Ok yes this guide is fine, a lot of things are up for negotiation, and I think it’s a lot more widely known these days to negotiate for stuff.
But man, a lot of the people out there absolutely still do not grok negotiating. They know it’s something you’re supposed to do, but they will try and negotiate things that are not negotiable (like making it a hard ask for extra contributions per paycheck for healthcare to match their former employer, rather than just ask for more money to cover the difference) or they’ll make demands for things we already offer if they had just paid attention and read the benefits packet we emailed them, and it takes a bunch of back and forth to figure out what they’re asking for (nothing, in the end). Or they’ll ask for weird PTO accrual and cash out schemes that just leaves us asking “why didn’t you just ask for more cash and more PTO up front because now HR is pulling people into meetings to try and figure out this demand”.
People need more than knowing to negotiate, they need to know how to negotiate, and that means partially knowing what is negotiable. (We’ll change a lot actually in negotiations, but not everything)
> But man, a lot of the people out there absolutely still do not grok negotiating.
Unless you have some kind of very unique skill or you have other offers and the company really, really wants you, how exactly are you supposed to negotiate?
Every comp negotiation I've ever had with a company has gone kind of like this:
[Company]: Here's your offer for $X.
[Me]: I'd like $Y.
[Company]: Your offer is for $X.
[Me]: Well, I think I bring skill A, B, and C to the table, and here is some data showing someone with my experience tends to make $Y.
[Company]: We don't care. Your offer is for $X. Are you interested or not?
[Me]: How about vacation time or benefits? Or maybe salary vs. equity? Can these be adjusted?
[Company]: <yawn> if you don't want $X, there's the door. We have 35 other candidates in the hiring pipeline.
What magical incantations are you guys speaking that allow you to make any progress against these brick walls? I've never once, in my 25 year career history, ever gotten a company to offer more than their initial offer.
If they know you have alternatives, they are much more likely to negotiate. In fact the modern version of this guide is try to get several offers and negotiate them against each other (not you versus the company). Might be more difficult in the current market.
The crass answer is maybe you’re not able to negotiate well enough to get more than the initial offer.
The less crass answer: In almost every company, you’re being hired on a salary band, so unless you’re at the top of that band in the initial offer there is room to go up, so you can typically push a bit higher. The trick is to make a request that’s higher than what they initially offer but not so high that they outright reject it without additional conversation, and if they are play hardball, and don’t budge on anything, you just reject their offer. It does mean you have to be comfortable rejecting an otherwise decent or good offer, but presumably most companies are willing to negotiate with a good candidate so this shouldn’t be a problem in practice if the negotiation is done in a considered way.
That does not match my experience. In small companies, I've asked for more and simply gotten it. At large companies, I've asked for more and in most cases they are willing to move the number as long as I don't push the role up to a higher level/band in their HR structure. And my most recent role, they specifically told me that they would need to give me a higher role/title for the money I wanted... I replied, "Great, re-write the offer for a different role, then." They called me back a couple days later with exactly that.
So I'd call their bluff. When they ask if you want the lower offer, say no. I can tell you that most places have recruiters being told to get you in the door for as little as possible... but still to get you in the door.
> [Me]: That matches my base salary at the moment but my current employer gives me healthcare and a car allowance so I would be out of pocket if I moved from my current job. In addition I currently am eligible for a 10% bonus. Would you consider an additional $5k/yr to cover some of this? I would love to move… although I can’t justify a pay cut, but think this is a really good opportunity and would love to work with you so hope we can make something work.
Ie you gotta give them a reason to justify paying you more, and to think that paying more is required for you taking the job. Also you have to be realistic in how much you ask (smaller amounts are more likely to be accepted, larger amounts pay more but are more likely to be rejected outright as if something is too large you can’t really counteroffer)
I think the modern advice that you should always negotiate and ask for more is deeply distressing for many people. They do not want to feel like they are being taken advantage of but they also don’t really want to engage in a negotiation.
> People need more than knowing to negotiate, they need to know how to negotiate, and that means partially knowing what is negotiable.
Everything is negotiable. Some things are just easier than others. Besides, did you tell them up front what was negotiable, or did you just kinda expect them to figure it out?
I suppose this is true in some abstract sense, but not in companies of any reasonable size when it comes to hiring. There are lots of things that are firmly set company-wide, like the type of health plans offered and the company contribution, that are pretty much non-negotiable. Not knowing this makes you look naive or runs the risk of just confusing the hiring manager/HR.
A good example of non-negotiable, while traveling overseas, for one particular company, I was just randomly doing an expense report - and noticed there was a "medical" line-item in my expense report, that I figured I would use for cough-drops that I had purchased. Finance of course went ballistic, because the policy against expensing anything with that line item was absolutely forbidden (which begs the question as to why it was available in the first place).
Here is the thing - the company would have zero difficulty with me asking for a $100/day per diem while traveling for months on end, instead of doing expenses - that was negotiable. But there was absolutely zero chance of getting a $7 bag of cough-drops allowed as a medical-expense. Non-negotiable.
If you're joining a company of 15 people? Probably. If you're joining a company of 50,000? Absolutely not, because they're not going to vastly increase the complexity of their HR or payroll just to close a single hire.
