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

kalzumeus.com

141–150 of 269 posts

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

#141
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…

Does "California based" mean "your office will be in California"? Or does it mean "the company is incorporated in California"?

The former, I believe. Many companies are incorporated in Delaware, but if they have offices in CA are still subject to CA employment law for jobs located there.

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

#142

> 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…

I find it is easier to prove your value in these cases and bounds are much wider.

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

#143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does "California based" mean "your office will be in California"? Or does it mean "the company is incorporated in California"?

The former, I believe. Many companies are incorporated in Delaware, but if they have offices in CA are still subject to CA employment law for jobs located there.

Thanks!

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

#144

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.

Most salaries reported in Glassdoor are several years old as Zuhayeer said. However, Glassdoor doesn’t even adjust them for inflation. So any statistic based on them will be horribly inaccurate. From personal experience too I can tell you that levels.fyi is far more accurate than Glassdoor.

P.S. I’d also like to thank Zuhayeer for building levels.fyi. It’s an awesome tool and helped me greatly in negotiating.

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

#145
post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Yes, it's harmful and if you appear a notch too aggressive they will probably dump you. (Reading articles about salary negotiation in the valley is possibly the most harmful thing a French person could do to themselves) Assume it's French cheap staffing companies (90% of the employment market there), akin to tata or infosys for foreign readers. There is a very narrow salary band for the position depending on universi…

Why would you want to work at such company with such poor philosophy then?

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

#146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's only negotiable because he got an offer from the next FAANG.

Recruiters are not going to assume that you can enter any FAANG at the highest possible level. It was incredibly lucky from the OP to get 2 offers and at the same time.

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

#147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why haven't all the big company pay scales leaked yet?

I have good news for you: https://levels.fyi :)

A better question might be, why doesn't levels.fyi include the actual pay bands that companies have to disclose upon request to candidates instead of just reported compensation?

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

#148
post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

If a company has a strong history of success and a positive work culture, good engineers will be knocking their doors down. Think 37signals. These places are super rare. Some comments: - I’m not sure about the extent to which this is scalable, especially at a VC-funded startup. - I am not sure if Wealthfront falls into this category.

> good engineers will be knocking their doors down.

If good engineers are knocking their doors down then an army of average, mediocre, and bad engineers are knocking too. Identifying which is which is a notoriously difficult problem.

Good engineers are generally employed and happy, or at least satisfied. Changing jobs is an extremely high risk move. How often do good engineers change jobs? Not often.

Almost all companies hire heavily through word of mouth. Employee referrals are king. But eventually you exhaust that pool. It's a very hard hump to get over imho.

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

#150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hilarious, a buyer telling sellers that the it’s in the seller’s best interest to not research their market price. In the finance sector nonetheless.

That post really doesn’t make sense to me. It’s always in your interest to shop around. The author calls them “collectors”, sounds like he’s upset he loses good candidates over money and wants to rationalize his loss.

And it is funny how the comments there all lick up to the post's author. Nobody calls him out. It is all bizarelly disgusting.
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