixed integration bugs. Example: "Each integration bug costs 1hr of senior dev time at $100/hr fully loaded and 8hrs of junior dev time at $50/hr. The new build process produces X fewer integration bugs per month, for a savings of X*$500 per month."

"Transforming" the sales numbers should also be measurable. Example: "Before, salespeople were closing x% of deals and missing scheduled followup on y% of contacts. Now (x+5)% of deals close and only (y/2)% of contacts are mistakenly dropped."

Re: Salary negotiations for techies (2011)

#116

Post by bane »

No1 wrote: post #40

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…

> 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.

The truth is that your employer doesn't consider your value as a major part of their compensation offer, they consider what would happen if you didn't exist. Is there or isn't there an endless ocean of other candidates who could more or less do what you do and do it for what they're willing to pay you and no what you're demanding?

In case you aren't sure what the answer is, there is.

Re: Salary negotiations for techies (2011)

#117

Post by MichaelGG »

ryanSrich wrote: post #100
MichaelGG wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some places may make it work, but teams not being together is a huge drawback. I think Peopleware covered it and it was one of the top detriments. Something like a 50% penalty in project schedules when teams were remote. That lines up with many projects I've seen first hand, too. Calling it outdated doesn't change anything. There's also tons of non-engineering stuff that benefits from being together, onsite. Stray co…

> but teams not being together is a huge drawback Define together? What does that even mean? Together in the same room? I'd have to completely disagree. Teams working together is extremely important. Teams _being_ together, as in co-located, is just a preference. > Peopleware covered it and it was one of the top detriments Peopleware has ideas that have stood the test of time. However their opinions regarding remote…

I've not seen remote meetings or chat clients replicate the kind of talk that goes on casually in person. I've not found them to be smoother at all. Walking around, getting into a different environment, sketching stuff on paper, even the body language and whatnot - it's just not very easy remotely. And while it takes work to make a company go, it takes more work for remote to work, overall.

It's like saying offshoring development is OK because "project management is hard and you have to be on top off things regardless".

But hey, I'm glad it works out for some people. A lot of my work is done remotely. But for core development or engineering on my own project, I'd want to be sure onsite meetings happened with fair regularity.

Re: Salary negotiations for techies (2011)

#118

Post by joshvm »

bane wrote: post #116
No1 wrote: post #40

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…

> 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. The truth is that your employer doesn't consider your value as a major part of their compensation offer, they consider what would happen if you didn't exist. Is there or isn't there an endless ocean of other candidates who could more or less do what you do and do it for what they're w…

The trick is finding a field that doesn't have legions of hungry coders waiting to fill your boots..

Good STEM programmers (i.e. science companies) are very hard to find. The jobs aren't as abundant as web dev, but they are there, pay reasonably and it's easy to show how valuable you are to the company.

Re: Salary negotiations for techies (2011)

#119

Post by khuey »

pmoriarty wrote: post #66

Does just receiving an annual performance bonus make your negotiating position stronger or weaker? How long would you wait after the bonus to ask for a raise? What if you don't want to stay at your company much longer? Should you still ask for a raise, and would you feel unethical for leaving soon after getting a raise?

If you plan on leaving shortly, what's the point in asking for a raise? I would not say it's unethical. It just seems like a waste of time.

Re: Salary negotiations for techies (2011)

#120

Post by ddingus »

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…

Another manager here.

I don't automatically do this. I want to know why, and what their value proposition is.

People have things happen and reasons and goals for wanting to change their comp, and frankly, that goes both ways. I've had people want less and to change roles for very similar reasons.

Replacement is expensive, so is commitment and vision. For some people, yes. It's a trigger for replacement. For others, it's a time to discuss keeping everybody healthy and productive.

And there could be options too. Perhaps more money isn't optimal. Nobody knows, until there is a discussion.

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