Money and equity are easy to negotiate because there's no management overhead. But if you want your 401k to be at a different brokerage, or have other "process" request like that? Probably not gonna happen - not for a line employee.
> Or they’ll ask for weird PTO accrual and cash out schemes that just leaves us asking “why didn’t you just ask for more cash and more PTO up front because now HR is pulling people into meetings to try and figure out this demand”.
They're trying to get your help in decreasing their tax burden, without explicitly saying that that's what they're doing.
(Dunno why people are so coy about this; tax minimization is not illegal, and companies are totally willing to work with you on it.)
But isn't it better to find a tax avoidance strategy that's mutually beneficial to both sides? Sure, you can ask for an extra $10k that gets taxed down to $5k, but if you can find a creative workaround to get $8k instead for the same $10k, isn't that better than trying to ask them for a $16k raise to make up for the taxes?
The problem comes with progressive taxation, especially in vaguely-socialist countries.
When you're in a high-enough tax bracket (in taxation regimes where such high tax-brackets exist), adding a marginal dollar to your net income becomes impractically expensive for the company, compared to basically anything else the company could offer you.
For some people, in some places, getting an extra $20k/yr tacked onto your net income, would cost your employer more than just, say, hiring you a well-paid full-time personal assistant, with the skills necessary to do enough of your job that you go from "overworked" to "takes off early most days to go play golf."
I’m not sure I follow. In a progressive tax system you pay in brackets, so that extra $20k doesn’t mean the rest of the salary is entirely in the new bracket, so why would it cost an exorbitant amount?
Net income is what goes into your bank after taxes/etc. In the US, the higher tax brackets are around 30% for federal taxes alone, so that extra $20k costs the company around $30k. Not counting state taxes or anything else like paying into benefits. Not sure if retirement savings count here. So let's say between $35k and $40k.
Googling "personal assistant salary", it looks like the average in the US is ~$50k/year. So a personal assistant would cost more, but it is in the right ballpark where that could be a better choice than that raise if this is the reason for the raise:
> with the skills necessary to do enough of your job that you go from "overworked" to "takes off early most days to go play golf."
Yeah but phrasing/negotiating it this way obfuscates it a little. If you're in negotiations and you ask for $60k/yr more gross, then it's clear you're asking for more than a PA would cost (maybe, factor in total comp for them too and it's probably closer to $65k/$75k). Do people negotiate net?
It's long for today's attention, but negotiation guides are fairly consistent maps of a territory. They teach you it is a way to relate and a perspective to start from. It's a way to protagonize yourself instead of competing to debase yourself more than the next person.
Focus on a high quality agreement and a process that feels good independent of the numbers and you will be happy with the result. My confidence comes from knowing I challenge myself to do hard things, can work effectively while relying on others to scale effort, and that I am a peer in high performance environments.
There's a shorter guide that comes from Pfeffer, which is the triad of Performance, Credentials, and Relationships, where each org weights these differently, and the people whose weighted score is highest will prevail. Know the weights in the place you're considering, and know how you rank in those areas. Use that as confidence to engage in a mutual process of discovery, where you are working together to find the best quality agreement possible. Maybe the best one you find is not what you're looking for, but by agreeing to work together to find the best possible outcome, you're already negotiating.
Thank you for your reply. I'm not a native speaker and find your writing style quite intriguing, which always makes me wonder "what does this person read?". Could you suggest a couple of your favourite books?
Apologies for this public private message, there seems to be no contact info in your profile.
thank you, they are of an era, but read something by W. Sommerset Maugham, Evelyn Waugh, Robertson Davies, P.G. Wodehouse, the economist and weekend FT newspaper columnists. add Christopher Hitchens, Martin Amis, Stephen Fry, Julian Barnes, Ian McEwan, Kazuo Ishiguro, Douglas Hofstader, and Douglas Adams. Do a pass over poetry, so Blake, Auden, and Kipling and try to remember anything funny. Then forget all of it and argue on the internet for 30 years.
The most important part of negotiation: Having an offer in the first place.
Unfortunately, I and a dozen other software devs (all of whom I know personally, and all of whom are amazing) are not getting any interviews, much less offers.
None of us have ever experienced a drought like this before, either. So... ???
I've been on the other side of the table recently, and I agree it feels like a buyer's market. But it still took a while to find good candidates, and a lot of candidates showed up to interviews weirdly unprepared on even the basics.
If it's a drought for you, then I'd have to add: It seems like an especially weird drought, as well. Supply and demand seem to be doing odd things.
(And, for the spectators of this comment thread, I can confirm: Yes, 2 people with 3 anecdotes each is enough to speculate wildly about an entire industry.)
I'm not sure on the root cause. Like I said, there's several people that I know who are all experiencing the same things. I have 20 years experience and a phd. Others in my friend group have no degree whatsoever, but have a decade of experience. Several years ago, we were all offered multiple jobs at a time. Now, we are not even getting requests for interviews.
EDIT: adding that, because we all live in a non-metropolitan area, we all have been remote, and are continuing to look for remote work.
From what I'm hearing/see, it's worse than 2002 by a long shot. :\ 2001-2004 was pretty bad (from what I recall Cisco laid off about 20% of it's engineering team), but it was clear by 2003/4 that the growth of dial up subscribers was going to continue, so people were able to find jobs again although senior devs moved to much lower paid jobs.
