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Comment by scarface74 | Hacker News Reader

I cringed reading this article. It is so much in the bubble of Silicon Valley startup culture it’s ridiculous.

Most developers don’t work for startups or one of the FAANG companies. Most will be working standard corporate jobs where you get a salary, paid time off, maybe a bonus, and somewhat likely a 401K match. That’s it. No great equity stake, nothing.

Depending on your market, it’s quite easy with the right networking, research, and talking to enough recruiters, you can find what your market range is.

Statistically, you’re probably not a special snowflake. Everyone thinks that they are and deserve way above what the local market is paying. You probably don’t.

The only time that I’ve been “underpaid” was when I either stayed at a company too long, or purposely made less than I could because I was learning a new technology or otherwise building my resume.

It’s not that difficult. Work with local recruiters, tell them what your minimum well researched jump number is and make sure you are keeping your skillset in line with the market. If I’m off by a few thousand, so be it. I’ll become aware of it in two or three years when I’m looking again.

But from looking at salary surveys, talking to friends in the industry, and talking to recruiters, I don’t think I am.

Yes I could make more if I wanted to be a manager (no desire) or a consultant (don’t want the travel or the stress right now).

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>Statistically, you’re probably not a special snowflake. Everyone thinks that they are and deserve way above what the local market is paying. You probably don’t.

This is a very fiscal conservative thing to say (smacks of "know your place, cog"), so here's what I believe the fiscal conservative answer to be:

"Is the market bearing it? Yes? Then you deserve it."

Bearing in mind "market average" is not what a company is going to quote you off the bat. You should ask for more for that reason.

Bearing in mind that if you ask for more, you'll probably get more. That's just raw dumb game theory, so you should ask for more.

Also, what is this "don't deserve?" Don't deserve? I'm getting an emotional reaction to this! Don't deserve, because we should keep our head down? Chug along, dare not ask for more? What kind of dystopic corporate hell? We talk morals we should talk profit margins corporations pull in and disperse to upper management or CEO. Thank goodness many founders have realized they have to share the pie with equity to get the goods out of the best engineers. But since we're talking about bigger companies, soulless entities that will actually sell your 401k out from under you for a profit, I believe the "right" and "moral" thing to do is to suck every penny out of them as possible, because they'll fuck you in the end if it's profitable.

Also, what is this "don't deserve?" Don't deserve? I'm getting an emotional reaction to this! Don't deserve, because we should keep our head down? Chug along, dare not ask

(All numbers are based on salary surveys in my local market).

If the salary range is between $130K - $145K for a full stack developer that knows C# and React and all of the other buzz worthy front end stack and I only know .Net Asp.Net MVC and jquery (which is true), why would they hire me at $150K when they could hire someone who already knows the required tech?

On the other hand, if $135K is my minimum, and they were willing to hire me at that, why wouldn’t I take it? Spend the next year or two learning on the job and when they inevitably give me a 3% raise for the next two years, jump ship to a new job?

A job can offer me two things - immediate compensation and experience that makes me more valuable in the future.

When I did leave the job I had been at for way too long, I only had three skills that the market cared about - C/C++, database, and a little C#.

I had two offers - one paying 20K more and I could have negotiated $25K more than I was making as a C++ developer and one only paying $7K more with no room for negotiation as an entry level C# developer. If I had taken the higher paying job, I would have been worth less in 3 years - hardly any jobs wanted C++ developers. Instead, I took the job as a C# developer. Three years later, I was making what the first job offered and I was more marketable for the next 6 years. Nine years later, there are plenty of jobs paying $60-70K more than I was making back then for C# developers. For C++ developers, not so much.

About a year ago I was in a similar position. I was a “software architect” over a small development shop at a large company. It was time to look for another job. I had two offers, one paying $15K more that I was perfectly qualified for - .Net Framework, ASP.Net MVC, Sql Server, Windows platform and I would have been over a team of 10.

I would have made more at the above job, but using technology that was the opposite of where the industry is going.

