Hacker News Reader

Comment by _xhok | Hacker News Reader

On engineering teams you don't want constant negotiation. The psychological chess that people play when they negotiate salary doesn't yield a better product. What you want is people collaborating dispassionately to always choose the best possible option --- the most physically effective, the most beautiful, the most platonically ideal (whatever that means), etc. Truth isn't negotiated. Likewise for the example below, programming languages. A language should be chosen based on technical factors. Defending your opinion should mean presenting a compelling (true) argument, not somehow coercing your teammates to your view.

I'm personally extremely conflict averse, in that I hate senseless fighting where winning depends mostly on asserting yourself. I'm cool with competition of ideas where the best ideas win, and I optimistically suspect most of these "conflict-averse" women would be too.

View on HN

This is really framing negotiations as a conflict and emotional. It doesn't have to be. There's plenty of data out there to make a data based case for a certain salary. There can be a lot stress depending on an individuals situation (currently no job, first job, new role, etc). For the most part I believe this stress during negotiations come from information asymmetry. Educating oneself is the best way to deal with this.

I have never seen a highly emotional negotiation tactic work. Screaming / demanding will more likely get an offer rescinded. Best negotiations I see usually go "market pays X for Y, here's the data to prove it from multiple sources", "competitor is paying X+Y%", "This job requires X% more time than stated, I have done this before. Here is the proportional increase I should get for the extra time."

The example with the competitor might seem as a one off. But market rate has a range, and it changes. Whatever competitors offers will eventually become market rate, if all else being equal (location, company prospects, coworkers, etc).

> On engineering teams you don't want constant negotiation.

I'm not sure you can escape it. I'm not sure you want to escape it. "Hey Jane, wouldn't the code be better written like this?" enters the process of negotiation. Do you really want to not explore a better way to write a given section of code because of some perceived conflict?

And maybe she will respond with: "Nice thought, but I avoided doing it that way because of a bug on platform X.", so you come back with: "Oh, I did not realize that. I still believe there is room for improvement. What if we did _this_ instead?". To which she returns with "I never thought of it that way. Good idea."

And there you have an act of negotiation. You won't always reach an agreement. Jane may not like your updated suggestion either and you ultimately walk away, leaving the code unchanged. But even when disagreements occur, I'm not sure I would want to go near an engineering team that was afraid to do that, to be honest.

> I hate senseless fighting where winning depends mostly on asserting yourself.

Perhaps we have differing ideas of what negotiation is. Senseless fighting and trying to beat someone down into submissiveness doesn't sound like the process of negotiation at all to me.

>Truth isn't negotiated

But yet... You name several possible states of "truth". For which either team member may or may not weigh as heavily..?

And, negotiations re-enter the conversation..

Reply on news.ycombinator.com