I’m from France where the market is still tense, so I have hard times understanding whether it’s a general trend or a local problem:
- How do you know it’s not just your surroundings (technologies, skills, area) which are dry?
- Are you maybe getting aged? (The programmer market is very ageist, hopefully I’m not turning the knife into the wound, but I’m not young either) and maybe you are experiencing the dry part of life for the first time?
- Or did you take the $500k+ post-Covid market as the norm? Here in France, beginners are at 38k€ gross annually, and the high end was 85k€ during Covid, but historically the high-end had been capped around 65k€ until Covid.
All in all, developers aren’t magicians. We deserve a high engineer pay, but look at electrical engineers, they have shit pay. We’ve been getting far too much money, for far too long. In normal office jobs, it takes a lifetime of sacrifices to get to higher pay grade. And this is the 3-year experience mark for a developer.
So, are you expecting Facebook-level pay, or higher-engineer-office-worker kind of pay?
Well I would love to have found a $500k job, that's definitely not my point of reference.
The problem is that I'm not even getting to the stage of asking about salary, because I'm not getting any interviews in the first place. Neither is anyone else in my friend group.
I am probably overqualified for a lot of jobs, but my friend group, which has a lot of variance in age and experience, would definitely not fall into that classification.
I hope I didn’t come across, my comment was not delicate but I was genuinely curious about the answer. I’ve created a product which luckily works for now, so I’m out of the job market, but I think everyone on HN knows that your situation is the normal one that awaits all of us in the second half of our career.
The "when it rains, it pours" phenomena I think most of us (anectodtally obviously) think we've seen is especially amusing in this context.
They're really shooting themselves in the foot by only hiring people everyone wants already instead of finding people who they can train for two weeks and bring up to speed.
Can I hire you and fire you in two weeks if you’re not a senior React+Java dev? Because most candidates who say that, ask for the senior price, while not being trained in the tech we’re asking.
There’s a lot of value in getting someone who has already done some React. Or some Typescript. Or some Java. There’s a triple-your-salary kind of value, and everyone asks for the tripled salary.
Senior people that need years of training in a specific tool are the exception that proves the rule.
A ton of people basically know enough to do a new role with a few weeks or months of mentorship. Remember orgs are a pyramid, for every senior person there are many many people who aren't, or who have entirely support roles like answering phones. People underestimate how many mid-level skills are easily transferable.
I am a generalist. Not once in my twenty years of experience have I met anyone like me. I can write firmware just as well as I can design and implement UX and UI. Heck, I can design circuits or even products in fusion 360. Where are all these so called generalists? If you mean “fullstack”, that is only a small fraction of software, and the bar has lowered a lot since JavaScript has become ubiquitous (so you only need to know TS/JS to call yourself fullstack…I don’t think you need to include even something like SQL).
As such, demand for me is so high that I’ve simply retired from all the money that was thrown at me (it’s also pretty easy for me to start my own business…although exiting is another story). I have no LinkedIn or other online presence and I still get headhunted despite having no interest.
Just remember your BATNA when you enter a negotiation.
Just today a recruiter called me and told me about a job that I think could be a good fit for me, and I do intend to interview for that.
I hate negotiations. So I'll be frank. I was already frank with the recruiter today: I love my current job, on Mondays I can't wait to get to work. Moving to another company entails risk. I need to be compensated for that risk, so I don't intend to even interview if they can't offer me at least a 20% raise. Many think that this becomes the ceiling rather than the floor. But if I get the offer, I'll simply tell the guys that I am an honest person, and I don't play games, and I would appreciate them not playing games either. More precisely, I tell them that I am not interviewing with them in order to get leverage for a raise at my current job (lots of people do that). But, if my current company will make me a counteroffer, I will accept it and I stop there. I do not want to be the subject of a bidding war ( * ). In other words, they have only one opportunity to make an offer. The should think twice about making a low-ball offer.
That's it. That's my non-negotiation tactic.
( * ) Why not let people bid on your compensation? Because word leaks out. The new colleagues at the new company will think "who does this guy think he is?". I need to work with these guys, and I don't want to start from this position. The colleagues at the old company will think "what a prima donna". Plus, I think it's a better position from a game theory point of view, a-la Thomas Shelling. I did not study game theory, so I have no idea if this is true, but it's not impossible. More importantly, I just find the idea quite distateful. Other people might find it flattering, but to me it's just gross.
I think the overall thrust of the article — "always try to negotiate, try to get better at it, it's low-downside and high upside" — is still very relevant and I frequently share it with friends interviewing even today.
Some specific things haven't aged well from this article in my recent experience:
1. Many companies have comp bands advertised and enforced by local law, and even outside of this many have implemented more regimented/structured comp in an attempt to reduce bias.
2. Relatedly I've seen more companies take a "no negotiation" policy, especially for more junior roles.
3. The market overall is much more an employer's market and is not growing as quickly, so the median SWE has less leverage.
I think the biggest impact of these changes is that the cost of not negotiating has become lower, and consequently the upside to negotiation is less, especially if you don't have competing offers or are more junior.