The other job was a “senior developer” position that needed some exposure to AWS (I had a little but not enough to be an expert),JavaScript, NodeJS, React, .Net, and Python was a nice to have. It only paid $2K more than I was making, I asked for another $7K just because.

Guess which one I took? By taking the lesser paying job, I already have companies taking me out to lunch, talks with CxOs, etc. trying to recruit me directly at thier company paying $35K - $40K more than I’m making now as a full time billable consultant. It would require travel and I want to wait for my son to graduate before I entertain the offers.

But since we're talking about bigger companies, soulless entities that will actually sell your 401k out from under you for a profit, I believe the "right" and "moral" thing to do is to suck every penny out of them as possible, because they'll fuck you in the end if it's profitable.

Companies have no control over your 401K. They can’t “take money” out of your 401K account.

Thank goodness many founders have realized they have to share the pie with equity to get the goods out of the best engineers.

Statistically, equity is worthless at most startups. They either fail, don’t have an exit event that makes it valuable, or it gets diluted. I would rather have the guarantee of a salary.

> Companies have no control over your 401K. They can’t “take money” out of your 401K account.

They control who your 401k trustee is and therefore the range of investment products available to you. Companies get kickbacks from their 401k trustees and the difference comes from fees charged to you from the investment products you buy. Obviously the company with the higher fees can pay the most in kickbacks.

But its all very transparent you see. The inflated fees are clearly marked in the prospectus you didn't read, and if you don't like them you can get a job somewhere else. All very above board.

Seeing that my tenure at a job is usually only three years, in the grand scheme of things, it really doesn’t make a big difference. I can transfer the money to an IRA of my choice with lower fees - like Vanguard.

While its great it works out for you, that doesn't solve the systemic issue at hand.

Your examples are very detailed, I appreciate that. But I don't get it, it just serves to help my argument - at each of those individual companies, you can ask for more money and probably get it, even if it puts you above market value. So why wouldn't you?

As for 401k, my friend's company was recently purchased, and in the deal the 401ks were wiped out, instead of transferred. It's probably not legal but a bunch of employees have to get together to form a lawsuit to sort it now. Basically, I feel it's important to remember that laws don't actually create boundaries for companies, companies have far more "legal worth" (money) so therefore they have more power.

Your market value is determined by supply and demand. Why would a company pay me as a “Senior .Net Developer” back in 2008 when I had less than 6 months experience with .Net at the same salary that they would hire someone with 5 years of experience?

Why would someone, hypothetically pay me a year ago as a “Senior Cloud Architect” who had only watched a PluralSight video and had done one small project on the side for the same amount as someone with 5 years of experience?

If you are actually asking why wouldn’t I ask for a larger raise after I gained the requisite experience, that’s just not the way the industry works. For some reason they would rather not give raises to existing employees but are more than willing to hire replacements at the prevailing market rates - that is the well known phenomena of salary compression and inversion.

Well I dunno, why did my company hire me as a mid-level frontend engineer straight out of a coding bootcamp? A lot of people didn't want to, I just went and found a company willing to... Is the market not as robust for .net?

If they called you “mid level” straight out of boot camp what exactly is a “junior”? Could it have possible been yet another case of title inflation?

They also put a title of “lead developer” on business cards in 1996, straight out of college - I was the only developer - when this little small company was trying to seem bigger than it was when they were trying to get a government contract.

> a full stack developer that knows C# and React and all of the other buzz worthy front end stack and I only know .Net Asp.Net MVC and jquery (which is true)

Possibly Microsoft-land has moved on since I’ve last paid attention to it, but if you ‘know .NET’, surely you more or less have to know C#?

Yes of course.

But .Net is not popular among the cool kids and the small companies. The ones that I prefer working for and will pay more for “adult supervision”/architect types.

Even if you do find a .Net/Windows type of company, they aren’t going to be using server side rendering with razor pages and ASP.Net MVC. They are going to want to use a front end framework.

