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Google's "free food" is not free

rachelbythebay.com

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Re: Google's "free food" is not free

#4

better perks can mean less money. this is not news.

Exactly - bashing a former employer because they took the cookies away is not that much of a breaking news story.

If this is really about the money: Didn't we have some time ago a story about women earning less than men just because they don't ask for more?

I had read nothing about negotiation, and didn't know what I was doing. They offered a sum which was in fact an improvement over what I had been making seems to me even kind, considering her not mentioning once that she asked for a raise etc.

Re: Google's "free food" is not free

#8
post #5

better perks can mean less money. this is not news.

Maybe you should read the article - the argument was that while yes, perks were offered as a reason to accept a smaller wage, they were then gradually eliminated without changing the wage.

My mistake, I misread it. Thank you for pointing that out, for myself and others.

Re: Google's "free food" is not free

#9
I'm writing a post on salary negotiation today, so I zeroed in on two supporting details here that you should remember for later: when pressed on price, savvy negotiators said:

1) Give us some time to think about it.

2) We are going to re-focus the discussion on a different compensation lever where we can present something you're already going to get as if it were a new incentive justifying your concession on a lever you're currently interested in.

You can do both of these as a job seeker.

(For example, if you have extra-curricular interests like many desirable tech employees do, the extra-curricular interests can be used to justify an increase in your compensation vis-a-vis a hypothetical employee who punches out of the Internet at 5 pm. It doesn't particularly matter that you're going to continue blogging and OSS regardless of the outcome of this negotiation, you just frame the discussion such that that becomes newly discovered value which gives the other party something to hang their hat on for getting you that last $10,000.)

Re: Google's "free food" is not free

#10
post #7

The real lesson for employees is to ignore the cash value of the perks when evaluating offers. Perks can be taken away, but cutting salaries is much more controversial.

Which is why some sectors treat money as a perk (bonuses). But as much as companies make sure employees understand what a "bonus" is, there's a sense of entitlement and people quit when this years bonus wasn't as big as last years.
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