Questions to Ask When Negotiating Salary | Hacker News Reader

Questions to Ask When Negotiating Salary

cleverism.com

28 pointscleverism19 comments

I'm super distracted by the use of ԛ instead of q in this article, what's that about? Plagiarism detection? Seems bad for accessibility/SEO.

I assume that's different characters? How could you even tell?

They happen to look significantly different in the font in the article the way my browser is rendering it. They're using the Cyrillic character that looks like q, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qa_(Cyrillic).

Not sure why you got downvoted. It was the first thing I noticed about this generic listicle.

It's not just ԛ.

They also use: а, с, е, о, р, ѕ, and у

Oh, I get it, it's a defense against plagiarism detection. The article is largely plagiarized from other sources, but since they didn't contain the homographs you can't just google the unique sentence "This is a fair and legitimate question, but not the first question you want to ask." (Original source, possibly: https://www.risesmart.com/blog/6-key-questions-ask-during-sa...)

Looks like this article has been posted on multiple blogs -- the oldest one I found was on glassdoor's blog.

I was making $500K/year in my last job, and I never asked for a raise in all my career. IMO, the best way to get market-level compensation is to find an offer from another employer that you're willing to move to. Once you show your employer the other offer, the burden goes to the employer to justify why they should keep you at a below-market rate.

Yes but that's largely due to stock appreciation at Amazon.

You and I both know that the target comp for SDE-3 at Amazon is significantly lower.

Only in the last 2 years. My comp went from $70K in 2011 to nearly $400K in 2016 without stock appreciation making any material impact. I got an offer from Oracle in 2016 for $380K. Amazon matched it, and then stock appreciation added another $80K in 2017 and $130K in 2018.

When you show your employer an offer you received from another employer, aren't basically saying "Pay me more" and asking for a raise? I can't imagine going to your manager and saying, "Look, these guys want to pay me more. haha. OK, back to work."

There's a soft way to ask for it. You basically point out that your manager is at risk of loosing you. Note that you need to understand both how much you bring to the team from your manager's perspective as well as your manager's budget considerations.

It's possible you outgrew the position altogether and the group you're in isn't interested in what you've become, at least not at that price. Or it's possible that what you've become is truly worth it to the team and replacing you with someone new would noticeably set the team back.

Yes, maybe. But it doesn't require asking any questions or negotiating (which is what the article is about).

Some of this transactional argument is misconceived I think. The argument that you can trade off picking off your kids at 4:00 against, say $5000 seems particularly wrong-headed to me and detracts from the value proposition you bring to the company.

These are nice tactical questions but they overlook the prime strategy in any comp negotiation: demonstration of value.

Eg what demonstrable value are you, the person asking for money, bringing to the table? What problems are you solving? Why are you worth what you're asking for? What things have you accomplished, issues you headed off, etc that I might not know about. Etc.

I have already demonstrated my value during the interview. Negotiation occurs after I have passed the interview.

This is a "feel-good" list without any concrete examples.

Check this out instead: https://haseebq.com/my-ten-rules-for-negotiating-a-job-offer...

It is much more directly applicable to our field with concrete examples.

Is there a value in "agents" for tech talent. (I seem to remember `toptal` trying to position itself like that).

Now that 500K is in the reach of SREs at Facebook, it seems worthwhile to get someone in to negotiate on that SREs behalf. Or is the "stupid high salary" world just too small?

Considering this is a low quality listicle without much content and is posted by a new account the same username as the domain, it seems somewhat likely that it's using fake votes to get as many points as it did?

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