Ask HN: Is Google still a cool place to work?

> 1. I hope you've taken everybody's boilerplate negotiating advice and not put yourself in a hard position over money. Did you tell them exactly what you're currently making? Or exactly what you want? If so, next time don't do that. Even if somebody tries to button you down, just finesse it a bit. "Dollar amount isn't the most important thing, yadda yadda" and ask them to give you the range they're considering to ensure you two are in the same ballpark.

As both an employer, and someone that has previously been a hiring manager, this can be counter-productive.

If you think you're underpaid, say so. Don't try to cleverly wiggle your way out of sharing your salary, because what you're doing is obvious. If you don't want to give your salary, you can say "I prefer not to say", but we know what that means, too.

We've offered $30k more than someone's current salary because, by our assessment, they were grossly underpaid. Their current employer came back with an even better counter-offer that we couldn't justify or afford, but the candidate chose us. Their current employer had sunk any goodwill by paying so far below market rate.

As you noted, in many cases, "only one of you his your own wallet on the table". Of course, currently, as a self-funded employer, I do have my wallet on the table too, and I'll tell you as much. We pay market rate, we pay fair, and we negotiate honestly, but we don't play weasely negotiating games.

The best negotiating strategy is to be firm, honest, straight-forward, and to have the substance to back what you're asking for. Stand up for what you want, but don't try to weasel your way into getting it. That'll garner you far more respect than playing games during negotiation.

Appreciate the perspective.

In this job market, if you've got an experienced candidate, and he tells you, when you ask, that his current salary isn't important, that we don't want to get hung-up on dollar amounts right now, do you perceive that as he's currently underpaid and/or coming from a positon of weakness?

I've never felt perceived that way. And I have always shared information about my current comp package later in the process, after we've gotten range-setting out of the way, after we've both had an opportunity to drop anchor so to speak. So maybe I wasn't clear about that. I added an "early in the process" to the post.

(Eight years at Google here.) It's changed a lot over the years and has certainly disappointed me many times, which any xoogler can also tell you. But every time I've considered leaving I've been unable to imagine some other work that gives me the same combination of high freedom and good compensation.

I've also seen the occasional person pull a michaelochurch. I've been lucky in that my random fun hacks have been seen as valuable work for the company. I could imagine things not working out under different circumstances (there's a large wing of the company working on boring Java apps that I don't think I'd enjoy). With that said, everything has a risk factor to it and the number of michaelochurches seems pretty low to me.

I think there are some things Google is very good at (giving you powerful toys) and others it's very bad at (launching products where UX matters, for example; maybe Marissa's departure will help there), so perhaps it also can depend on what sort of person you are.

(All the above and most of the other comments are engineer perspectives. Other non-technical positions, like reviewing ads for bad words, are reportedly much more variable on the awful spectrum.)

My current job hired me at a 40% raise. This was after telling them exactly what I made. And I did exactly what you said: I told them I knew I was underpaid.

Now, I'm pretty sure I could have gotten another 10-20% if I had not given them this information. But really, I'm getting paid what the job's worth, so I'm not complaining. If I thought the job was worth more, I'd have held out for the last bit. They did mention my existing lower salary as a reason they couldn't offer more, too.

I understand both sides of that. They have to be sure I wasn't being paid low because I can't perform, and I want to get paid what I'm actually worth. When you're as badly underpaid as I was, it's rough. I should never have let myself get into that position.

Where are you located? If you're in NYC, I'm a new hire there now.