Then if you are in a cloud environment or any environment for that matter, you really don’t want to tie your horse to Windows/.Net Framework or Sql Server. You want to be using .Net Core and one of the open source or open source compatible databases.

You don’t want to be using jquery in 2018.

Of course you can find jobs using Asp.Net MVC/Jquery/IIS/SQL Server, etc. but that’s not what you want to hang your horse on.

I would much rather stay with .Net than to move to Node, but the market has spoken.

See what happened with employeees of Enron and their 401ks.

There was blame from both the Enron and the employees. The employees voluntarily put thier retirement savings in Enron stock - you never put your retirement contributions in the company stock. But the company locking them out and putting thier match in company stock was inexcusable.

> Statistically, you’re probably not a special snowflake. Everyone thinks that they are and deserve way above what the local market is paying. You probably don’t.

It's certainly possible that everyone deserves (or more precisely, is able to negotiate) a salary much higher than they have, but social pressures and norms and the fact that potential employees have much more to lose than potential employers over a single negotiation failing means that market value is much lower than it should be.

The efficient market hypothesis, if it is even true, is only true in liquid markets with free flow of information. Hiring is neither.

The efficient market hypothesis, if it is even true, is only true in liquid markets with free flow of information. Hiring is neither.

My local market, has been very liquid for the past 20 years, if you have the right skillset. I’ve been able to find a job within two or three weeks each time that I was looking usually with two or three offers.

It’s not a free flow of information but it is out there. I talk to recruiters and former coworkers all of the time to compare salaries.

From the market perspective, it’s because I haven’t been asking more than the median based on my skillset during the last 10 years. From my perspective, I’ve been prioritizing learning skills and building a resume over maximizing wages. I can’t both ask a company to hire me knowing that I’m barely qualified and ask for the highest part of the range.

The second issue is a collective action issue. There are plenty of qualified “full stack developers” who can make yet another B2B Software as a service CRUD app. You can’t negotiate too far over your local market rates or there are other developers who are “good enough” who will take the job. I’m able to slowly get on the right side of the bell curve by being a “enterprise cloud architect” (yeah I die a little bit everytime I say that). My next step is a “consultant”.

You can find a job within two or three weeks, sure, but you're not switching jobs every two or three weeks. If there's a company that's willing to hire you for $10K more but doesn't have headcount until next quarter, you're not getting that $10K, and you'll typically go years before the next time you negotiate. (And if you jump ship after a quarter, your market value goes down because people start looking at your resume suspiciously; in exchange that company would have to offer significantly more than $10K to compensate you for that risk and encourage you to jump ship.)

A liquid market typically doesn't have the restriction that after a trade, the asset stays off the market for years until the next trade. A liquid market typically has market makers, who buy whenever sellers are ready and sell whenever buyers are ready and make a little profit from the spread, and thereby ensure that the market itself serves as a mechanism for price discovery. There's no equivalent of that in the hiring market. Nobody will hire you now for $9K more in the expectation that in a quarter they can contract you out for $10K more.

The hiring market does sort of compensate for this with raises, but - because everyone knows that there's a cost to switching jobs - raises don't have to match your current market value. They just have to get to your current market value minus the cost of switching jobs right now.

Insightful comment overall, but I disagree with your implication that the formula for pay raises is generally "current market value minus the cost of switching jobs right now".

First of all, what "cost of switching jobs" are you referring to?

If I live in SF, "switching jobs" likely means getting off at a different BART station. Hell, I might be able to walk to my next job.

I think the well-known fact that pay raises fail to keep up with market wages in tech - isn't some brilliantly efficient calculation like "current market value minus the cost of switching jobs right now" as you suggest.

It's clearly not working very well, since job hopping in the valley is crazy high, and everyone knows that's done because of pay. To wit, the longer you work for the same company, the farther your market comp will drift away from you, and the only way to catch up with the runaway comp-train is to hop jobs.

