Salary Negotiation: Make More Money, Be More Valued

http://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/01/23/salary-negotiation/

by llambda • 15 years ago

596 188 15 years ago

kalzumeus.com

vimalg2• 15 years ago

Thanks Patrick. This was a long time coming.

I can tell you've had quite a personal journey about this topic.

DavidChouinard• 15 years ago

patio11 draws some content from his original "Don’t Call Yourself A Programmer, And Other Career Advice"[1] which you should definitely read.

[1] http://old.kalzumeus.com/2011/10/28/dont-call-yourself-a-pro...

bryanh• 15 years ago

I think a lot of what Patrick does well in this article is "reframing" the situation. I find once you get out of the "I don't want to offend them and lose my shot" mindset, negotiation and other "money talk" becomes really routine.

I wonder if there is value in creating "mock hiring sessions" that require you to negotiate your pay up. There are millions of "mock interviews" done in colleges every year, why not go that extra step? It seems learning to reframe the situation is easy enough to do given the proper coaching.

jaryd• 15 years ago

http://salarytutor.com/ this is a pretty good and fast read on the subject with some actionable advice that will help prepare you for the conversation.

jwegan• 15 years ago

The suggestion to not give a number first is awful. You may not want to give your previous salary history, but you most certainly do want to give the first number. You should do your research and figure out what the company usually pays for someone of your experience (checkout glassdoor.com or ask around) and state a number that is on the very high end of reasonable. It is always easier to try and stand your ground than fight your way uphill from a low offer.

The only case you might not want to state the first number is if you can't find our what the company typically pays.

VMG2• 15 years ago

Scientific research agrees with you. The concept is called anchoring

Anchoring research helps clarify the question of whether to make the first offer in a negotiation: by making the first offer, you will anchor the negotiation in your favor. In fact, Mussweiler and I have shown that making the first offer affords a bargaining advantage. In our studies, we found that the final outcome of a negotiation is affected by whether the buyer or the seller makes the first offer. Specifically, when a seller makes the first offer, the final settlement price tends to be higher than when the buyer makes the first offer.

http://hbswk.hbs.edu/archive/4302.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anchoring

The whole article could use a lot more science. I suggest reading "59 Seconds" from Richard Wiseman.

priv_acy• 15 years ago

I was under the impression that putting out the first number anchors the negotiation around that number, not necessarily in one's favor. For example, if you think you want to earn 100k, and they were hoping to keep you under 125k, throwing out a number of $110k is not giving you the advantage, as they may have thrown out a first number of $115k if you had let them.

khafra• 15 years ago

Considering that anchoring works with completely unrelated numbers, I wonder how well it would work to ask the population of Tallahassee, or the distance in miles to the moon, right before you start talking dollars.

badclient9• 15 years ago

I was voted as the most ruthless negotiator in class because as soon as the negotiation began, I rushed to anchor the most extreme position. The rest of the negotiation was how I might budge a little bit. In all but one case, the party budged and I got a super awesome deal--and the points. In one situation, the party didn't budge and neither of us earned any points.

It all really boils down to options and what is at stake. In my class negotiation, I literally had nothing at stake(the grade wasn't tied to winning negotiations). In real life though, if you don't have options and you only have one offer and you are pretty sure you won't get any more, this is harder to execute. On the other hand, if you don't have a lot to lose, you can be somewhat irrational.

Note, you are not giving your current salary number, just what you expect.

If it is way overboard, the company should still make you an offer if they like you. From then on, it is up to you: if you have a better option, go with it; if you don't, emphasize that you are willing to find some middle ground because you dig something unique about the company. You can say how you understand they can't pay what you'd like but because you are excited about industry x and enjoyed the culture, you'd consider middle ground figure of _____.

Final caveat: There is such as thing getting TOO good of a deal ... and then getting fired soon after because you couldn't deliver on the expectations you set relative to your salary.

mechanical_fish8• 15 years ago

This is only good advice if:

a) You really know what you're worth to the person across the table. (In a crazy-hot market, it's hard to get a good handle on this. And if you're mentally constrained by your current salary, negotiated in a down market when you had no experience, it's hard to break free of that. It's also hard to evaluate your own skills as others see them...)

b) You are completely comfortable with asking for, say, 1.5x what you're worth with a straight face;

c) when the person across the table visibly flinches or chuckles or hedges - and they will; books on negotiation explicitly teach you to do this - keeping that straight face and defending the number you just asked for.

So I incline to the opinion that patio11 is giving the right advice for his audience: The kind of people who secretly think of themselves as vastly overpaid and are secretly ashamed of it. I know from painful experience that if you send me into a room and ask me to anchor my own price my natural-born tendency is to tie that anchor around my own foot and then throw it into the Atlantic Ocean.

alexsb92• 15 years ago

Do you have any examples of some good books on negotiations?

badclient9• 15 years ago

If that is the case, then shouldn't a large part of the post focus on creating more options? Because if you have five interviews, I bet it is easier to be bold in negotiation than when you have one. Any other advice for the timid(than getting more options) is just beating around the bush imo.

run4yourlives10• 15 years ago

If you do give the first number - in any negotiation - and you don't count that as a point for the other side, you are probably a horrible negotiator.

This might not mean much to you overall, but don't confuse it with strong negotiation skills.

therandomguy• 15 years ago

Always be the first one to give a number. That sets the bar. Let's say your current salary is $100K. You want $130K. You say call the number first, $160K. Now the company is negotiating against that number. If you accept $140K they will perceive it as a win for them.

rmc3• 15 years ago

The problem is most engineers significantly under value their worth and so usually offer a low-to-the-company number. There are people working in offices (not as programmers) that don't know zip files. You, as a programmer, can do magic with the magic boxes.

In the long run, it would be better if programmers were better are valuing themselves. In the short run if programmers stopped giving numbers, it'd be better.

swanson• 15 years ago

Any tips specifically for negotiating a higher raise? Most of the advice is targeted to the "new job"-salary negotiations.

patio114• 15 years ago

Get attached to the part of the company that makes money, set up the measuring and politics such that you get credit for increases in the amount of money they're making, pitch a raise for you as the easiest way for them to get a repeat performance in the next quarter. Also, since companies have persistent exploitable inefficiencies about this issue, be prepared to talk to the people who are actually willing to give you a raise. (i.e. it may not be the people you currently work for.)

patrickyeon• 15 years ago

I haven't had the opportunity to try it, but a suggestion I liked when I heard it was to go to the person in a position to give you a raise and tell them "in six months time, I would like to be making X$. What would I need to do or show I am capable of doing (actionable, measurable, objective is important here) for you to give me that?"