That said: competing offers is still the single most effective negotiation tool, as others have said. I've seen companies be relatively inflexible on cash comp but highly flexible on equity comp, which tends to not be required as part of job listing bands, and becomes the lion's share of comp as you get more senior. And often there are carve-outs of matching offers.
TL;DR: Still worth a read, but many of the specifics need discounting.
If you make it to an offer, it probably means you are the best of the lot. You can always negotiate somewhat. Unless your ask is outlandish, they can always say "no, but the offer stands". If you ask for 10x what youre offered / marker, that's different of course.
I'd like to suggest an alternate method that worked for me. I only applied to jobs that 1) I thought I'd enjoy greatly, and that 2) I felt my skills could benefit the employer more than most other applicants. Generally I didn't get fantastic salary jumps but I chose jobs in good companies that didn't cause me too much stress. This let me be a better team player.
Over time it meant that I could study for my next job at night while still having a good work experience. I am paranoid so I always worked close enough to the job that I could bike there if necessary, and I saved money for a rainy day. I even chose to avoid Silicon Valley because I didn't like the ultracompetitive vibe.
I ended up with a big payout from one job that started on the path to my own long-term business, but all along the work/life balance was excellent.
I'm sure I could have negotiated higher but programmers tend to make good money anyhow. Never bothered me when I made $90K but it could have been $105K or whatever.
> In this market where every company out there tries to minimise costs
That was always true. Guide reminds you that significant amount of money for you is a rounding error for most of companies, so negotiating is always a good idea.
Observations:
- posted salary ranges are BS. Companies are as likely to go significantly over the upper limit as to refuse to entertain anything remotely close to upper bound even with the most amazing of candidates. You won't know until you negotiate.
- vc backed companies are supposed to grow fast, not balance budget. if you can convince them you will help with that growth more than the next guy many limits become very negotiable
- some companies have fixed / very narrow ranges for roles except the most senior ones. usually they are significantly below market rates. if they straight up refuse to budge don't waste your time - same mechanism is going to manage your future salary increases
I've noticed only slightly larger pool of decent candidates when recruiting, but nothing crazy.
The number of unsolicited messages from recruiters with serious offers I receive haven't changed much either.
The only serious change I see is in the number of borderline spam recruiter messages coming to the linkedin profile I haven't updated in almost a decade.
In the past I would have said "this" but I've seen a lot of people declining good offers for better ones that never materialized. Be careful playing chicken if you can't afford to.
With the amount of scatterbrained recruiters out there these days, what kind of magic does one pull to get multiple offers to appear so close together?
College recruiting can make this happen. Granted really only for new grads but it is totally normal in that setting to get multiple offers within a week or two of each other.
Not even. You have to handle the negotiation like a complete asshole before your counterparty will withdraw their offer entirely. For the most part, asking (respectfully and politely) for the moon will just result in a "no, we can't accommodate that". Then you decide if you're ok with that, and accept or decline.
I agree that withdrawing an offer is rare but you have to be OK with some non-zero chance of withdrawal if you’re going to negotiate with only a single offer in hand.
You’re making the negotiating mistake of projecting onto counterparties. “I wouldn’t pull an offer except to an asshole” becomes, “My counterparty won’t withdraw the offer unless I’m an asshole.”
If you absolutely 100% need a job and can leave nothing to chance then you should probably not negotiate with only a single offer in hand.
There is always room. If a company makes you an offer it means thyley want to hire you over every other candidates so far and their first offer is unlikely to be the best they can do.
My company opened up a highly technical position in the greater Boston area and we were flooded with 250 applications in a week. Phone screens went out to almost everyone remotely qualified but so much of the applications were spam/YOLO from people from the asian subcontinent, close to 80% were not even remotely qualified. I went out of my way to sift through any qualified female applicants and there were less than five in total and none had the experience we were looking for, even very remotely. In the end we hired a handful very talented people from very different backgrounds and none were from the public channels. We worked with a handful of recruiters that had established relationships with top talent. We also had to fire some recruiters that kept sending us low IQ people.
They got you distracted with H1b, when the real problem is outsourcing. Companies want to make dollars here, but they don't want to keep the dollar circulating. And then we end up in a situation where they run out of customers and need a bailout.
Ok yes this guide is fine, a lot of things are up for negotiation, and I think it’s a lot more widely known these days to negotiate for stuff.
But man, a lot of the people out there absolutely still do not grok negotiating. They know it’s something you’re supposed to do, but they will try and negotiate things that are not negotiable (like making it a hard ask for extra contributions per paycheck for healthcare to match their former employer, rather than just ask for more money to cover the difference) or they’ll make demands for things we already offer if they had just paid attention and read the benefits packet we emailed them, and it takes a bunch of back and forth to figure out what they’re asking for (nothing, in the end). Or they’ll ask for weird PTO accrual and cash out schemes that just leaves us asking “why didn’t you just ask for more cash and more PTO up front because now HR is pulling people into meetings to try and figure out this demand”.
People need more than knowing to negotiate, they need to know how to negotiate, and that means partially knowing what is negotiable. (We’ll change a lot actually in negotiations, but not everything)
> But man, a lot of the people out there absolutely still do not grok negotiating.
Unless you have some kind of very unique skill or you have other offers and the company really, really wants you, how exactly are you supposed to negotiate?