I think it's simply the traditional American 2-3% raise model clashing with a booming tech reality where your market wage will likely increase much higher. Plus, the traditional model itself never worked very well for well-performing employees:

> It used to be that jumping ship meant landing a salary 10 percent to 20 percent higher than your previous one. While increases of that size aren’t as widespread as they used to be, switching jobs is still the most common path to the best pay raise.

> If you stay at the same organization, your annual increases may be restricted by your current base salary because companies have a narrow percentage range within which they can boost your pay.

https://www.investopedia.com/articles/personal-finance/09041...

Simply stated: employers were never very efficient at raising comp for good performers. Even decades ago, in industries nowhere near the growth rate of current tech, top performers were much better off job-hopping. Tech just made it even more lucrative.

First of all, what "cost of switching jobs" are you referring to?

Besides the job hopping stench, there are other very real cost to switching jobs.

- there are three “levers of power” in an organization - relationship, expert, and role power - in that order.

At any job, especially at more senior levels, having the right relationships with the right people means for example the difference between you having to send a ticket to the IT department and wait in a queue to get those test VMs you need and being able to send a Skype message, they set everything up for you right then and then you submit the ticket as a formality.

- Expert power and developing a reputation for knowing what you’re doing is the difference, especially at a small company, is the difference between having to wait for the “IT department” (or the outsourced Amazon support people that your company hired), and being given admin access to AWS so you can do it yourself.

When people know you and trust you, you can punch above your role.

You lose that at a new company and it is a “cost” to get it back.

Also, at a company I’ve been at for three years, I know where most of the bodies are buried. I’ve buried a lot of them or know who did and I know the technology. I spend the first 6-12 months at a new company working extra just to ramp up on the company’s code base, and because I’m usually changing jobs to learn new-to-me technology, learning the tech stack. That extra time has a “cost” on my personal and family life.

By "cost of switching jobs" I mean that there's a negative cost in the long term to having a short job on your resume (especially if your previous job was also short), to not having an enthusiastic positive reference, to maybe getting a reputation as someone who doesn't want to stay at a job, etc. If I take a job paying, say, $100K, and someone is offering me $120K after six months, waiting until I've been at the job a year or two is technically costing me $10-30K over jumping right now but is probably worth more than that in the long term just to not have that six-month stint on my resume and to not burn bridges with my current employer.

After a couple of years it becomes more defensible to leave, so there are mechanisms for giving you significantly more money after several years (promotions, promotions to manager track, refresher grants, etc.) but fewer mechanisms for giving you more money in the first year or two, and basically none for within the first year, because employers know that even if your market value is theoretically higher, you can't actually take advantage of that yet.

I think that even in markets where job-hopping is high in general, any particular individual can still only job-hop so many times before it backfires on their ability to get a high salary.

Hopping after 6 months, or say less than a year, will definitely hurt your resume, even in the Bay. As a hiring manager, I'll typically assume your either got fired, or gave up too quickly. Both strong reasons not to hire you.

Hopping after 2 years in the Bay is extremely common. So much that I'm not even sure it's considered "hopping" anymore.

I'm not sure how long of a time horizon you mean when you suggest job-hops will eventually hurt you. In the Bay, at least, if you have say 5 2yr stints, what's likely to hurt you is... your age.

A developer with 2 2yr startup stints is your typical Bay "senior developer". And a developer with 1 2yr startup stint is your typical "experienced" Bay developer, and generally one of the most in-demand categories of developers in the Bay.

I'd go so far as to say that the 2 2yr stints will look better to a startup hiring manager than 7 years in an corporate environment like Oracle. The former is definitely in tune with SFBay startup-scene vibe, the latter looks like a corporate potato whose fit for startup life is questionable (not to mention a little too old as well ;).

At least you are honest about your ageism.

How is that ageism? There is nothing stopping a person in their mid 40s from keeping thier eye on the ball, not getting complacent at a company, and not letting thier skills atrophy.

I’m in my mid 40s and also know plenty of other developers my age who decided not to go anywhere near management so we had to keep our skills up to date. There is nothing sadder than seeing an older developer who stayed at a company for 15 years, get laid off and spend months not being able to get a job. On the other hand, I have a former manager who retired from the military in the late 80s, started out as a Powerbuilder Developer and became a manager at a .Net shop.

