I quickly skimmed through the article and it seemed to me that most of the advice given where taken from here:
How Not to Bomb Your Offer Negotiation
71–80 of 132 posts
Re: How Not to Bomb Your Offer Negotiation
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can you elaborate a bit please? Does this mean not meeting half way between your offer and theirs? And then what?
Good questions. His techniques rely on building a relationship, empathy, and many other techniques. If you enter the process with a split the difference mentality, you invariably leave a lot of value on the table. It's late where I am, I'd just go read the book if you want to know more.
Hopefully the book has a chapter on how to negotiate with people that have read the same book.
Re: How Not to Bomb Your Offer Negotiation
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
> O.o These numbers are surprisingly high, to the point of almost being unbelievable. Bingo! He's joking.
Sorry, but this is real. It's very normal for a new grad googler to make $185k total comp in first year. Offers i had got, Uber, Airbnb, Snapchat, Google, Robinhood, Netflix, Salesforce, Affirm, An investment bank in NYC, Two stealth startup in SF. In Facebook, it's very common for one high perfoming engineer getting discretionary equity of 1M+ if you do re-defines or create a meaningful impact. I'm sorry i'm not goi…
He's not joking. This is the talking style of all those people from IIT and IIM bragging about their "pay packets" to "freshers" about to be ragged. I wonder if he is going to copy/paste that directly into his matrimonial.
Re: How Not to Bomb Your Offer Negotiation
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
Really sad to know he didn't get a good offer in Airbnb and you both think it's a good offer. But this looks totally like a new grad offer. I have my friends who just got offers in Airbnb who are getting paid 180k in salary and ~600K in stocks which is basically $330k/year. My other friend who is senior engineer with 5 year experience is compensated around 500k/year. I have similar experience and i recently did a job…
O.o These numbers are surprisingly high, to the point of almost being unbelievable. And I go around telling my friends that software engineers can make 120k right out of college, and I'M getting laughed at by my friends at how apparently unbelievable ridiculously high this is. I've got 3 years experience and I'm making not much more than that working at a midsized startup (I went to a top tech school and everything!)…
Skepticism is the best policy with things like this. It's easy for an anonymous person on the internet to make claims like this.
Re: How Not to Bomb Your Offer Negotiation
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
>he's clearly a pretty skilled self-teacher I think it's pronounced "self-promoter."
I'm dubious of the guy's background and claims. I'm concerned he's smurfing here on HN. Here's why I'm concerned: 1. The grandparent links to two articles as "sources." One's a guest blog by the subject. The other's a self-quote of the subject extracted from a full interview, which is linked but both the site and the link are dead. And the grandparent's only comments on the account are in this thread, supplying the "…
Exactly how long has he been hanging around engineers? Who the hell boasts about their general GRE score?
Re: How Not to Bomb Your Offer Negotiation
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, this is just sad. I know people personally that worked their asses off learning systems programming, algorithms, and advanced mathematics at top-tier four-year colleges with absolutely fantastic technical CVs that got offers that aren't even half of that. These are surely some of the smartest people in the world, too, but I suppose they don't play the "bluffing" game all too well (er, "negotation" -- call it wh…
I wouldn't call it sad at all. It's all a game, and these are the people that are playing to win (by their definition of "winning", which is a lot of people's: maximizing monetary gains) I agree with a lot of what you say (and in fact, I work at a company that doesn't allow negotiations at all and has an open salary calculator: http://stackoverflow.com/company/salary/calculator ) but I wouldn't call it sad at all, I…
Thanks for the calculator. It's good to get an idea what some companies are willing to pay (I have an offer from another company that merely matches my current salary (though they have better benefits), and I've been agonizing over it). There's a possibility I'm above market rate already -- I live in a low COL area and that calculator about matches my current salary if I'm a skill level '2'.
One thing that struck me, that location adjustment for high COL cities isn't nearly enough. If I was working for SO, I'd definitely want to be remote.
Re: How Not to Bomb Your Offer Negotiation
#77As a side note I've found that negotiation room in EU is so tiny if not negligible. Maybe it is just me but I suspect it's a mix between a different culture and a - generally - more unionized and segmented job market. Wondering if you guys have experienced the same.
I'm sure you can negociate if you have offers from Google, Facebook and Palantir in London. Negociating only works in hot markets, and there are very few of them for tech in the EU.
Maybe, but the compensation range for developers in London is much narrower than you might think. From what I've seen, most startups offer in the range £30k-70k per year, probably with some mostly useless stock option deal. I've seen salaries out of Amazon and Facebook starting at £50k, and even at investment banks, for more junior positions. These are all basically suckers, given the cost of living in London, among other things.
Anything below £70k isn't worth consideration, unless you really want to be in London I guess. There will be better offers elsewhere.
Above £70k the range is basically £70k-100k, for a number of reasons. At £100k you end up in a different tax bracket, to the point where you may want to start considering taking other perks other than salary, to keep your tax cost down. Also, if you're being offered that kind of money, you're likely accepting a director-level offer, so really for engineers the meaningful range is about £70k-100k. Since you mentioned Palantir, I'll mention that I met with a recruiter of theirs who mentioned in our first (and only) meeting that their salaries were in this specific range.
For contract work, you can quite easily break the £100k barrier, but obviously now you're running your own shop with all of the issues that brings. Or possibilities, depending on your perspective!
Re: How Not to Bomb Your Offer Negotiation
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
EU is not homogeneous. Different areas work differently. Which part do you have experience of?
Italy, UK, Sweden to name a few, With UK being a bit more open.
My personal experience agrees with yours, there's not that much room – at least not in the higher end.
Re: How Not to Bomb Your Offer Negotiation
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
Companies do not work on empathy, but on maximum reward for acceptable risk and investment.
This would be true if your offer was negotiated with a distant bureaucratic committee (or board), but most of the time, regardless of who they represent, you're just dealing with people.
Many companies, particularly the larger organizations, have pretty strict boundaries though. Case in point: in a large corporation we tried recruiting an incredibly talented developer, but because of company rules, we couldn't offer him what he asked for despite us thinking he was definitely worth it (and really, it wasn't outlandish in any way) but HR would never let it fly because rules. His problem then, I think, was that he mentioned what he'd earned elsewhere, so some policy dictated we couldn't offer more than 20% than that, or whatever. Stupid, silly policy, and just goes to show you should never divulge information the other party just isn't privy to. (I've never told recruiters what I earned before, that's not their business.)
Re: How Not to Bomb Your Offer Negotiation
#80My main technique in negotiation is to make sure I've framed my own boundaries. I always know at what point I walk away, what's simply non-negotiable. Everything else is on the table, and it helps me frame the conversation. If I find whoever I'm negotiating with simply won't meet the walk-away limit, I walk away. No hard feelings, no regret – all of those what-if feelings were dealt with as I set the minimum limit before going into the conversation.
As well, I make sure that minimum level is a level I am genuinely comfortable with. It's not a cop-out, it's a level where I will sign and feel happy about it. Anything more than that is a bonus, but if I don't get that I'm perfectly happy.
I've found since I started doing this, and staying true to actually walking away if things aren't working out, the whole conversation has been much more professional and easy. Key to this though is that walk away means walk away, no childish "give me this or else I walk" nonsense. If you walk, you walk, that's it. Non-negotiable means just that.
EDIT: Probably worth mentioning as well that I do plenty of research before setting that walk-away level. There's one aspect which is what I instinctively want, but then there's other things that come in to play as well of course, relocation if applicable, cost of living etc.