Then do those things. In six months, remind them about the conversation (I'm sure it'd go better if you had a reliable way to jog their memory, eg email). If you're worried about them backing out, maybe follow up halfway through to see if they agree that you're on course and that they understand you meant it.

grecy• 15 years ago

This is a tactic that works very well for me:

I go into the room and do lots of listening at the start. I'm told something like a 3% raise. I say that's very interesting.. blah blah and the manager thinks then it's done.

Then I ask to confirm what my job title is, and what my responsibilities are (write them down). Then I go through a list of all the things I've done or am doing in the last year (prepare well in advance) and I get the manager to say if that item falls within my responsibilities, or if it's "over and above" my current title. Also then make sure the manager comments on how valuable that "thing" is. I drag this on.

Eventually, we have a list of 5 things I'm doing that are "expected" and 20-30 things I regularly do that are "over and above" and highly valued in the manager's own opinion.

From there, it's quite clear I deserve a higher raise.

Another thing I've done is compare the increase in cost of living to my (potential raise) - When the manager told me 3%, I mentioned my rent had increased 10% and gas had increase more than 25% in the last year... so in fact a 3% is actually a salary cut.

SatvikBeri3• 15 years ago

At a previous job I negotiated an 80% raise and double promotion 8 months after joining. This was at a huge, very bureaucratic, very political company. This made me the youngest Senior Analyst ever at the company. Here's how I did it:

Work portion: I focused my work on what provided value, not what was difficult or what was in my job description. One of my big achievements was saving the company roughly $1.2MM with a week of work.

I also found out who would be responsible for approving my raise/promotion (my boss and his boss) and what they valued. My boss pretty much just valued results and didn't care how long you worked, where you worked from, etc. But his boss cared a lot about office presence, face time, filling out mandatory reports that no one read, work hours, etc. So I made sure to satisfy both of them, even though I could easily accomplish all my work in just a few hours a day.

Negotiation portion: first, I found out when budgets were set, which was in September. Since performance reviews were done in December, that meant that by the time a performance review came about, your raise would have already been decided.

Then in May, I had a meeting with my boss where I told him something like "I'd like to have a meeting to discuss compensation sometime next month." So he knew it was coming-there was no surprise. Also note the timeline, the actual discussion was in June, giving my boss and his boss plenty of time before budgets would be fixed in September.

Then I made two write-ups: one presenting the value I'd contributed in terms my boss would value, and one presenting the value I'd contributed in terms his boss would value. I then made my case to my boss, focusing on the value I'd provided, and asked for the double promotion so that I could fall back down to a single promotion if that didn't fly.

This was not a perfect approach, but even this much was enough to put me in probably the top 95% of engineers trying to negotiate a raise.

I should mention that pretty much the entire approach above came from Ramit Sethi's book I Will Teach You To Be Rich.

feralchimp2• 15 years ago

While I don't agree with all of the article's advice, it gets the most fundamental point right: Stop feeling guilty about asking for market compensation.

Being a nice person has nothing to do with it. It's not your fault that you're worth more than they're offering out of the gate. It's the market's fault.

Good luck out there.

erikb2• 15 years ago

To get what you're worth, you should actually ask for more. The other one will assume you did and try to bargain you down hard anyway.

feralchimp2• 15 years ago

I have never been in a salary negotiation in which I was bargained down hard, which may mean I'm a terrible person to ask for negotiation advice.

But not entirely, because the "assume the counterparty is a dick" technique is actually kind of pointlessly lossy, even if it works out in aggregate over the market. It's been a long time since I negotiated a salary, but in a few recent contracting scenarios I've just set a price that I knew was fair, stuck to it, and when necessary explained to the prospect why it was fair.

People are either willing to listen to reason or they're not worth dealing with.

skrish• 15 years ago

@patio11 Thanks for writing such a detailed blog on this.

As I read your rephrasing of questions, I remembered reading this book "In the line of fire" by Jerry Weissman. There is a concept explained in this called "Roman Column".

The key message is: Do not answer the question till you fully comprehend the roman column i.e., the key issue. You can get to your own interpretation of roman column or ask the person to clarify the question to understand better. Then paraphrase the question and address the issue head-on focussing on the roman column.

I found the book to be very interesting with lot of real examples about press meets & other negotiations.

bhousel4• 15 years ago

Like many others in the comments, I disagree with the whole "Don't be the first to state a number" strategy.

Being weaselly about your number is a very noob thing to do in a negotiation. A skilled negotiator will seize on this and anchor the negotiations in at a very low rate. You need to know your number ahead of time, and drop it on them like it's the most natural thing in the world.

Your initial offer should be high but not ridiculous. (Unless you really are that busy with work and you don't want the job anyway, then give them a ridiculous number, and see what they say. Sometimes they'll say yes anyway).

The number could be 2x whatever you make currently, or 2x whatever you think they will pay, but the important thing is that it's high, and you say it with confidence and act like it's reasonable. It's far better to work your way down from (your) high number, than up from (their) low number.

joezydeco3• 15 years ago

I'm curious how this should all work when working with a recruiter.

I've come across a number of interesting positions that are available only through these guys. But we never get 15 minutes into a conversation before they're asking about salary history. The implied message is that the number you give is going to decide if your resume gets passed onward or not. So going too high, say 2X, would certainly kill your chances.

I've tried the "let's get to a fit before negotiating salary" and I actually had one recruiter say "sorry, this is how we roll". I dumped that guy, but it keeps coming up.

I know the OP's advice was to avoid this route and get to the hiring manager. Just curious what to do about these people.

mechanical_fish8• 15 years ago

Go "too high". Why dump the recruiter when you can just price yourself out of the recruiter's league?

Believe me, if your salary seems impossible to achieve the recruiter will tell you, probably pretty bluntly. And if it is possible to achieve and the recruiter helps you get there she'll be thrilled. Recruiters get a cut of that number!

(Though, remember, take recruiter advice with a grain of salt: Their tendency will probably be to talk you down. As with buyer-brokers in real estate, the recruiter's incentive is to make the deal go forward, not to hold out for the best possible price for you. Alas, in the end, the responsibility for holding out for a good price is almost impossible to delegate: The buck stops with you.)

Of course, the take-home lesson is that if you aren't comfortable setting a high anchor point for your salary you shouldn't deal through recruiters. Which probably helps to explain why companies seem to love using recruiters.

sethg7• 15 years ago

I don’t know specifically how to manage this procedure with recruiters, because in my most recent job search I found a position without using recruiters entirely.

But my general attitude regarding salary negotiations in the early stage is this: For any job that I apply for, I can go to salary.com, fill in the appropriate information, and get a range of expected compensation levels. Any recruiter or HR flapper can do the same thing. So I tell them that I expect to be compensated according to the market rate for engineers of my skill and experience level. If they’re not satisfied with that answer, then they shouldn’t be representing my interests, because either they’re stupid or they think I’m stupid.

bhousel4• 15 years ago

You don't really negotiate with a recruiter, in that sense. When they are asking you your salary information, it's not negotiation, it's fishing for information -- they want to know whether continuing the conversation is a waste of time or not.

