Aside, as a small startup I am generally upfront with the salary since if you are not in the range we can afford it is not worth having a discussion.
At startups you negotiate for equity instead of salary but a lot of the same advice applies.
"You can't write me a check?" I said, "No, I -- a check? Hell yeah, I can write you a check! I thought you needed money. Tell you what, I'm just gonna pay the whole thing off right now! I'm gonna be a congressman when I grow up."
But at the time the employee is negotiating this has already been decided. The company has some valuation and you are offering some known percentage of that scarce resource. You could argue that the valuation itself is the thing being manipulated (which is partially true), but that doesn't change the cost of the offer to the company in units of equity %
If you think about the amount of money given up as a startup employee you will definitely get some winnings.
For example, say as a startup employee you are earning/being compensated 80,000 a year in equity. If you bought $80,000 of lottery ticket’s each year how much would you win. Depends on the lottery but most lottery’s have a rough payout of approximately 50-70%. Let’s say it’s 50%. So you would expect to receive back $40,000 per year.
Do half of all startups equity turn into cash, I think not. So probably more likely to make money from the lottery.
But most startup people don’t work at most startups.
The purpose is to trade EV for a small probability of high payout. It's less extreme than the big ticket lotteries but more extreme than a scratcher. If that's not for you, don't do it
Also your last point is either obviously not true (if you're talking about big lottery winnings) or trivially true (if you're talking about $1000 scratcher prizes). More people made life changing money from a single company (Facebook) than all California lottery winners combined across all time
You are making an empirical claim that can be made rigorous, it's just off by several orders of magnitude
Surely the calc is, the number of money gambled in startup equity versus the amount of money gambled in the lottery.
Do startups payout at .5 or above, I think not.
Also…the lottery and startups work very differently.
I have 5+ years experience at a no name place and can’t even get an interview anywhere. Maybe my resume is shit but I’ve tried many different versions with no luck in the last 4-5 months.
Just started my own business instead.
And all the FAANG combined probably don’t even have half that many positions, with negotiable salaries, in total worldwide.
Getting some work experience and then starting my own thing was a better fit for me.
We as engineers have let the recruiters and VC funding brainwash us into lower salaries. Kind of looking forward to a rebound.
That said, once the project goes beyond a certain threshold, LLMs offer little more than a highly capable autocomplete. In larger codebases, the current context window is too small for the tools to even answer questions properly, let alone make any non-trivial changes.
Productivity starts going down once you try to use LLMs in a large codebase and expect them to be as helpful as they were in a smaller one. Often, these authoritative little shits will whirl you around in a doom loop and still won’t find any useful solution. And suddenly you find yourself having to clean up the mess.
I’d still say the productivity benefit is positive, but at the same time, the hype around these is bonkers. Employers are holding onto the hype cycle to bring down wages through FUD.
I find LLM autocomplete extremely annoying compared to traditional intellisense
It is wrong way more and I don't want multi-line autocomplete, it's too intrusive
Llms are still a big speed boost there
Exactly this. I've really tried to find use for LLMs in my big tech company SWE job and I just can't. The context is just too large, and not just the code context. In the time that I can "explain" everything to the LLM, keep iterating until it spits out something semi-useful and massage that into something I can merge, I'd rather just do the whole thing myself.
But it's amazing for greenfield personal projects.
There is negotation power but only if you pass all the interview challenges. Only at that point you are in a position to name your number (of course you won't ask $500K when you know the company you are applying to pays around $200K... because you have done your previous research on that; you'll ask something between $200K and $250K and see how they react). Layoffs and AI hasn't change this (sure, thing, 5 years ago companies were hiring more and perhaps were more relaxed about this, but that didn't change the fact that you can only negotiate when they want you)
Market conditions aside, the points the OP blog post makes about asymmetrical value are evergreen.
I've been at companies which paid me 1/2 of what some my peers earned. I don't have time for these games. Give me your salary ranges for the position and I can negotiate. Otherwise I'm pulling numbers out of my ass.
The recruiter wants to pay me as close to 0 as possible, and it's up to me to push back on that.
The only good jobs I got directly from CEOs.
On forms where I have to put a range, I put $1.00.
Ask for working hours that effectively pays you more per day, like an 80% contract at the same comp. If they mumble HR and hours, offer to do 4x10 hour days. The magic phrase in corporate is "flexible working". This doesn't solve your comp going up, but you get a 3-day weekend and 52 more holidays a year.
This one even works at intensely bureaucratic organisations like universities. With grants, the amount you can be paid is very fixed, but almost anything else can be approved if three people sign off on it.
Them: We'd love to have you join the team! Here's your compensation letter, please get back to us within the next 2 weeks and we'll move forward.
