When I have pushed back on the same topic, it usually is met with negativity. I believe recruiting and hiring staff have some incentives to treat you like you’re crazy if you want special provisions or need clarification on complex terms.
In my career, I’ve negotiated
- a severance package in my offer letter from a company that said, “we don’t offer severance packages as a matter of policy.”
- a sign on bonus from a company that said, “we don’t offer sign-on bonuses as a matter of policy.”
- a longer expiration period for startup options, as well as partial acceleration of vesting in the case of a significant liquidity event, from a company that said, “we can’t modify our standard equity agreement papers.”
- immediate full vesting of matched 401(k) contributions from a company that said, “our policy is that matched contributions only vest after 1 year.”
- ability to expense my own Linux workstation, which I could keep, in the offer letter, from a company that said employees are only allowed to be issued Mac laptops.
- explicit extra section in the offer letter stating that any IP created by me using only my personal equipment and personal time was my sole property and was explicitly not subject to any part of the employee handbook dealing with ownership of IP.
In all these cases, the conversation usually started out with me being gaslit about all this being impossible or my expectations being crazy. But after sticking to my requirements, eventually it normalized out into a sincere discussion.
I should add, all these examples came from very large companies except for the case of the options expiry and acceleration.
I also gave a hard “no” to many companies over the years that wouldn’t negotiate on topics like these, and I can say I don’t regret it one bit. There’s never been a case where I said no to a job offer over inflexibility on all these topics and then later regretted it.