Recruiters can be useful because they should know the upper salary bound for the position that they are trying to fill. Just ask them directly how high the client can go, and they'll probably volunteer this information. Act underwhelmed and ask for a little more (or end the conversation there if it's seems like a waste of time). The recruiter will go back to whatever HR manager and either get a "yes there's some flexibility" or "no it's set in stone".

Most recruiters are the "putting warm bodies in front of desks" kind. This kind of recruiter doesn't really give a crap about you or the client, they just want to make the deal, but a high salary for you works out well for them also. Filling positions this way can be a sign that the client is desperate.

There is another kind of recruiter that doesn't work this way. They're rare and they only do talent search for hard-to-fill executive and consulting positions. They are more about building networks and relationships.

mkramlich2• 15 years ago

I've learned that, as a rule of thumb, recruiters are damage and should be avoided. They are almost always more hassle than they're worth, and the chance of any recruiter ping/interaction leading to a good, paying gig is much less than if you can deal directly with a potential client, directly with a potential hirer and decision-maker. They suffer from middle-man effects, and they look for proxy signals rather than the actual substantive things they should want. They also want a big cut. And they are almost always very technically ignorant and incapable of judging what things are important, whether a person is qualified, etc. And they can "fish you", and by that I mean they tell you they have something, but it's really just to get your resume and other facts about you, put into their database, and then nothing ever happens except maybe a series of future contact attempts about gigs that just happen to have a few buzzwords in them, but you otherwise very clearly would not be interested in or available for. Again, this is my rule of thumb based on experience with most of them. I also think their profession, at least in the software industry, is going to die out, due to all the cheaper, better, smarter alternatives to sourcing and vetting.

brown9-22• 15 years ago

I don't think anyone is saying to not have an idea in mind ahead of time of what your goal number is. The point Patrick is making is to just not be the first one to state a number.

Just because they've attempted to anchor the discussion at a low rate doesn't mean that you don't already have another mental anchor known only to you of your goal number.

But the argument is that if you are the one to give your number first, you could lose out on money you could have gotten because you had no idea that they were willing to offer even more. It's hard to state you want $X/year and then ask for $1.1X a few minutes later. If you are the first to state a number and you ask for $100k/year and they were willing to offer $150k/year, you will never find out about that extra $50k/year.

badclient9• 15 years ago

If you are the first to state a number and you ask for $100k/year and they were willing to offer $150k/year, you will never find out about that extra $50k/year.

That looks good in paper but doesn't happen much. Vast majority of the time you will be low balled.

publicus2• 15 years ago

The key is to give out the number first at 200k/year then settle for 180k/year

drblast2• 15 years ago

You anchor the range. If you as an applicant state a number first you set the top of the range.

You say: "I want $100,000."

They say: "Oh, well, we were thinking more like 60,000"

You say: "Ok, how about 80,000?"

They say: "Done."

If they were willing to pay 100k, you've just lost 20k. They know what they are willing to pay, you don't. You're at a disadvantage and need to gain more info. The one who speaks first loses. Instead:

You say: "I really am impressed with this company and I'm sure you will offer me a very competitive salary."

They say: "60k"

You say: "That's great! I was thinking anywhere from 60k up to 130k."

Now you've set the range and the negotiation will more likely end up where you want. You won't lose money doing this. BUT you might gain money if they say, "90k" right off the bat and you didn't expect them to offer that much. Then you can offer the 90k-120k range and even if you only gain 5k after that, you're much better off than if you spoke first.

On edmunds.com there was a fantastic undercover used-car salesman expose where they talked about this. The salesman would always ask people what they wanted to spend each month on a car. No matter what they said, (say, $300) the salesman would then counter with the question, "up to?..."

Inevitably people would be embarassed or confused and offer a higher number. The article said the tactic worked so well that the salesmen would jokingly greet each other in the hall by saying "up to?.."

So think about the range.

funkah2• 15 years ago

Parts of this seem unrealistic to me. How would anyone say with a straight face "That's great! I was thinking anywhere from 60k up to 130k"? Sixty to a buck thirty? Nobody has that kind of range.

In the first example, if the company was willing to pay 100, why would they say 60? As the article mentions, typically the person on the other side of the table is much less invested in your salary than you are. If that's the case, I can't see them going from 100 to 60.

I dunno. I think there are a lot of ways to approach this and the main thing is not getting caught doing the dumb stuff patio11 talks about, like shying away from the entire process. But these smaller issues like mentioning the number first could more likely go either way.

mvgoogler2• 15 years ago

"You say: "I really am impressed with this company and I'm sure you will offer me a very competitive salary." They say: "60k""

Sorry - the real world just isn't this simple.

First - if you are talking to a company that really is trying to screw you down to the lowest possible number - ask yourself why you would want to work for such a company? If they are going to start off the relationship by nickel and dime-ing you, what do you think they are going to do once you're in the door?

The reality is that any company that is worth working for is going to want to bring in good developers at a salary that works for both parties. It is way more expensive in the long run to bring in a developer for less than they are worth and have them leave in a year when they realize it, than it is to just hire them at the right salary in the first place.

If a company hires good developers and treats them well, not only are they going to produce more for the company, they are much more likely to help you bring in other good developers.

I don't know about you - but I prefer to work with good companies who are looking beyond the next P&L statement.

I prefer a more honest approach. 1) Do your homework. Talk to people you trust and figure out what you are worth in the market 2) Do your homework (part 2). Figure out how much you need and how much you would like. This (and step 1) will give you solid salary range to work with. 3) Do your homework (part 3). Decide where you are flexible - maybe your spouse has good benefits and you don't need any, maybe you're willing to trade salary for equity (or flexible hours, or something else).

The bottom line is - no tricks or tips are going to give you better results than knowledge and preparation will.

Once you've done your homework you don't need to rely on tricks to get what you want. There isn't anything wrong with putting a number out there first if you've done your homework. Sure you anchor the conversation - so go ahead and anchor it in your favor. You know what you need and what you want - so use that information to benefit you. If you know that you need 100K but are ideally looking for 120K, and know that your market value is around 115K, then use that information to inform what you put out there as your first number. If you think you're talking to someone you trust, then maybe you just put your numbers out there. If you think the recruiter is going to negotiate down from your number then add X% to your real numbers.

The other real answer is that nothing works better than having a real plan B. Don't just talk to one company. Go out and get several offers. Let the other companies do your work for you ;-)

sethg7• 15 years ago

I spent approximately the past year looking for a new job (and accepted an offer this month). From my salary research regarding people in my situation, it seemed like a 10% pay hike makes the difference between a median salary and a 75th-percentile salary, or between 25th percentile and the median.