When his kids moved out, he “self demoted”, got a job as a developer and is now doing .Net and React. He is at least in his mid 50s.

This isn't my ageism, I personally love experienced candidates. This is a reflection of the reality in SV, where most employers aren't like my current one.

You twice perpetuated the notion that older candidates are less likely to get the job because of their age. Simply giving it credence is ageism.

I agree, even though I switched jobs 5 times in 10 years I had to have a story to tell - one company went out of business, one product was cancelled, one was a “change of direction and they didn’t want to be a software company”, but they did want me to finish a project and paid me well enough to lead it to completion.

But now I am starting to get the job hopping stench about myself.

But if you really want to stay liquid - contract. You don’t get the job hoppers stench about you if you do want to go full time later on.

> I can’t both ask a company to hire me knowing that I’m barely qualified and ask for the highest part of the range.

If you know what the range even is, you’re ahead of the game.

That’s where recruiters come in. They know the range and you can ask them before you even start the interview process.

I once told a recruiter I would accept the offer from the hiring company if they offered slightly above the range - which was still below what I was offered as an “architect” for a company using a technology stack that I was good at, but was on the decline. They did the negotiating for me.

Why would I waste my time interviewing before knowing the range? It’s not proper to ask the hiring company from the offset the salary range but it is okay to ask the recruiter.

> That’s where recruiters come in. They know the range and you can ask them before you even start the interview process.

True, with the caveat that all benefits of (external) recruiters depend on the degree of alignment between your respective interests.

For example, if you choose a recruiter who only works with positions up to $X, I guarantee the top of the range he will assess you is going to be... you guessed it, $X.

Some recruiters also get paid more by some employers for some positions. So a recruiter may steer you towards a position that is inferior, including pay-wise, because he'll personally get paid more if you take it.

This can end really bad for you, since some of the employers who pay recruiters the most are those with the highest turnover... which usually has its own good reasons.

Always remember: recruiters ultimately get paid by the employers, not by you.

The best strategy is to work with several external recruiters, and ideally also interview with some employers directly.

I think the more general version of this argument is that jobs achievable via recruiters are a fairly small subset of the job market, and you don't have a good sense (as a job-seeker) of how exactly that subset is shaped, so this doesn't actually solve the problem of not having enough information. You now have significantly more information about a subset of the market and no idea what that subset is.

If you were to go trade, say, tech stocks, but you didn't know how profitable the companies were until after you had made a bid, and you decided to solve the incomplete-information problem by working with brokers who were paid by some of the companies, you would be making a mistake by thinking you're now in possession of enough information to make the EMH kick in.

Your argument is well-phrased, and theoretically correct, but in reality recruiters often work with a large subset of the job market in their area. The market is tight right now, and hiring managers have no reason to only work with one recruiter. On the contrary: they will cast the widest net, talk to any viable recruiter, and typically disclose comp information to that recruiter.

I agree it's not perfect information, but in reality if you job hop, work closely with several recruiters, and negotiate well - you'll get a pretty good idea of your market value, imho.

Employees who have the least idea of their market value are those who stayed in the same job for a long time, and haven't interviewed or talked to recruiters in years.

I completely agree with your earlier assertion that it's quite possible that entire sectors of the tech industry are underpaid, but the employers' frantic and often limited efforts to keep comp data secret are just one reason for that.

True. When I’m looking for a job, I am working with 7 or 8 different companies most of the time.

But if you already know your range. All the steering in the world is not going to convince you to take a lower paying job.

My experience is that recruiters get paid a percentage of your first years salary from the company. They have an incentive to get you a higher wage, but like real estate agents, that incentive isn’t perfectly aligned. (http://freakonomics.com/2008/02/26/real-estate-agents-revisi...)

> But if you already know your range. All the steering in the world is not going to convince you to take a lower paying job.

