Interview advice that got me offers

> What hadn't occurred to me at the time is that C# is a very verbose language which Visual Studio beautifully automates away the tedious parts of. This online IDE automated nothing.

That's pretty much why I use Javascript in interviews

Writing on the board or in an online IDE

Its just the gaslighting is annoying, in most contexts that's called toxic. "We don't care which language you use .... ooooh you used Javascript we code in this other thing"

C++is {}

Are you in the US? There’s not many companies outside of FAANG (and the FAANG-alike like Uber and Snapchat) that pay software devs with 5-10 years of experience over $300k/year. Perhaps financial companies in NYC?

The suggestion assumes most of the asymmetry between you and the company is not informational. You should strive to be well informed about what the salary range is. For well known tech companies, this is easy with sites like levels.fyi. Otherwise you can ask in your own network. It follows that you should also strive to be well networked.

Negotiation is an adversarial game played between humans. Therefore there can't be any simple advice except to get better at the things that make you more competitive at negotiation itself. Instead of subscribing to basic rules like, "never give the first number!", put yourself in a position of being well networked, well informed and experienced. Then you can decide how to negotiate well on the fly according to the context. You will probably earn vastly more by focusing on those areas than you will by diligently following simple rules of thumb.

For example: I received an offer from Stripe and got them to add a $100k sign on bonus to it even though I previously gave the first number. Which party gives the first number doesn't matter.

Candidate thinks they're worth $250k. Employer pay bracket is $200k. Options:

1. Bend policy at hiring. $250k. $250k. $250k. $250k. $250k. $250k (no raises)

2. Follow salary brackets. $200k. $210k. $220k. $230k. $240k. $250k (low initial salary, catch up over time)

Having been on both sides, it's nearly impossible to make the case for bending policy further at annual reviews. Over time, employees converge to pay brackets. If you were hired with a on-off exception, you're getting no raises for a long time.

No raises feels shitty to a lot of people. It also brings risks.

True story: I was hired by a not-for-profit doing good work. Pay was maybe 1/3 of Google, and I'd be the top tech person at the org (not by ladder, but by skills). Pay was about 85% of what I needed to cover cost-of-living. They stretched brackets to get up to covering my cost-of-living exactly, so I was almost 20% over the upper cap of my pay bracket. Come next re-org, what do you know, they re-jiggle salary brackets standardize things, and my salary comes down 20%.

Fortunately, in the meantime, my cost of living had come down, so it worked out okay. I'm doing important, fulfilling work, and it's fun. So long as I'm doing that and making ends meet, I'm not tempted to jump ship to FAANG.

And no, my employer wasn't simply f-ing me; I understand the organizational structure, psychology, and dynamics well enough to understand what happened, how, and why. These were dynamics well above anything my boss, their boss, or their boss has any influence over, and I'd rather spend the social capital of going to their boss on something more important (e.g. making sure everything I do is open source).

A common career mistake people make is to assign intentions to places where the other side has no control. If you're worth $350k on the free market, and you receive a $180k offer, odds are the other side isn't low-balling you or doing anything mean or improper. They're operating from their constraints. You're operating from yours.

If you need $350k, and they can spend up to $500k, you'll be hired, and how well each side negotiates sets at where you'll get paid. If you need $350k and they can spend up to $200k, you're not getting hired, period. It's good to discover that earlier rather than later, but in practice, that usually comes up after the interview. In the no-hire $200k/$350k case, although you might not get a job now, things might change in five or ten years, and it's good to leave without bad feelings, and I'm not just talking about expressing bad feelings, but about what you're actually feeling. If you come out thinking "low-ball exploitative !@#$%," that's not very healthy; if you come out feeling "good people; no fit; difference in expectations; maybe next time," that is healthy.