If I had asked for $100K in the salary-negotiation stage for any of these jobs, I would not have considered $60K a serious counteroffer. Either the company had a serious misunderstanding regarding my skills and responsibilities (maybe we need to discuss further what I am bringing to the table), or the company doesn’t have a lot of cash and is offering extra-sweet equity packages instead (that might be a good offer for some people, but not for me), or they’re just lowballing everyone (FAIL).

krschultz• 15 years ago

It is very situational dependent.

I make a good salary. I very know quite well what a top level salary for my position in my area is because I have a large network of friends doing the same thing and it is a clearly defined role (as most technical jobs are). I would want to put my number out there first because we're going to be negotiating in a very specific range. I still want to hold off until after they've decided they want to hire me (that helps my leverage), but when push comes to shove I want my number out there first.

My friend works in marketing. Definining her salary is much more difficult. Marketing titles can really vary - what is an associate? What is a specialist? What is a product manager? What is a brand manager? There are some brand managers making six figures and some making $25k. In her case, she wants to change jobs because she is horribly underpaid. Almost any salary would be an improvement. Her throwing out a number first could only be detrimental and so she will wait until she hears the number on the table.

As a side note, always compare total compensation not just salary. In the two examples above, we both want to get MBAs. Having our next company pay for the MBA would be worth a lot of money. I would take 10,000+ a year less for a place that will pay for an MBA over one that doesn't. Don't forget about bonus, healthcare, 401k matching amount & vesting, overtime, vacation, flexibility, etc etc etc. And negotiate it all at once.

robotresearcher• 15 years ago

| Her throwing out a number first could only be detrimental

That's a strong statement. How do you know this to be true?

_dps• 15 years ago

Agreed re:being weaselly about your number. Given that someone has to say a number first (absent weird note-trading schemes), not saying a number first is (game theoretically) tantamount to saying "I'm hoping you'll unwittingly make an offer better than what I believe I could credibly demand". In complex multi-dimensional negotiations this can be totally reasonable (when there are 20 different key terms to negotiate, saying "I think you'll make an anchoring mistake first" is not at all unreasonable). Salary negotiations are usually not multidimensional since the position/title is usually fixed and the official story is that you'll work at some fixed level of output commensurate with that title and not connected to pay (so you can't say "I'll accept $X but I'll probably slack a lot").

From the employer's position the "I think you're likely to botch it" bet is not a bad one: employees don't know the employer's value function for the work, but the employer can have a pretty decent model of the employee's value function for steady income (tip: eliminate your short-term need for steady income and many negotiations become a lot easier).

For the employee, hoping for an accidental or poorly-informed over-offer is rarely justified. Employers usually have many past negotiation experiences and many sources of information for what other employers are paying, whereas employees usually have few. Similarly, the employer's side of the exchange is primarily liquid and easily quantified (cash+benefits) whereas the employee's side is poorly quantified and illiquid (the employer usually can't directly "sell out" your past labor and partially recoup if he decides it was worth less than he expected).

Expecting employers to err on the side of overpaying with any sort of frequency seems theoretically hard to justify, and that is certainly not in line with my experience. Unless you know the employer wants you specifically (as opposed to any instance of the class you represent), I think it's almost always better for employees to open with what they consider a high number and let the employers try to talk them down.

D_Alex• 15 years ago

I would go even further than this... If you are given an opportunity to state a number first, go for the ridiculously high, especially in the context on "we simply must have a number to get the ball rolling". Patrick suggests that you say "Okay, lets fill in $1.00 and then come back to it later" - Wrong! "Lets fill in $1,000,000... etc" is the way to go.

The reasons are best explained here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anchoring

furyofantares• 15 years ago

They are already anchored at the maximum salary they'll pay you, and you are anchored at the minimum salary you'll accept, but neither of you knows each other's numbers.

They want to hit somewhere above your minimum. They don't want to hit your minimum (since it may be volatile) and they really, really don't want to hit below your minimum. And they are okay with hitting their maximum.

In my location it costs 15-20k to find a senior engineer you want to hire. Once that happens, you really, really don't want to lose them in salary negotiations, or to another offer. So you don't lowball them. If they give you a number they can lowball themselves, but if they don't, then you offer something near your maximum.

Your advice is that you give them a number so high that you're sure it's above their anchor and that it gives them no information about your anchor. But that doesn't change their anchor, and not giving a number at all is pretty close to that, while being nearly risk-free to you.

Of course, once they've asked for a number, you've refused, and they've pushed on it, it may not be risk-free to fight anymore. At that point, I'd agree: Aim for the sky.

smh• 15 years ago

Re the "Don't be the first to state a number" strategy, what happens in the real world when two competent negotiators meet?

bwldrbst• 15 years ago

After about a week we broke down the office door. People on the floor below were starting to complain about the smell.

rdouble2• 15 years ago

I'm not convinced by this article that the author has ever done a salary negotiation.

brown9-22• 15 years ago

The author offers his services to companies as an independent contractor. I would think a huge amount of that involves rate negotiation.

tlogan• 15 years ago

All negotiations need to end with both parties thinking they are winners. In that spirit, you need to give a number (high-end) (so called anchoring) so that other party can feel good when they convince you for less.

Also, other things (i.e., vacations first 6 months, or some small perks) mention only after you negotiated the salary and pretty much you close the deal.

lawnchair_larry• 15 years ago

I've never understood advice that talks about negotiating fringe benefits like vacation time. At best, company policy will prevent those terms from being negotiated because they're standardized. At worst, you're just going to look like an entitled asshole from day one if you try to get special treatment. I'd much rather make up for it in salary negotiation and take the same deal that your future teammates got.

run4yourlives10• 15 years ago

>At best, company policy will prevent those terms from being negotiated because they're standardized.

Those policies are there for people that don't choose to negotiate those terms.

sethg7• 15 years ago

At best, company policy will prevent those terms from being negotiated because they're standardized.

If you frame your counteroffer as “I would take this job if you gave me $X more base salary or Y more vacation days”, then the guy across the table can decide which option is more offensive to company policy. It’s not your job, as the applicant, to decide in advance what terms the employer will accept. Your job is to communicate what you want until you either have a deal or feel comfortable walking away from the table.

At worst, you're just going to look like an entitled asshole from day one if you try to get special treatment.

Personally, I have better things to do with my time than count up how many days off each of my co-workers have taken and compare them with the numbers in the employee handbook.

ssharp• 15 years ago

I think these discussion tend to get a lot of people debating on who should offer a # first.

I don't think this is a question with a binary answer. Statistically, you may be able to determine which works better as a whole, but nobody will negotiate their salary enough times to render a proper sample. I'd guess that treating each salary negotiation uniquely will produce a higher mean salary than simply changing the "who says $ first" variable.

corin_• 15 years ago

"If you’re sane only about 25% or so of your gross income is subject to the results of real estate negotiations. Close to 100% is subject to the results of salary negotiations. Thus, your salary negotiations are probably going to be the most important financial decisions you will ever make."