Sure. But if the top of my range is $150k, and I'm talking to a company that would be willing to pay me $175k, it's not in my best interest to tell them that $150k is enough to hire me.

> My experience is that recruiters get paid a percentage of your first years salary from the company.

Generally, yes. But the exact percentage may differ from company to company.

Typical example are bad employers with high turnover. They need the recruiters to get a lot of new people in the door every year, while convincing these candidates to walk in the door is typically harder due to the employer's poor reputation. So they end up paying recruiters more, sometimes a lot more, per successful candidate.

Sure. But if the top of my range is $150k, and I'm talking to a company that would be willing to pay me $175k, it's not in my best interest to tell them that $150k is enough to hire me.

Unless you are special snowflake, why would the company’s range be that far outside of the range for the local market? Either the company is incompetent, you’re about to step into some crap, or the employee doesn’t actually know the market.

Generally, yes. But the exact percentage may differ from company to company. Typical example are bad employers with high turnover. They need the recruiters to get a lot of new people in the door every year, while convincing these candidates to walk in the door is typically harder due to the employer's poor reputation. So they end up paying recruiters more, sometimes a lot more, per successful candidate.

Every job I’ve gotten through recruiters, the employer was adding people not replacing them. Well, except for one where they fired the most senior developer, three weeks after I came in. I didn’t know I was being watched as his replacement and being made the team lead.

In hindsight it was obvious when half the interview was asking me to come up with a 90 day plan to create a modern software development shop on the spot after he told me about the challenges they were having....

> why would the company’s range be that far outside of the range for the local market?

Because the "range", as a concept, only goes so far.

In reality, there are companies willing to pay above market for various reasons.

For example, they're highly selective, and you're the first candidate to pass their interviews in months. Congrats!

Or maybe you just successfully completed the exact same technology project they're looking to do themselves.

Or maybe they're just doing really well and willing to pay above-market.

> Every job I’ve gotten through recruiters, the employer was adding people not replacing them.

Trust me, there are companies out there with crazy-high turnover. They typically will not tell you that as an interviewee, for obvious reasons.

These companies are always recruiting, always in touch with multiple recruiters, and always pay them well - because they need them the most.

For example, they're highly selective, and you're the first candidate to pass their interviews in months. Congrats!

Most jobs aren’t that selective and aren’t doing work so specialized that that need someone in the 90th percentile.

Or maybe you just successfully completed the exact same technology project they're looking to do themselves.

Congratulations - you are then that “special snowflake”. You would know that if you ask the standard “what type of challenges are you facing” question when you are interviewing.

Or maybe they're just doing really well and willing to pay above-market.

Why would a company pay above market value for a new employee out of the goodness of thier heart? I could see the paying a bonus to existing employees.

Trust me, there are companies out there with crazy-high turnover. They typically will not tell you that as an interviewee, for obvious reasons.

I found that out the hard way during my second outing after my awkening. It was a contract to perm job that was so bad. That I just up and quit in a month without having anything lined up or even in the pipeline. I had an offer for what was then a Fortune 10 company within 4 days. Thanks to a recruiter. It also paid more than I was making.

> Why would a company pay above market value for a new employee out of the goodness of their heart?

Several reasons:

1. They want to minimize the chance of the candidate declining. Every employer had a bunch of candidates go through the entire process (at the cost of multiple $k each) and then decline the offer, because you were a good boyscout and gave them their "market value" offer, exactly like all their other options, and slightly less than some. If I'm flush with cash, I may put a little extra on top of my offers, to ensure this doesn't happen, especially in a tight market where I'm competing against multiple other employers.

2. I want the employee to be motivated right off the bat, by knowing he's getting paid above market rate. One of the dangers with new employees nowadays is that they know they can easily get 3-4+ offers that pay the exact same (or a bit more) elsewhere. That causes lack of motivation, and some of them will quit if more disadvantages emerge. Paying above market ensures this won't happen.

> I found that out the hard way during my second outing after my awkening.