Every comp negotiation I've ever had with a company has gone kind of like this:
What magical incantations are you guys speaking that allow you to make any progress against these brick walls? I've never once, in my 25 year career history, ever gotten a company to offer more than their initial offer.Negotiation start and stop with BATNA - Best Alternative To Negotiated Agreement.
The employers BATNA is they go to the pool of 35 other candidates. Yours is you go back to your job.
If your job hunting first when your sick to death of your job, your BATNA isn’t very strong.
If this is your only offer, your BATNA isn’t very strong.
If you’re one paycheck away from being out of the street, your BATNA isn’t very strong.
See where I’m going with this?
The magic incantation is competing offer.
If they know you have alternatives, they are much more likely to negotiate. In fact the modern version of this guide is try to get several offers and negotiate them against each other (not you versus the company). Might be more difficult in the current market.
The crass answer is maybe you’re not able to negotiate well enough to get more than the initial offer.
The less crass answer: In almost every company, you’re being hired on a salary band, so unless you’re at the top of that band in the initial offer there is room to go up, so you can typically push a bit higher. The trick is to make a request that’s higher than what they initially offer but not so high that they outright reject it without additional conversation, and if they are play hardball, and don’t budge on anything, you just reject their offer. It does mean you have to be comfortable rejecting an otherwise decent or good offer, but presumably most companies are willing to negotiate with a good candidate so this shouldn’t be a problem in practice if the negotiation is done in a considered way.
That does not match my experience. In small companies, I've asked for more and simply gotten it. At large companies, I've asked for more and in most cases they are willing to move the number as long as I don't push the role up to a higher level/band in their HR structure. And my most recent role, they specifically told me that they would need to give me a higher role/title for the money I wanted... I replied, "Great, re-write the offer for a different role, then." They called me back a couple days later with exactly that.
So I'd call their bluff. When they ask if you want the lower offer, say no. I can tell you that most places have recruiters being told to get you in the door for as little as possible... but still to get you in the door.
Maybe instead of:
> [Me]: I’d like $Y
You could try:
> [Me]: That matches my base salary at the moment but my current employer gives me healthcare and a car allowance so I would be out of pocket if I moved from my current job. In addition I currently am eligible for a 10% bonus. Would you consider an additional $5k/yr to cover some of this? I would love to move… although I can’t justify a pay cut, but think this is a really good opportunity and would love to work with you so hope we can make something work.
Ie you gotta give them a reason to justify paying you more, and to think that paying more is required for you taking the job. Also you have to be realistic in how much you ask (smaller amounts are more likely to be accepted, larger amounts pay more but are more likely to be rejected outright as if something is too large you can’t really counteroffer)
Negotiations require two parties willing to negotiate.
In your example one is not, so negotiations aren't possible.
I think the modern advice that you should always negotiate and ask for more is deeply distressing for many people. They do not want to feel like they are being taken advantage of but they also don’t really want to engage in a negotiation.
> People need more than knowing to negotiate, they need to know how to negotiate, and that means partially knowing what is negotiable.
Everything is negotiable. Some things are just easier than others. Besides, did you tell them up front what was negotiable, or did you just kinda expect them to figure it out?
I suppose this is true in some abstract sense, but not in companies of any reasonable size when it comes to hiring. There are lots of things that are firmly set company-wide, like the type of health plans offered and the company contribution, that are pretty much non-negotiable. Not knowing this makes you look naive or runs the risk of just confusing the hiring manager/HR.
A good example of non-negotiable, while traveling overseas, for one particular company, I was just randomly doing an expense report - and noticed there was a "medical" line-item in my expense report, that I figured I would use for cough-drops that I had purchased. Finance of course went ballistic, because the policy against expensing anything with that line item was absolutely forbidden (which begs the question as to why it was available in the first place).
Here is the thing - the company would have zero difficulty with me asking for a $100/day per diem while traveling for months on end, instead of doing expenses - that was negotiable. But there was absolutely zero chance of getting a $7 bag of cough-drops allowed as a medical-expense. Non-negotiable.
If you're joining a company of 15 people? Probably. If you're joining a company of 50,000? Absolutely not, because they're not going to vastly increase the complexity of their HR or payroll just to close a single hire.
Money and equity are easy to negotiate because there's no management overhead. But if you want your 401k to be at a different brokerage, or have other "process" request like that? Probably not gonna happen - not for a line employee.
While this feels true, it isn't in the fundamental sense. Yes, paying taxes is negotiable, but the consequences may not be.
> Or they’ll ask for weird PTO accrual and cash out schemes that just leaves us asking “why didn’t you just ask for more cash and more PTO up front because now HR is pulling people into meetings to try and figure out this demand”.
They're trying to get your help in decreasing their tax burden, without explicitly saying that that's what they're doing.
(Dunno why people are so coy about this; tax minimization is not illegal, and companies are totally willing to work with you on it.)
more money solves that in the end doesn't it? Just ask for enough to cover the tax burden
But isn't it better to find a tax avoidance strategy that's mutually beneficial to both sides? Sure, you can ask for an extra $10k that gets taxed down to $5k, but if you can find a creative workaround to get $8k instead for the same $10k, isn't that better than trying to ask them for a $16k raise to make up for the taxes?
That $8k may cost another $5k to implement: current systems used by the would be employer may not be geared up to handle that non-standard asks.