That's pretty irrelevant really, what's relevent is the difference it can make. First, if you negotiate a 20% discount on the 25% you're doing better than negotiating a 1% pay rise for the 100%. Second, a negotiated salary recurrs annually, it's not a one-off sum. So yes the conclusion is right, but for the wrong reason.

yariang• 15 years ago

The 25% he alludes to is your recurring mortgage payment, which also happens annually--monthly, actually. What he means here is that a discount of 5% in your mortgage negotiations is much less than an increase of 5% in your salary. So he is right, for the right reason.

jarek• 15 years ago

corin_ is right - salary is recurring, mortgage/real estate purchase is one-time. You pay off the mortgage with recurring payments, but they are based on the one-time amount. If you negotiate $10k extra salary, after two years you will have $20k extra. If you negotiate $10k lower real estate purchase, after two years you will not have $20k extra. (Technically you will have a little bit more than $10k extra due to compound interest on smaller principal, but nowhere near $20k.)

badclient9• 15 years ago

Honestly, my top advice for negotiating better: interview lots and never feel like if you don't take this job, you won't get a better one. The techniques are important. But if you don't have a solid foundation in any negotiation(options and leverage), you're fighting an uphill battle.

As it stands, patio11's advice seems to be more applicable to people who have very few job options. I'd argue most people on HN would have multiple options, even if they are shy about activating them(by applying/interviewing).

funkah2• 15 years ago

> interview lots and never feel like if you don't take this job, you won't get a better one

Right. One thing my dad taught me is that if they want to sell it more than you want to buy it (or vice versa), you win. If you're feeling insecure about your value, I'd say that matters a lot more than, say, who throws out a number first.

Timothee5• 15 years ago

One thing I often find in salary negotiation advice are lines that go like this "At my last company, I increased sales by 3% by $YADDA_YADDA".

The thing is that I can't really think of nice metrics like this, and am surprised that a lot of engineers would find something as significant as sales numbers.

For one thing, the further your metric is from strict revenue, the harder it is to put a price tag on it. A sales number is easy, but if you optimized some part of the code somewhere, it becomes much more fuzzy and longer to explain. Sure, Patrick also pushes people to get jobs were your contribution is more directly correlated to revenues, but not everyone will want a job like that, and until you do get one, you can't use that.

The other thing is that I feel it's easier to consider a sales person as directly responsible for a significant increase in revenue for their market. But engineers work in teams, so saying "I increased sales by x%" is hard to justify: what about the Product Manager that spec'ed it out? What about the rest of the engineering team that worked on that change, reviewed it, pushed it to production? If you're the only one doing all that, sure, but that's rarely the case.

So, what's a good way to come up with relevant, justified metrics like that?

lrobb3• 15 years ago

I don't think most engineers or engineering managers really give a flip... At least IME they don't.

They want to see that you can produce code. So if you can point to features/apps that you developed, or how you optimized some feature somewhere, that's what they want.

Timothee5• 15 years ago

I understand that and that's kind of my point. As an engineer, you can definitely talk about what you've done to convince the other party that you're capable, but it's (IMO) more difficult to tie it to a specific increase in the offer when negotiation starts, which is what Patrick discusses.

Specifically, he puts the asked salary increase head-to-head with the potential revenue increase: "Getting me that extra $4,000 would make this a much easier decision. Considering that this is conceivably worth millions to you, we’d be silly not to do business with each other." Which indeed makes it sound like a bargain. :)

And I know it's exactly the goal of what Patrick preaches: speak in terms of value created, not technical competence. It's just, y'know, hard :)

patio114• 15 years ago

Sales guys very rarely tie their stomachs in knots with "So I suppose technically I might have talked to five million in new accounts last quarter, but most of them required new features, so I'm not sure I can justifiably claim credit for that one without splitting it with the engineering team." One might start learning from that example. Did you lead development on a new product with $5 million in sales? Then I might describe that as leading development on a new product with $5 million in sales. I wouldn't recommend optimizing SQL queries on a screen no one actually uses, but if that is your day to day activity, you were improving performance of the company's flagship product which launched to over $5 million in sales. If you're optimizing page load speed then presumably you tracked the before and after and, if you don't have great data about how that trickled into the business results, you can at least say "I shaved 5 seconds off our dashboard. Research from Google / Amazon / Microsoft / etc has found that page load speed has the following quantifiable impacts and that the sensitivity is on the order of 100 ms, or roughly one fiftieth of the improvement I delivered."

You can also either a) engineer your transfer to the part of the company which makes money or b) engineer your work duties such that they include things which will help career growth. For example, A/B testing both prints money and gives very relevant, justified metrics which are likely to include things motivational to decisionmakers at current and future employers. If you are an engineer in a company which doesn't A/B test but could, you should make that sale internally, and then nominate yourself as the obvious person to implement it.

Timothee5• 15 years ago

I know what you're saying, but sales guys benefits from the perception that they're solely responsible for the close of a sale. That's their job after all. So the $5M in sales? It wouldn't have happened without them! (that's the perception)

if that is your day to day activity, you were improving performance of the company's flagship product which launched to over $5 million in sales

Already there are more steps. You know he didn't sell that himself, a sales person did, and the link between performance and number of sales is unclear without knowing the product. So, to me, the $5 million number is nice ('ok so he was trusted to work on that important product') but feels a bit irrelevant when asking for a specific offer increase.

For whatever reason, it doesn't convince me that this candidate in particular couldn't have been replaced by another candidate for the same result. In the example of a sales person, I'm more easily convinced that s/he was influential in the result. edit: I guess it's because sales is so much more of a "people" job than engineering.

But maybe I'm just pointing at what you've been saying: take a job closer to the money…

temphn• 15 years ago

patio11: just to play devil's advocate here, you have posted in the past that you have never made more than $60k per year[1]. This prompted a much attacked post [2] that is actually sort of structurally similar to this one (how to get more money for engineers), but aimed at you specifically rather than others, which made it strange.

Can I ask you the extent to which your points are field tested? Within the last 488 days, have your salary negotiations actually paid off, and who have you been negotiating with given that you are an entrepreneur with your own company?

This is not meant as ad-hominem and I like much of your writing. But you are like a sports trainer recommending a workout plan, and it is not unreasonable to ask whether you are actually in shape.

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1716991

[2] http://www.sebastianmarshall.com/the-genius-and-tragedy-of-p...

rmc3• 15 years ago

The thing is that I can't really think of nice metrics like this, and am surprised that a lot of engineers would find something as significant as sales numbers.