What is your "awakening"? :-)

What is your "awakening"? :-)

After working hard for one company for 7 years and only getting 3% raises and feeling the effects of salary compression and inversion. Also I realized the lack of optionality when your skills aren’t a fit for the market.

The first job I detailed above after I left, was a great decision. I chose technology over money - I also met my now wife.

After that company laid everyone off [1], and I did a short stint as a contractor with one of our former customers, I got a job at a horrible company and all of the signs were there in hindsight. But I had never worked at a bad company before then. I had only worked for 3 companies in the past 16 years. I didn’t put that company on my resume and I explained the three month gap ase deciding to take some time off to get situated after getting married.

After that, I jumped shipped from a company as soon as I saw a market opportunity. People worry too much about job hopping. If you interview for a job and they are concerned about job hopping, they won’t give you a job. If they do hire you in spite of your work history you leave. What harm is interviewing? The next job either hires you or you stay where you are until the job hopping stench wears off.

[1] They were very up front with us and the investors promised us that they would keep paying our salaries until they either found a buyer or officially gave us notice. We wouldn’t have to worry about not getting paid while we working. All of us stuck around because why not? We knew based on the tech stack we were using, that we could get another job before our final check cleared.

This is where your recruiters come in...

I have three criteria for choosing a job - technology, environment, and money in that order.

If three separate recruiters are representing separate companies and all other things are equal except the money (they rarely are), you tell the recruiter representing the job you want the most that you will take it if they can get you $market_value + $x.

I’ve had cases where the recruiting company offered me a signing bonus out of thier commission to convince me to take an offer. It didn’t work. Usually there is one company out of the offers that is offering a better tech stack/shorter commute/preferred environment.

Recruiters don't know, or often lie about the true range. They are incentivized more to get you in the door than to get every last $, because that will sour their future with that company and will only net them a % of that increase.

I’ve been on the hiring side working with recruiters. We tell them the range up front.

If they don’t tell you or they don’t know, stay away from them. They don’t have a direct relationship with the company.

Any recruiter that you tell what your range is and they still try to steer you below the range stay away from them. That’s like dealing with real estate agents who try to steer you above your range or your expressed preferences.

Recruiters do know the range, almost always.

We just tell people in a fairly detailed document we share with everyone. Comp is not completely open, but everyone lives in a band for the position and we stick to it.

One company I left tried that too. They established “bands”, made it hard to get out of the band, and 5 developers jumped ship within 6 months to jobs paying from $10K -$20K more....

It has drawback, and you can't do it in an unfair way. It works fine for us. It isn't hard to get out of the band. The criteria are reasonably objective and people move upward with ease when they demonstrate capability / qualification. It is far more transparent than not disclosing the information.

Agree 100%.

The original article assumes you're going to go through the entire interview process before discussing a number?

What happens if the delta between you and the hiring company isn't just a few thousand, but multiple tens of thousands? Will negotiating ever bridge that gap? More often than not it will never happen, and everyone has wasted their time...yours especially.

In the current US job market, and let's say everywhere except the FAANG companies for reasons of this discussion, we're in a extreme situation where employers need people but aren't willing to move salaries upward to get it.

patio11 had it right when he said

"The explosive growth of the tech sector keeps average age down and depresses average wages. Compared to industries which existed in materially the same form in 1970, we have a stupidly compressed experience spectrum: 5+ years rounds to "senior." This is not a joke."

We're stalemated before we even finish answering the phone call or email from the recruiter. Knowing your jump number is the gatekeeper.

It's not just the FAANG companies; it's a lot of startups and unicorns that compete with FAANG for talent (though generally Amazon pays less than the rest so it is more like FANG) as well.

But it's certainly true that in the broader US job market, everyone is complaining about a shortage in job-seekers, but refusing to raise wages to attract the employees they so desperately need. In fact, last time I checked, wages went up by less than inflation, year over year. There seems to be some sort of reverse unionization where employers are keeping wages sticky and unwilling to raise wages even when doing so is necessary.