The problem comes with progressive taxation, especially in vaguely-socialist countries.
When you're in a high-enough tax bracket (in taxation regimes where such high tax-brackets exist), adding a marginal dollar to your net income becomes impractically expensive for the company, compared to basically anything else the company could offer you.
For some people, in some places, getting an extra $20k/yr tacked onto your net income, would cost your employer more than just, say, hiring you a well-paid full-time personal assistant, with the skills necessary to do enough of your job that you go from "overworked" to "takes off early most days to go play golf."
I’m not sure I follow. In a progressive tax system you pay in brackets, so that extra $20k doesn’t mean the rest of the salary is entirely in the new bracket, so why would it cost an exorbitant amount?
Net income is what goes into your bank after taxes/etc. In the US, the higher tax brackets are around 30% for federal taxes alone, so that extra $20k costs the company around $30k. Not counting state taxes or anything else like paying into benefits. Not sure if retirement savings count here. So let's say between $35k and $40k.
Googling "personal assistant salary", it looks like the average in the US is ~$50k/year. So a personal assistant would cost more, but it is in the right ballpark where that could be a better choice than that raise if this is the reason for the raise:
> with the skills necessary to do enough of your job that you go from "overworked" to "takes off early most days to go play golf."
Yeah but phrasing/negotiating it this way obfuscates it a little. If you're in negotiations and you ask for $60k/yr more gross, then it's clear you're asking for more than a PA would cost (maybe, factor in total comp for them too and it's probably closer to $65k/$75k). Do people negotiate net?
It's long for today's attention, but negotiation guides are fairly consistent maps of a territory. They teach you it is a way to relate and a perspective to start from. It's a way to protagonize yourself instead of competing to debase yourself more than the next person.
Focus on a high quality agreement and a process that feels good independent of the numbers and you will be happy with the result. My confidence comes from knowing I challenge myself to do hard things, can work effectively while relying on others to scale effort, and that I am a peer in high performance environments.
There's a shorter guide that comes from Pfeffer, which is the triad of Performance, Credentials, and Relationships, where each org weights these differently, and the people whose weighted score is highest will prevail. Know the weights in the place you're considering, and know how you rank in those areas. Use that as confidence to engage in a mutual process of discovery, where you are working together to find the best quality agreement possible. Maybe the best one you find is not what you're looking for, but by agreeing to work together to find the best possible outcome, you're already negotiating.
Thank you for your reply. I'm not a native speaker and find your writing style quite intriguing, which always makes me wonder "what does this person read?". Could you suggest a couple of your favourite books?
Apologies for this public private message, there seems to be no contact info in your profile.
thank you, they are of an era, but read something by W. Sommerset Maugham, Evelyn Waugh, Robertson Davies, P.G. Wodehouse, the economist and weekend FT newspaper columnists. add Christopher Hitchens, Martin Amis, Stephen Fry, Julian Barnes, Ian McEwan, Kazuo Ishiguro, Douglas Hofstader, and Douglas Adams. Do a pass over poetry, so Blake, Auden, and Kipling and try to remember anything funny. Then forget all of it and argue on the internet for 30 years.
If you haven’t read him already, I bet you’d like Saki.
I found this quite resonates with my approach for a meeting tomorrow
The most important part of negotiation: Having an offer in the first place.
Unfortunately, I and a dozen other software devs (all of whom I know personally, and all of whom are amazing) are not getting any interviews, much less offers.
None of us have ever experienced a drought like this before, either. So... ???
Thankfully, we're all still currently employed.
Any thoughts on root cause from your perspective?
I've been on the other side of the table recently, and I agree it feels like a buyer's market. But it still took a while to find good candidates, and a lot of candidates showed up to interviews weirdly unprepared on even the basics.
If it's a drought for you, then I'd have to add: It seems like an especially weird drought, as well. Supply and demand seem to be doing odd things.
(And, for the spectators of this comment thread, I can confirm: Yes, 2 people with 3 anecdotes each is enough to speculate wildly about an entire industry.)
I'm not sure on the root cause. Like I said, there's several people that I know who are all experiencing the same things. I have 20 years experience and a phd. Others in my friend group have no degree whatsoever, but have a decade of experience. Several years ago, we were all offered multiple jobs at a time. Now, we are not even getting requests for interviews.
EDIT: adding that, because we all live in a non-metropolitan area, we all have been remote, and are continuing to look for remote work.
From what I'm hearing/see, it's worse than 2002 by a long shot. :\ 2001-2004 was pretty bad (from what I recall Cisco laid off about 20% of it's engineering team), but it was clear by 2003/4 that the growth of dial up subscribers was going to continue, so people were able to find jobs again although senior devs moved to much lower paid jobs.
I’m from France where the market is still tense, so I have hard times understanding whether it’s a general trend or a local problem:
- How do you know it’s not just your surroundings (technologies, skills, area) which are dry?
- Are you maybe getting aged? (The programmer market is very ageist, hopefully I’m not turning the knife into the wound, but I’m not young either) and maybe you are experiencing the dry part of life for the first time?
- Or did you take the $500k+ post-Covid market as the norm? Here in France, beginners are at 38k€ gross annually, and the high end was 85k€ during Covid, but historically the high-end had been capped around 65k€ until Covid.
