Totally Honest Software Engineering Negotiations
pastebin.com
pastebin.com
Me personally, I am a fan of the golden handcuffs approach to a limited pool of talent. It allows a company to focus more on critical business efforts and less on internal profits via penny pinching, wasting business cycles on needless spends of time and energy. Optimizing every last dollar, over chasing revenue, is best left to companies that are stagnant or in decline.
The problem is, with that employee that would never ask for a raise, is that once he decides he wants more money, mentally he will already be out of your company. Those are the kind that don't look back. When he looks he will be serious about leaving.
Honestly, for 5 years of raises, he didn't negotiate well. If he negotiated more aggressively, he probably could've gotten up to 200k at this point, since he was promoted to be one of the key technical people.
One key thing he didn't do was negotiate the new job offer well. If they offer you $75k at a new job, you need to push them up to 85k-90k. Once you have that, you go to your current boss and negotiate it up to $100-115k. By not countering, he lost one of the major advantages of finding a secondary offer.
Yes, it's better than not having something to fall back on, but he left 50% (or more) on the table.
It's like asking for a discount, and getting 2%. That's ridiculous. If they're willing to give you 2%, they can give you 10-20% as well.
My take on this whole idea is this: instead of focusing on how big your balls are, focus on how much value you can bring to the company. Your monetary compensation will reflect that (and actual honest negotiating techniques are recommended).
That's the companies view point. You're selling them something and
they want the biggest bang for the buck.
You want the biggest buck for the bang.
Most sums paid in this industry aren't based on working skills, but on negotiation skills.
If there are loopholes in the negotiation that enable some of the parties to make false claims to increase their chances, they will use them.
A negotiation tactic: getting an actual job offer in hand for your salary + X, and then indicating to your manager that you have an offer for $S+X and that you would like to stay where you are if they could match.
Lying: not getting a job offer, but tell your manager you did.
Also lying: getting a job offer for $S, or $S+0.1X, but telling your manager you got an offer for $S+X.
"Lies" and "negotiation tactics" are overlapping sets.
There are negotiation tactics that are not lies, and lies that are not negotiation tactics, but just as surely, there are lies that are negotiation tactics.
> Lying: not getting a job offer, but tell your manager you did.
Sure, that's a lie. And if you tell your manager this as part of a stratagem to get a better compensation deal in your current job, its also a negotiation strategy.
It may be an unethical negotiation strategy, but it is certainly a negotiation strategy.
How about the example where the hiring manager says "this is all we can afford to pay for the position" when there are other employees at the company making much more for the same job? Shouldn't the employee feel equally taken advantage of? I was in this situation early in my career where I was told $55k was the highest they could go for this position, that's all they had in the budget, etc. This was a large publicly-traded tech company (at the time, private now). I knew for a fact it was a lie, but I took the job because I needed experience to put on my resume, so I wasn't totally naive. At my 1 year review, I later found out that other developers on my team were making $70-80k, so I used some of the techniques described in the pastebin post to get another offer for $65k, get my employer to match, then I got the other company to beat my employer's match with $70k. I stayed at that company for 3 months and then left to go to a better company for $80k. In this case I was completely honest about my salary, but my company flat out lied about what they could pay. After a year at $80k I switched companies and was able to jump to $110k by exaggerating my salary. I didn't lie about it, but I reported my $80k plus 20% bonus (that I had a good chance of getting), perks such as 401k match, free concert tickets, etc as a "total compensation" of $100k.
Well, both sides are wrong then. Deals negotiated in bad faith are bad deals, regardless of whose bad faith it is.