You: Thank you, I believe my background and skills would suggest a compensation of $1.5X instead of $X. Is this possible with your hiring budget?
Them: The offer is for $X and we believe it is appropriate for your level.
You: Maybe my level should be higher then?
Them: Ha Ha
You: Looking at [website A, B, C] I see the average compensation for this role is $1.25X. Surely there is room to move this upward.
Them: We don't agree with that data. The offer is for $X. Shall we move forward?
You: What about equity or bonus, is there any flexibility with those numbers, or vacation time, or...?
Them: The offer is for $X. If you don't want the job, we can move on to one of our other 20 candidates who are in the pipeline for the role.
That's basically how salary negotiations went for almost the entirety of my career. If your results have been different, I'm kind of envious!
"I received your offer for $X. I really enjoyed the interviews, meeting the team, and am intrigued by the problems I'd get to solve with them. Unfortunately, I have a competing offer for $1.25X from another company and I need to make sure my family is provided for. If you would match it, I'm excited to join, but if your offer is firm at $X, I'm afraid I won't be taking it."
If they really just need someone to hold down a chair, they'll probably not budge. If they really want specifically you, they're more likely to bend if they believe that's their only move.
Someone’s already asking about your BATNA, and I’m wondering if you negotiate all benefits (amount of time off for example) since your story focused on salary alone.
If you don’t have a good competing alternative offer/option, you’re not negotiating, you’re begging.
And chances are, they have alternatives.
If someone came with that request, I’d probably be amused but I doubt I could change anything.
If the company can afford to onboard someone any time in the next few months, they don't need to negotiate. They just need to keep the pipeline flowing until some candidate accepts their lowball number.
I would not jump to this conclusion. The company might have a very deliberate compensation strategy. Giving $Y instead of $X to a newcomer at a given level without aligning other people at the same level to $Y raises serious concerns.
As a company, you don't have to let yourself bullied by other companies.
P implies Q doesn’t necessitate Q implies P.
I do not get how is anyone realistically supposed to coincide the multiple offers they get. Unless you are already in an extremely privileged position, I cannot even imagine how you can do that.
last job search i got 4 offers to line up that i could use in negotiations.
If you re-read the transcript, I hope you will come to the understanding that this is a lie. The company is trying to leverage your desperation for a job.
> Last time I got a job offer the hiring process took ~4 months with seven steps
Just like increased compensation, gettting the timeline you want requires leverage. When interviewing I always communicate that I expect an offer from a peer competitor within the next few weeks - this expedies my interview process. I always end up with a minimum of 4 competing offers to use as a BATNA.
Something the article winks at here is that negotation has only a small expected payoff if you've navigated your career such that you're a "small fish in a big pond" so to speak.
Someone who can barely pass a FAANG interview likely can't negotiate much with Google but probably could negotiate at lower tier company like SAP.
I was looking to leave a secondment I was on, and received an offer, right as the leader of the client I was seconded to said we’d like to take you on permanently and we’ve cleared it with your company, here’s the offer. I used that as leverage and left.
Otherwise, I agree, it’s a snowball chance in hell to coincide them.
This has to be the key point. They do this all the time as part of their job. You do it every few years, or maybe every decade. Of course they are better at it.
Was true in 2012, remains true today.
1. Negotiate from a position of strength
You pointed out a couple of these, like when you have a strong personal brand (like Patrick) or when the market dynamics favour employees. The former is not something you can control so, when the market is in this place, you should take advantage of it to propel yourself. However, the former is completely within your control. You can spend some time and effort building a personal brand. Many people discount the value of a brand and the effort spent building one, but it totally works. I have marketing-savvy friends who, since early in their career as juniors, spent a lot of time on LinkedIn thought leadership & brand building. And it totally works. In fact, I have one such friend who was recently part of a restructuring layoff (i.e., not related to performance). Because of the brand they built, once they posted about the layoff on LinkedIn, they had 12 offers within a week all higher than their previous salary.
Another area where you can gain leverage is when you already work at a company that wants to retain you. The only time a business will bend over backwards for an employee is when the conversation is about retention. To make the conversation about retention you need to be completely willing to walk, and your negotiating position is strengthened if you have counter offers. To maintain your political capital (which will be important if you stay) you need to be careful about how you play this game. I've worked with people in the past who approached the business confrontationally, saying "if you don't give me $X, I quit" - that strategy only works once. But there are ways to structure this conversation where you don't leave a bad taste in anybody's mouth.
2. Care about something different than your counterpart
Often the person you're negotiating with cares the most about optimising certain metrics. You should try to spend some time figuring out what those metrics are and see if there is something different that makes a difference in your life.
e.g., your employer might be really under the gun about managing fixed salaries. This is very common in a lot of businesses to try to manage their headcount. So they might be more willing to give you a $50k cash bonus compared to a $25k salary increase. Or maybe they're more open to an extra week or two of vacation vs. salary.