All in all, developers aren’t magicians. We deserve a high engineer pay, but look at electrical engineers, they have shit pay. We’ve been getting far too much money, for far too long. In normal office jobs, it takes a lifetime of sacrifices to get to higher pay grade. And this is the 3-year experience mark for a developer.
So, are you expecting Facebook-level pay, or higher-engineer-office-worker kind of pay?
Well I would love to have found a $500k job, that's definitely not my point of reference.
The problem is that I'm not even getting to the stage of asking about salary, because I'm not getting any interviews in the first place. Neither is anyone else in my friend group.
I am probably overqualified for a lot of jobs, but my friend group, which has a lot of variance in age and experience, would definitely not fall into that classification.
Yes, I understand.
I hope I didn’t come across, my comment was not delicate but I was genuinely curious about the answer. I’ve created a product which luckily works for now, so I’m out of the job market, but I think everyone on HN knows that your situation is the normal one that awaits all of us in the second half of our career.
Your most powerful tool in negotiation is the ability to say no. That comes when you have competing offers.
The "when it rains, it pours" phenomena I think most of us (anectodtally obviously) think we've seen is especially amusing in this context.
They're really shooting themselves in the foot by only hiring people everyone wants already instead of finding people who they can train for two weeks and bring up to speed.
I don't think they can tell the difference.
Can I hire you and fire you in two weeks if you’re not a senior React+Java dev? Because most candidates who say that, ask for the senior price, while not being trained in the tech we’re asking.
There’s a lot of value in getting someone who has already done some React. Or some Typescript. Or some Java. There’s a triple-your-salary kind of value, and everyone asks for the tripled salary.
Senior people that need years of training in a specific tool are the exception that proves the rule.
A ton of people basically know enough to do a new role with a few weeks or months of mentorship. Remember orgs are a pyramid, for every senior person there are many many people who aren't, or who have entirely support roles like answering phones. People underestimate how many mid-level skills are easily transferable.
Clickable link for the lazy https://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/01/23/salary-negotiation/
I am a generalist. Not once in my twenty years of experience have I met anyone like me. I can write firmware just as well as I can design and implement UX and UI. Heck, I can design circuits or even products in fusion 360. Where are all these so called generalists? If you mean “fullstack”, that is only a small fraction of software, and the bar has lowered a lot since JavaScript has become ubiquitous (so you only need to know TS/JS to call yourself fullstack…I don’t think you need to include even something like SQL).
As such, demand for me is so high that I’ve simply retired from all the money that was thrown at me (it’s also pretty easy for me to start my own business…although exiting is another story). I have no LinkedIn or other online presence and I still get headhunted despite having no interest.
Just remember your BATNA when you enter a negotiation.
Just today a recruiter called me and told me about a job that I think could be a good fit for me, and I do intend to interview for that.
I hate negotiations. So I'll be frank. I was already frank with the recruiter today: I love my current job, on Mondays I can't wait to get to work. Moving to another company entails risk. I need to be compensated for that risk, so I don't intend to even interview if they can't offer me at least a 20% raise. Many think that this becomes the ceiling rather than the floor. But if I get the offer, I'll simply tell the guys that I am an honest person, and I don't play games, and I would appreciate them not playing games either. More precisely, I tell them that I am not interviewing with them in order to get leverage for a raise at my current job (lots of people do that). But, if my current company will make me a counteroffer, I will accept it and I stop there. I do not want to be the subject of a bidding war ( * ). In other words, they have only one opportunity to make an offer. The should think twice about making a low-ball offer.
That's it. That's my non-negotiation tactic.
( * ) Why not let people bid on your compensation? Because word leaks out. The new colleagues at the new company will think "who does this guy think he is?". I need to work with these guys, and I don't want to start from this position. The colleagues at the old company will think "what a prima donna". Plus, I think it's a better position from a game theory point of view, a-la Thomas Shelling. I did not study game theory, so I have no idea if this is true, but it's not impossible. More importantly, I just find the idea quite distateful. Other people might find it flattering, but to me it's just gross.
HR really likes folks like you, because you're selling your services at a discount.
I got one FAANG to increase their offer to 2.5 times the original amount. I'm fine with taking a bit of heat from the team if I get paid that much.
The only thing that really matters is that you can casually say no, and that you have multiple options.
I think the overall thrust of the article — "always try to negotiate, try to get better at it, it's low-downside and high upside" — is still very relevant and I frequently share it with friends interviewing even today.
Some specific things haven't aged well from this article in my recent experience:
1. Many companies have comp bands advertised and enforced by local law, and even outside of this many have implemented more regimented/structured comp in an attempt to reduce bias. 2. Relatedly I've seen more companies take a "no negotiation" policy, especially for more junior roles. 3. The market overall is much more an employer's market and is not growing as quickly, so the median SWE has less leverage.
I think the biggest impact of these changes is that the cost of not negotiating has become lower, and consequently the upside to negotiation is less, especially if you don't have competing offers or are more junior.
That said: competing offers is still the single most effective negotiation tool, as others have said. I've seen companies be relatively inflexible on cash comp but highly flexible on equity comp, which tends to not be required as part of job listing bands, and becomes the lion's share of comp as you get more senior. And often there are carve-outs of matching offers.