One way: Did you work on a feature that was then used to sign up a client that is now worth €X?

run4yourlives10• 15 years ago

>So, what's a good way to come up with relevant, justified metrics like that?

Make shit up.

I'm dead serious. Not in terms of "This product never existed and I'm going to lie to you", but in terms of "Everyone loved that feature I did, it probably helped retain 3-5% of our clients alone, and we were able to hire another two people the following year, so that probably works out to about 10% growth."

So: my feature improved helped grow sales by 13%.

jiggy20114• 15 years ago

Many companies I think will intentionally keep employees in the dark as much as possible about how much they are really worth to the company.

I worked in support once for an outsourcing company where I was paid only a little over minimum wage and given a number of SLAs to keep (which I usually exceeded).

When I found out years later about the actual costs to the customer of the work I was doing (management flatout refused to give us any of these numbers) I realized that I could have worked about 4 days a week on the same monthly salary and they would still have made a substantial profit on me.

lutorm3• 15 years ago

Coming from academia, where we don't make money, we spend money, I wondered this too. I can come up with a badass Monte Carlo algorithm that does our computation in half the time, but there's absolutely no way to connect this to any monetary value because the end product isn't about money.

patio114• 15 years ago

Vis-a-vis your institution, get good at grant writing. You don't make money in academia by doing research, you make money by doing grant proposals.

Vis-a-vis the funding agencies, they generally have a set of concerns which are non-monetary, too, so meet them where they are.

rmc3• 15 years ago

Sounds like you've made some interesing Monte Carlo based research. Why not write about that/promote that? Get other insitutions talking about how great lutorm from $YOUR_INSTITUTION is. Will academia pay for that?

anthonyb2• 15 years ago

Start gathering them.

Seriously, if you're working on $YADDA_YADDA, then obviously there should be some justification for it, either to yourself or your manager. That's what you need to get down, stuff like: improved response times by x%, killed y open bugs, removed z lines of code, whatever your project's current major issues are.

And if you can't come up with an easy justification like that, why are you doing it? :)

thomaslangston2• 15 years ago

> What about the rest of the engineering team that worked on that change, reviewed it, pushed it to production?

"I worked as part of a team that $x. My role on the team was $y."

SatvikBeri3• 15 years ago

Real-life example from a friend I coached:

-His main role was working on a software process that generated XYZ benefit for the free users

-He increased the efficiency of that process, allowing the company to increase the XYZ's they created by 100%

-Free users who had XYZ were n% more likely to buy

-Sales were worth an average of ABC dollars

-Multiplying it all out, he was responsible for increasing the bottom line by a lot

Now, he had to make a lot of estimates, and ask people he knew at his company for estimates on some of the information. But by amassing all this information he can make a much stronger case for his value than if he could only talk about the technical work he did.

inerte• 15 years ago

The part about managers thinking less of you because you do not negotiate is completely true. Everybody wants an awesome negotiator under them. Just like if you solve P=NP on the white board on the interview will mark you as the wizard, negotiating will mark you, right from the interview, as someone who fights for what he wants, and will fight for what the project/team/company wants.

chrisbennet2• 14 years ago

I upvoted you but I'm not so sure its the negotiation skills that they'll admire as much as the self confidence in your own market value. Sort of "This guy is used to getting paid really well, he must be really good."

dsolomon• 15 years ago

Author drew numbers from thin air resulting in horrible advice.

Throw in - "For a funded startup which has enough engineers to warrant a foosball table, the company payroll is well north of $100,000 a month." - yet still require that employees provide their own hardware/software to do the job.

lazerwalker• 15 years ago

In your guys' experience, how relevant are these tips to someone speaking with relatively young startups (say, seed or Series A stage)? I know that good negotiation skills are good negotiation skills however you slice it, but I'm curious to hear from folks if they've needed to use a different set of tactics when not dealing with an "HR department" as much as a founder.

mikeklaas• 15 years ago

The advice to "never be first to state a number" should really be "never divulge your current/previous salary".

throwaway19793• 15 years ago

This isn't as easy to dodge though, right? Or do people do this routinely?

patio114• 15 years ago

It is not too difficult to dodge questions about current/past salary. We're clear on why you want to do that, right? If you say "My salary at my current job is $65,000", you will receive a job offer at $70,000 +/- $2,000 regardless of whether the company would happily pay $90k for you if they had not known your current salary.

Anyhow, given that, there are numerous options to decline to damage your own negotiating position. My personal favorite is "As a matter of professional courtesy, I decline to comment on the specific policies of past employers. Don't worry, I will treat your confidences with the same level of professionalism when someone asks me about them in a few years."

It is unfalsifiable (as opposed to what people sometimes suggest on HN: "That is under NDA", which is a claim that can actually be a lie), conveys status, and (gently) informs the person you're speaking with that you're aware how the game is played.

lrobb3• 15 years ago

"Applicant: Great, I can’t wait to get started. Getting me that extra $4,000 would make this a much easier decision. Considering that this is conceivably worth millions to you, we’d be silly not to do business with each other."

I think the problem is that you don't have a verifiable skill that will increase sales by X%... Because if you did, then you'd be silly for only asking for an extra $4000 based off of increasing sales by millions.

hudibras• 15 years ago

I think Patrick's point is that this is B.S., but it's B.S. that the interviewer can use to rationalize giving up the $4,000. It's exactly the same as the Free Food At Google argument.

byoung22• 15 years ago

I think software engineers can come up with a few skills that makes them more valuable than other applicants by a quantifiable amount. In my case, I have extensive experience with streaming audio and video across web and mobile devices. Having built and maintained the streaming video infrastructure that powers RushLimbaugh.com, JimRome.com, CoastToCoastAM.com, BobAndTom.com as well as their corresponding mobile sites and apps while I worked at ClearChannel, I have the experience to cut months off of similar projects for my current company. That alone was worth the 37.5% increase over my last salary to them.

spicyj• 15 years ago

Can anyone say how applicable these suggestions are to getting internships while still in college?

prophetjohn• 15 years ago

I'm currently working at my first internship where I negotiated a ridiculous lowball into a substantial lowball. I didn't have any other offers on the table and was worried that I wouldn't get anything, so I settled. I think my point is that it won't hurt to ask.

I later found out that I wouldn't be an employee, but a 1099 contractor responsible for all my taxes, making the rate even lower than I initially thought. Needless to say, they will have to more than double my hourly rate when summer comes for me to stay.

throwaway19793• 15 years ago

So here's an issue I've faced. Instead of being asked ... what's my number? I've gotten asked .. "what's your salary?" How do you deal with this one?

sethg7• 15 years ago

If you don’t think your current salary is relevant to what you are worth to your next employer, then you don’t have to answer that question. Really.

bhousel4• 15 years ago

Make something up. It's not like they're going to call your boss and say "Hey we're trying to steal this employee away from you, how much money are you paying him?"