All the money in the world is not going to help the immediate problem of finding developers on the high end if the pool is smaller than the demand. In the long run, the pool should increase if the salary is higher, but it will still take time to enlarge the pool.

It also doesn’t help that the US is becoming very unfriendly to immigration that would enlarge the pool.

> we're in a extreme situation where employers need people but aren't willing to move salaries upward to get it

This line nails it and is true for so many companies now it's painful. Just a few weeks ago I was trying to help a hiring manager fix his candidate pipeline for qualified people and when I dug in, his target salary was the same as it was in 2010.

I think the fundamental problem is that outside of tech, companies are completely unwilling to potentially sacrifice corporate profits to raise wages. Instead, they'll explore every possible alternative from outsourcing to "contract-to-hire" (spoiler: they'll never hire) to underpaid H1B to piling more responsibilities onto fewer people before even considering bumping pay up. The second chart in [1] summarizes the situation nicely.

[1] https://www.wealthdaily.com/articles/the-real-culprit/6276

What’s equally amazing to me, and this just personally happened to me, is that companies would rather walk away from the discussion over a figure smaller than the amount of productivity being lost by the vacancy.

I recently turned down an offer from a company that went on and on about the backlog of projects that needed attention and couldn’t ship. My estimate was that they were probably losing a few hundred thousand in annual sales due to headcount.

Want to know how much they wouldn’t budge on a salary offer? $15K.

The position is still unfilled. It’s been six months, and the job was open six months before that.

they'll explore every possible alternative from outsourcing to "contract-to-hire" (spoiler: they'll never hire)

What’s wrong with contract to hire or straight contract? I’ve always made more on contract jobs - even taking into account unpaid time off - than I could have made with the same skillset as a fulltime employee. It helps that I don’t care about health benefits. I get those through my wife’s very stable government job.

You answered your own question here. It’s all about benefits.

Health benefits is just another expense that you should calculate into your required hourly rate if you need it. We aren’t talking about exploited (not being sarcastic) relatively low paid employees. It’s no different than calculating your self employment taxes and factoring in unpaid time off when taking your required hourly rate into account.

I paid insurance out of pocket during my first contracting gig via CORBA - that was before I was married. Most contractors I know either buy through the ACA exchanges or through thier contracting company.

This also struck me as suffering from severe valley myopia.

> What happens if the delta between you and the hiring company isn't just a few thousand, but multiple tens of thousands? Will negotiating ever bridge that gap? More often than not it will never happen, and everyone has wasted their time...yours especially.

This has happened to me on a few occasions. The bottom line is that there's a wide range of a) what companies are able to pay and b) what people will work for. The end result is that without any malfeasance by either party, there are vacancies and candidates that are hopelessly mismatched with each other in terms of salary even though they are a match in terms of job description. I've had to cut a few conversations short as they were – not entirely unreasonably – trying to hire at ~50% of what I was already earning at the time. If I waited until the end of the interview process before discussing salary ranges, I'd be wasting an awful lot of my time and theirs.

By all means, get them to blink first if you want. But unless you want to waste a lot of time, don't wait until the last minute before discussing salary.

Yeah, but if I'm already making the market number, then any company that wants me to leave has to provide a reason why I'd want to jump ship. Usually that reason can be more money.

> FAANG

What is N for? Or you meant FAAMG ?

As said below Netflix. But I usually say FAANG + Microsoft. But that doesn’t roll off the tongue as easily.

Netflix. Microsoft pays way less (except LinkedIn, and probably Github as well now).

Netflix

thanks

my thought was about Microsoft

Netflix

thanks my thought was about Microsoft

Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, Google. Microsoft is as relevant as IBM.

I thought everyone was getting a new impression of Microsoft under their new CEO.

As a Linux Admin/consultant I’ve been impressed with some of the directions they’ve been headed in recently. If they don’t butcher github in the next few years I may consider hating on them slightly less.

I've been really impressed with the last few years. I still hold on to some little bit of skepticism, but it's shrinking more with every year of their open source + Linux work.

So is Netflix.

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