This phenomenon has been really helpful for me in the last year. I run my own business, but my business is fully bootstrapped, so I don't have a board or any investors to please. As a result, I'm not as motivated by ARR as other SaaS companies. Sometimes I encounter customers who would rather pay me a 3-4x one-time fee instead of ARR. By making these deals I immediately guarantee what would have otherwise been four years of cash (potentially with a cancellation risk during the term). A VC-funded SaaS business would almost never make a deal like this, because such a deal would not have a material impact on valuation.
Another example - I was moving recently and sold some furniture. I was chatting with somebody who was an optometrist who wanted to buy a few things, which I listed at $200. They offered $100. I countered, asking for the right to use their employee discount, and ended up getting $500 in value.
So you should also spend some time trying to figure out what your negotiation counterpart cares about. Maybe there is an arbitrage where you can both get exactly what you want, instead of needing to find an outcome where one person wins and the other one loses.
The only reasonable conclusion I can draw is that they simply enjoy the negotiation process itself. I guess most of us do not.
My two jobs since I've been able to get more by... just asking for more, even without competing offers.
If you're in demand, and you're good at what you do, the road is paved for you. Top companies have already set the bar.
Them: we offer 250k-350k
Me: I don't consider anything below 500
The answers I get vary. Some tell me to politely fvck off. Some tell me they need to discuss with leadership. Some just go for it because they know how hard it is to fill that role.
The justification is simple: why would I take a job with you if I can land an HFT gig at twice the pay?
Don’t want the job for the salary offered? Too bad. Hire a cheaper person armed to the teeth with the best LLM coding tools and move on.
Unless you’re coming in with significant clout that will move revenue and relations to bridge partnerships across other companies, you will not be worth the extra $250k on skills alone.
Now it's LLMs. Same old.
LLM’s have similar if not worse trade offs imo.
Weaker engineers and junior engineers are in more the situation you describe. This is tough and I feel for these folks but it is possible for many people to become stronger engineers if they choose to put in the work.
I'd encourage you to not take on a feeling of hopelessness here.
> 250k-350k
> land an HFT gig
Respectfully, your perspective may be a bit skewed? OP's context was "us rank-and-file employee number 12887's".
Not really in the same category as Carmack
So I am left thinking they are just collecting salary metrics for the position.
Tell them that the salary should be negotiated at the end if the process is successful.
If they tell you "but we need this to make sure we're not wasting your time and ours", tell them "well give me a range for what you can do and I'll tell you if you're wasting my time"
1) after reading the original post immediately linked it to a friend who had an outstanding offer. She got a significant raise from fairly light negotiating
2) personally, I don't think of myself as a particularly aggressive negotiator. However, I have been able to truthfully discuss compensation using the tactics described with recruiters to get leveling and comp where I've wanted it to be for my last couple of jobs. Yes, I always had multiple offers. That's part of negotiating.
More generally, though, I think spending 30+ minutes (reading the piece and more) thinking about negotiating has helped me build a better mental model for what to bring to the table.
Either she had a competing offer, or the company she is interviewing for has weak processes. A company yielding "a significant raise from fairly light negotiating" is very worrying IMO.
Think about it: what does that tell you about the next newcomer that will come after you?
(Less process is normal at smaller orgs, so that's also something to consider)
Patrick is right: compensation is much more about negotiating skill than it is about reputation or (especially) notoriety, holding everything else equal.
I once negotiated a large raise at a job where afterwards my boss told me that he could not have justified giving me that raise on his own, but because I asked for it he was able to make the case.
Negotiating often works. It has no downside for you (besides making you feel uncomfortable) and major upsides that last well beyond your current role.
i'm usually lucky if i can get one offer when interviewing. no room to negotiate that way...
Which is not to say that this advice must lead to a raise for everyone who reads it, but if your current assessment of the piece is "this only works for super stars" then you have definitely not really ingested the ideas offered (but you might be making excuses for why that is).
The only thing you need is leverage, and yes, rank-and-file are not going to have a lot of leverage at a FAANG.
You can’t negotiate if you’re not willing to let the job go through.
In particular, companies don't really look at how much they spend to hire someone. They'll just wait for the hiring committee to be "really excited" about a candidate before making an offer.
Point is, I'm not negotiating with the bank teller, they have a flow chart they need to follow. For a lot of positions with big companies, it's going to be the same. There might be a path on the flowchart you can access, but you're not really negotiating. In some cases you may be able to break though this if there's a real person (not recruiter) that will push for you, but talking to recruiters / talent is like talking to the bank teller.
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