Salary Negotiations Study: Data from Tech Employees | Hacker News Reader

Salary Negotiations Study: Data from Tech Employees

comparably.com

53 pointsBiffyc719 comments

Its too bad young people don't negotiate more. When your next salary is anchored so heavily on your current salary, a little negotiation early can have such an impact on lifetime earnings.

I don't know where you live, but had my salaries have always been a 'take it or leave it' deal. The only way to get a bigger pay check here in Belgium is by getting a new job.

I'm in the US. I'm not talking about negotiating raises at the same company. The key is when you go looking for that new job, negotiate with the new company. After finding another offer I've had my current company offer $15k extra to keep me and when I didn't want to stay with one company, I've negotiated two new offers to get an extra $10k over my top pick's "absolute max for the position." Negotiating happens when you start a new job and fresh out of college is the perfect time to do it because it's often much easier to get multiple offers at the exact same time and play them off each other.

That's great for you, but for the "young people" coming out of school it's just not the reality. I left school (highest honors, 4 semesters of work experience, stem degree)with 2 offers, both 100% static.

Perhaps people with computer science degrees from the best of the best schools have that luxury, but for the rest of us even an interview in this market is often times asking for too much (and continues to be even over a year out).

I change jobs every 2-3 years. Mostly because asking for a raise or a promotion is usually met with an eyeroll. Or a laugh. Or some lame attempt at blame-shifting to "corporate."

Yeah, it's sad. It's so much easier to get substantial pay increases by switching jobs than moving up through a company.

The crazy thing being that the company will end up paying a lot more, when you factor in the ramp up period for new employees.

I was refused a pay rise because of pay scales. They ended up hiring one and a half people as my replacement (one is part time).

Yeah, watch out there, though. After a certain number of job changes, "too many job changes" becomes a red flag to future potential employers.

Usually that's limited to very short stints. Employers nowadays are acutely aware of the "2 year rule" (It might be my background in finance, though)

In my experience it's either one of the following: a) spend (at least) 15-20 years at X company and hope to ride some waves, get lucky, to rise to the top/executive level but most likely get stuck in middle management with crappy comp b) switch every 2/3 years, probably not rise as high, but keep up with market wages and have a more diverse experience

Months is a problem. Two or three year stints with obvious level progression is great.

// Hiring :-)

I'm with you. Another key benefit of regularly switching is the sheer amount of people you meet who can help you out next time you want to change.

It would have been really useful if we could see the last visualization (male/female comparison by dept) include department AND experience.

As hotly debated as that topic can be, (and no coincidence that it was presented last in order) it seems responsible to align all available variables as closely as possible.

It's always easy to try to make assumptions based on data, but it's just as easy to take away the wrong idea. Do prospective executives negotiate because they're used to negotiation, or because companies are prepared to negotiate salaries for those roles?

You don't get to that role without negotiating and if you notice the higher up you get, the more likely you are to negotiate.

I think it at least partially correlates with knowing what the new role is worth, financially, to you and to the employer. Nobody's going to disclose what the current executive in that role makes but once you get to that level you're prepared to ballpark it. And prepared to know what it would take for you to accept it.

Actual intelligence comes from all aspects, not just stuff that is written on a 2-dimesional plane. Being good at that stuff -- in reality -- equates to being good at academic stuff -- which is not actually connected to intellect, in a way that non-academic things are not. Likewise; being good at academic stuff is not an indicator of a lack of intellect either.

Math in particular is only a supplement to intellect, as it is only one of an infinite ways of describing what is first understood through intellect.

Often, organisms who are capable of reproducing mathematical stuff, are void of an understanding of what it is that the math is describing.

I'd worry if someone in sales, BD, or supply chain didn't negotiate. Part of their job is negotiating, and their employment is a business deal the company is making with that individual. So I was very surprised to see that the negotiation rate for VP of Sales was not near 100%!

Nothing unexpected, but interesting to see the comparison to other jobs

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