Some exceptions to this: 1. You work a government job where your salary is public knowledge 2. You are unemployed and they can just call your previous employer. 3. You listed your current boss as a reference and they're probably getting a call anyway. 4. You expect that they're going to perform an extensive background check that might uncover your salary anyway.

sigjuice• 15 years ago

"Can't disclose my current salary due to NDA?"

brador• 15 years ago

I'll just say be careful when taking free negotiation advice from professional writers rather than professional negotiators..That's not to take anything away from patio11 here, just be careful and keep the salt handy.

dexen• 15 years ago

Details of strategy sure are important, but, above all, do negotiate.

A comment† by http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=jfoster that really opened my eyes:

> You might also look at it another way, and Google probably will, too. If you're being considered by Google and you don't negotiate, perhaps they are the ones making the mistake [by attempting to hire you].

† http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3496512

positr0n• 15 years ago

Great advice here, now I want to see something about negotiating a raise within your own company. I could use this information to get huge raises by changing jobs every couple years for the first decade of my career.

But what if I like my job? I want to stay here and negotiate large, fair raises. How?

run4yourlives10• 15 years ago

Be willing to leave.

Sounds trite, but it's true. If your employer knows you are never a threat to leave, they will never try to convince you to stay with monetary incentives.

Once you are willing to leave, shop around and "interview" with your employer too. Figure out what the best overall deal is at that point.

wallflower• 15 years ago

My friend wanted to move his family across the country. He approached his managers with the proposal that they let him work remote. And, more importantly, he explicitly let them know if they did not accept his proposal that he would resign. He got the remote approval and he says that there was no bluff. He was all-in. If they said "sorry, we cannot do that. Cya", he would have had to resign. Because his creditability would be shot if he said "oh, thanks for considering". He feels he got it because he really was forcing their hand.

larrys• 15 years ago

First let me say that this appears to have plenty of good information and I will definitely read the entire piece.

But I've been stopped right away by this paragraph near the beginning:

"I think that middle class Americans are socialized from a very young age to view negotiation as something that is vaguely disreputable and engaged in only by poor people. Think of the associations you have with the word “haggling”: do you think of a successful young professional talking about thousands of dollars in a brightly lit office? No, you probably think of an old woman arguing over a trivial sum of money in a dirty flea market."

Nothing could be further from the truth for people that are, as only a few examples, jewish, indian, asian and I would imagine other immigrant groups.

As a member of one of the above mentioned, it's exactly the opposite. I was raised to think if you don't negotiate you're stupid. And not only that, but if you give someone a price and they don't negotiate so is the other party.

Of course this all depends on the product or service in question obviously as well as the dollar amount.

By the way, negotiation doesn't mean someone giving you a price and you saying "will you take $x". That's something that any good negotiator will recognize as essentially saying you will pay the asking price or maybe you want them to throw you a bone.

gleb• 15 years ago

Real estate purchases in US are usually highly leveraged, say 5x for a typical purchase with 20% down.

So, negotiating those will have proportionally larger impact than immediate cashflow changes suggest.

The article incorrectly suggests otherwise which detracts from its authority.

alexwolfe• 15 years ago

I think there are a lot of people disagreeing with "Don't state the number first" but it's important to be open to new ideas.

This article is meant to make you stronger and offer some new tricks in the negotiating process. You're certainly not learning and expanding your game if you're convinced that you don't need to do anything different.

I think its important to think about what the author is really saying: Can you find out what cards their holding before they know what cards you have? Can you? It's tough, its challenging, that's the point.

The more information you have before you start making decision the better decision you're going to make, period. When you start throwing out numbers a very big decision has just been made, theres's no going back at that point.

If you're worried they are going to laugh at you, or be offended, they won't be. This is not a war, it's an interview, a chance to make an introduction and meet somebody new. Sometimes you can make connections in the interview even if you end up not taking the job. You're dealing with people, not robots. No one is out to get you. In fact, they're considering hiring you and working with you everyday!

The point is learn new tricks and push back a little.

calibraxis• 15 years ago

Interesting point. Also, it really helps to somehow weasel/tap your way into the hiring side. ;) Even if it's just to see the submissions of applicants.

An important principle of negotiation is knowing their interests as well as you can. And presenting a representation of yourself which strongly satisfies those interests.

Basically, all the work is done before the negotiation; the point of negotiation is where it all comes together and you use all that pressure you've built up to (politely) bear.

If you have a take-home project, great, you can hit it out of the ballpark by adding all the professional polish that virtually no other applicant will do — have it build, solve corner cases, or casually note that it was tested on 3 platforms; whatever's vaguely appropriate. Virtually everyone else cuts some corner somewhere. Most will submit a minimal answer, to a question which resembles — but isn't — the take-home question.

To the company struggling to find a good coder, this makes you a drool-worthy thing to purchase, like the newest Mac. They will calculate what they're losing in not having your increment of productivity, and that will pressure their decision.

(That said, I prefer to state the number first as an anchor, because I research relevant salaries, but whatever. ;)

geekfactor• 15 years ago

A friend of mine turned me on to the audio version of this book, "Negotiating Your Salary: How to Make $1000 a Minute" [1], many years ago.

It's more about a mind shift than rocket-science techniques, but I can attest to increasing my income by tens of thousands of dollars by putting its ideas into practice.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Negotiating-Your-Salary-Minute-Revised...

publicus2• 15 years ago

Key: never tell them your salary. Then, be the first to give the number at 2X your current salary. Then come down a little eg, 5-10% lower then 2X.

Get a bunch of offers, let them bid it even higher.

xiaoma2• 15 years ago

>"I received a comment that this is untrue for startups by someone today. For a funded startup which has enough engineers to warrant a foosball table, the company payroll is well north of $100,000 a month."

I'm 90% sure that was in reference to this post: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3499480

Our most recent round of funding at the start-up where I'm working was 750k. (http://techcrunch.com/2011/10/24/smartots-raises-750000-offe...)

That has to cover everything for about half a year, including developers, artists, lawyers, rent, travel expenses, regulatory costs, etc... And we've made it go pretty far and will likely raise a much larger round in the near future. I'm sure everyone at the company would love to be making more money, especially those who have worked in richer countries. However, even a couple of developers pushing for the kinds of salaries that pattio11 is would mean the start-up burns its cash, the founders lose their invested time and money and worst of all, we don't improve kids' education.

Of course there is always the chance that those two guys have such beastly skills that they can get us market dominance (and profits or a much larger investment) before that happens. Would you take that gamble?