TL;DR: Still worth a read, but many of the specifics need discounting.
If you make it to an offer, it probably means you are the best of the lot. You can always negotiate somewhat. Unless your ask is outlandish, they can always say "no, but the offer stands". If you ask for 10x what youre offered / marker, that's different of course.
Leverage is also about timing your market which is a matter of local and overall trends. You can use google trends to figure out when the global market trend is in your favor: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=a...
Get a sense for how your industry is doing as well. Your best leverage is a competing offer.
I'd like to suggest an alternate method that worked for me. I only applied to jobs that 1) I thought I'd enjoy greatly, and that 2) I felt my skills could benefit the employer more than most other applicants. Generally I didn't get fantastic salary jumps but I chose jobs in good companies that didn't cause me too much stress. This let me be a better team player.
Over time it meant that I could study for my next job at night while still having a good work experience. I am paranoid so I always worked close enough to the job that I could bike there if necessary, and I saved money for a rainy day. I even chose to avoid Silicon Valley because I didn't like the ultracompetitive vibe.
I ended up with a big payout from one job that started on the path to my own long-term business, but all along the work/life balance was excellent.
I'm sure I could have negotiated higher but programmers tend to make good money anyhow. Never bothered me when I made $90K but it could have been $105K or whatever.
> In this market where every company out there tries to minimise costs
That was always true. Guide reminds you that significant amount of money for you is a rounding error for most of companies, so negotiating is always a good idea.
Observations:
- posted salary ranges are BS. Companies are as likely to go significantly over the upper limit as to refuse to entertain anything remotely close to upper bound even with the most amazing of candidates. You won't know until you negotiate.
- vc backed companies are supposed to grow fast, not balance budget. if you can convince them you will help with that growth more than the next guy many limits become very negotiable
- some companies have fixed / very narrow ranges for roles except the most senior ones. usually they are significantly below market rates. if they straight up refuse to budge don't waste your time - same mechanism is going to manage your future salary increases
It's an employers market, so probably no.
Not for senior roles it isn't.
Sure it is.
I've noticed only slightly larger pool of decent candidates when recruiting, but nothing crazy.
The number of unsolicited messages from recruiters with serious offers I receive haven't changed much either.
The only serious change I see is in the number of borderline spam recruiter messages coming to the linkedin profile I haven't updated in almost a decade.
Anyone got numbers?
Whenever you have more than one offer, there is room for negotiation.
In the past I would have said "this" but I've seen a lot of people declining good offers for better ones that never materialized. Be careful playing chicken if you can't afford to.
With the amount of scatterbrained recruiters out there these days, what kind of magic does one pull to get multiple offers to appear so close together?
College recruiting can make this happen. Granted really only for new grads but it is totally normal in that setting to get multiple offers within a week or two of each other.
I got three FAANG offers at once 3 years ago. I stalled the first one and used it as leverage to speed up the laggards.
I've never managed that, but everyone I know who has had some combination of the following:
- brilliant
- lucky
- juggled like 50 interview processes at once
Only one you can do anything about.
Feels intentional by recruiters as a part of the hiring meta-game tbh
Even if you have one offer there is room for negotiation if you’re willing to accept that you might end up with 0 offers.
Not even. You have to handle the negotiation like a complete asshole before your counterparty will withdraw their offer entirely. For the most part, asking (respectfully and politely) for the moon will just result in a "no, we can't accommodate that". Then you decide if you're ok with that, and accept or decline.
I agree that withdrawing an offer is rare but you have to be OK with some non-zero chance of withdrawal if you’re going to negotiate with only a single offer in hand.
You’re making the negotiating mistake of projecting onto counterparties. “I wouldn’t pull an offer except to an asshole” becomes, “My counterparty won’t withdraw the offer unless I’m an asshole.”
If you absolutely 100% need a job and can leave nothing to chance then you should probably not negotiate with only a single offer in hand.
If anyone has any good reads about consulting compensation structures, I would appreciate it.
I wouldn't know. I have a disability and I don't feel I could ever negotiate.
Ask for a yearly inflation correction.
There is always room. If a company makes you an offer it means thyley want to hire you over every other candidates so far and their first offer is unlikely to be the best they can do.
Try the TCP algorithm... raise your rates until you start losing dollars, then back off until peak cashflow restored. Try again every so often.
Not sure but if Trump wins and turns H1B visas on its head again, we might see a reversal.
My company opened up a highly technical position in the greater Boston area and we were flooded with 250 applications in a week. Phone screens went out to almost everyone remotely qualified but so much of the applications were spam/YOLO from people from the asian subcontinent, close to 80% were not even remotely qualified. I went out of my way to sift through any qualified female applicants and there were less than five in total and none had the experience we were looking for, even very remotely. In the end we hired a handful very talented people from very different backgrounds and none were from the public channels. We worked with a handful of recruiters that had established relationships with top talent. We also had to fire some recruiters that kept sending us low IQ people.
They got you distracted with H1b, when the real problem is outsourcing. Companies want to make dollars here, but they don't want to keep the dollar circulating. And then we end up in a situation where they run out of customers and need a bailout.
Enough. The number of available H1-B visas available each year has not changed since 2005.
https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/research/h1b-visa...