Disclosure: I don't speak for the company, I'm not privy to top level strategy discussions and I don't own any of it or represent it, etc... I do like what we're doing, though.

rhizome2• 15 years ago

The flipside is that maybe the execs aren't good enough to get the kind of funding necessary to build the company effectively, or that the business idea (beyond "improving kids' education") is not viable in its current implementation path.

xiaoma2• 15 years ago

One of the founders has successfully sold a start-up in China in the past and the CTO has sold 2 in the US. The product fit still isn't 100%, though. The business has gone through a couple of pivots just in the time I've been there.

It should go without saying that before hitting market fit is a terrible time to take on overly mercenary employees. Goal #1 is to survive off of the money long enough to reach that point.

mhartl• 15 years ago

I'd like to suggest a "comfort challenge" for patio11: apply the principles in this article to increase your stated income ($70,000 [1]) by a factor of three without compromising your quality of life. I bet it can be done.

[1] http://www.kalzumeus.com/2011/12/21/bingo-card-creator-etc-y...

jrockway• 15 years ago

This is all kind of obvious, and I boil it down to: if you're moving to a new company, they should pay you more than your current job and any other offers. Ask each company for what you want to make, then let them compete against each other.

The real difficulty I had in the last round was pricing relocation; is $XX in New York better than $XX-10% in Seattle?

jonnathanson• 15 years ago

In my experience, most companies will severely lowball on big relocations and cost of living adjustments. You could be living in the boondocks on $100k a year, where the cost of living is next to nothing. And then you find a roughly equivalent job in NYC, where the cost of living is easily 2X or 3X your current situation. Will the firm in NYC double or treble your salary? Extremely unlikely. Most will simply anchor to your existing salary, with perhaps a very miniscule adjustment for COL.

In these situations, it might make sense to volunteer the first number in the negotiation, and to go high with it. Don't mention your current salary. Just talk about how the cost of living is a big adjustment (be precise about your multiplier, citing a data source), relocation is a big adjustment, etc., so accordingly, $X sounds reasonable. (Where X = the first number you mention; you do not make reference to your starting point before arriving at X. The hiring manager or HR person usually won't work backwards and reverse-engineer your starting point, but rather, will treat X as the anchor. The mere fact of having a rationale leading up to X makes X seem credible).

The other thing I'd say is not to make X a wildly ballsy figure, or to pull it out of thin air. You should have a very realistic reasoning for having arrived at X; it shouldn't be complete bullshit. Giving a number that is wildly off the top end of the pay scale for a position is a sign of naivete, which is often a signal that you're not actually qualified for the position (or that you're overqualified, in which case, why are you applying for this position?). Your anchor X should be somewhere at the high end of what your research tells you is a realistic range for the job in question.

apu• 15 years ago

This is all kind of obvious

You're probably much more experienced than I am, but I thought a good 80% was new to me, and incredibly useful. Perhaps in the abstract I knew many of the principles, but to see them elaborated down to the level of actual conversations that happen during the negotiation was very valuable.

run4yourlives10• 15 years ago

The best way to avoid saying the salary number is to simply ask the question of them first. In other words: "What salary range does this role warrant in your company?"

That frames the conversation really, really well. For one, if the two ideas are severely mismatched, you don't waste your time. If the number is low, you can make note of it then and explain why you are so much better than that. If the answer is non-committal, you've got a wonderful spot to review the role in detail and "come up with the number together".

If the number is high, you can reset your mid-point and focus more on their "horrible" vacation allowance that they'd need to correct to bring you on. :)

rb2k_• 15 years ago

Speaking of salary negotiations, there is something I always wondered about the US:

What is the difference in "pure" salary vs additional costs to the empolyer?

Things like 401k contributions and benefits (e.g. dental or health) certainly come with a pricetag. Seeing as I'm doing remote work from another country, I'm not sure how much that actually saves the company. The same goes for simple things as not needing office space / electricity / ... which I provide for myself over here (as I'm working from home).

Does anybody have any insight on that?

sethg7• 15 years ago

One question I’ve been asked, interviewing at startups, is: “how do you feel about cash vs. equity?” For my personal financial needs, this is a no-brainer: cash is king, baby. But other HN readers might be in a position where their market-rate salary is $100K cash but they could see themselves getting by at $75K or even $50K... how should they answer that question?

mitchie_luna• 15 years ago

I think the people who has the right to negotiate is the one who has the skill to do the job being offered. Because you know your capability, definitely, you should know what is your value in the market.

Anyway, article is interesting.

nnythm• 15 years ago

how do you negotiate equity?

forax• 15 years ago

Any advice for negotiating over email if you don't receive an offer until after the interview?

rapind• 15 years ago

Jut like everything in life, confidence is key. You gain confidence through experience. Try, fail, try again. Little tricks like not being the first to say a number is about as useful as pickup lines are for dating.

kurtvarner• 15 years ago

Anyone want to give a TL;DR explanation?

sliverstorm• 15 years ago

I always struggle internally with posts like this, or the other one I remember, "Don't Call Yourself a Programmer". To fully follow the advice underpinning these pieces, I would generally risk sacrificing a lot of personal enjoyment in my work in pursuit of money.

I know HN leans strongly towards money whenever money is at hand, but I tend to lean the other way.

tintin• 15 years ago

You are right. Money is the worst motivation for a job. Money is just a small part of salary.

fragsworth• 15 years ago

For those of you who suck at negotiations and how to go about them, I believe the single best thing you can do is to get more than one employment discussion going at the same time. Then you can be totally honest and open in your negotiations and still maximize the offer made by each company. It is quite difficult to mess it up at that point - you might not get the highest salary possible between the companies, but you will get close to the highest possible salary that at least one of the companies is willing to offer.

cgopalan• 15 years ago

There are many people that are not comfortable with negotiation. They see it as a game, and want to avoid it. They would rather just produce something and get paid for it for a living, and cut all the bullshit. For those people, maybe the template below will help (just a suggestion).

1. Find out what you really like to do (technology or domain-wise etc)

2. Find out where you break even on your daily/monthly expenses.

3. Add to that a savings cushion that you are comfortable with. Thats your number.

4. Find out companies that do 1, and drop that number right away so that they know where you stand.

5. If company rejects, keep looking.

6. If the company okays it because they think its well below market rate, and you come to know of it, work for them for a couple of years and then jump ship.

You may have been low-balled for sometime, but you worked on something you liked, and have some experience under your belt to search for other opportunities in the same field.

bedris• 15 years ago

Two good posts on the subject:

http://hollaforthatdolla.com/2011/discussing-desired-salary-...

http://hollaforthatdolla.com/2011/be-prepared-to-discuss-sal...

Anm• 14 years ago

Random note on the site theme: This detail looks horrible, adding unnecessary high frequency contrast when selected: body { text-shadow: white 0px 1px 0px; }

chrisbennet2• 14 years ago

"What's it going to take to get you into a top of the line Engineer today?"

Salary Negotiation: Make More Money, Be More Valued

Related Stories