Comment by legerdemain | Hacker News Reader

Comment by legerdemain | Hacker News Reader

  > Virtually any amount of money available to you personally is
  > mouse droppings to your prospective employer.
  > They will not feel offended if you ask for it.

Two comments.

(a) I interviewed with Wealthfront last year. They offered $160K, which was lower cash comp than any of my other offers. I tried to open the door to negotiation. The recruiter and the dev lead then got on the phone with me to awkwardly explain that no, they don't negotiate with candidates, and what makes me feel like their offer is inadequate? Would I really want to miss the opportunity to work for an exciting company over some marginal sum of money? Yes.

(b) The money you ask for is a pittance on the company's balance sheet, but you're not negotiating with the company. You're negotiating with someone in recruiting. From hanging out with HR, they talk a lot of shit about candidates who they consider difficult, and have a lot of ways of making the experience less pleasant for the candidate, even if it's not clear what this means for the company's ability to attract talent.

In the case of Wealthfront, it may be a cultural matter as their CEO specifically believes that negotiating your offer is a negative indicator: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/20130708151000-56725-offer-co...

Hilarious, a buyer telling sellers that the it’s in the seller’s best interest to not research their market price. In the finance sector nonetheless.

That post really doesn’t make sense to me. It’s always in your interest to shop around. The author calls them “collectors”, sounds like he’s upset he loses good candidates over money and wants to rationalize his loss.

Yep it makes no sense. In fact, normally if they can pay your more it's a good sign. The place with more money is more likely to have a better career, all else unknown, because they probably make more money (or are well funded) and therefore they desperately need the best people so are willing to stump up for it. There is a bigger causal link between your work and the impact on the company. In such places, expect to work with other good people.

The only reason it is a bad sign is if they are paying more money simply to compensate for insane working hours or bad culture. That should be sniffable on glassdoor, or with a few well placed questions. Or look for the warning signs. E.g. "We have an onsite gym because we don't want people to leave the building all day".

And it is funny how the comments there all lick up to the post's author. Nobody calls him out. It is all bizarelly disgusting.

Well said :) This is exactly it.

Of course the buyer tells them that, since if enough of them believe him he saves double digit percentages on payroll.

I don't know about the first negotiation anecdote, but I can kinda see what Andy means here. I don't think pay is the primary thing I get out of a job, they'll all basically pay enough to live really well. Feeling good about what I do at work, learning new skills for the sake of learning, having a positive environment are all far more important to me. I've met a lot of people in school and at work who are just there to make as much money as possible, and I've always found that incredibly depressing. I think both our views can be valid at once, but I don't think they're a good culture fit together.

Its also depressing to pick a job not based on pay, and see how friends with similar skills who do optimize for pay make a million extra over the span of a couple years.

Not a couple of years, but a valid point. I've always told myself I'm focussed on my compensation integrated over 10 years. This can allow for some trade off between money today and money tomorrow.

Like many others, I disagree with several points of that article.

First, even if you're dead set to work at company X, it's a good idea to get offers from companies Y and Z to help you negotiate. If X is primed for success, as the article recommends, then X should have no problem matching up because a good hire should bring in many times more revenue than what could be saved by pinching pennies on the offer. As a candidate, it's also great to be in a situation where you have multiple offers in the same range, because that allows you to take comp out of the equation and make your decision purely based on which company and role would be the best fit.

Second, it's OK if the first company you work at fails. Early in your career, learning as much as you can is more important than success or failure IMO, and failure can be a tremendous learning opportunity. The article recommends joining a company that's already almost certain to succeed; this means all the critical problems were solved before you joined, and all that's left is to execute. It's great to learn how to execute well, but it's also far from being the whole picture.

Well on CEO level that might be true (I realise that's not what he talking about though). It seems pay of top level exec positions follows very different patterns than normal folks. It's used for signalling status. I know of at least one instance where the head of the board said to increase the salary offer to a CEO candidate because "we want to be the company in the country who offers the highest CEO salary".

That statement is a textbook example of a domination strategy, and nothing else. People will lie through their teeth over money.

It makes his job a lot easier if he can increase say “we need 10 people” and pay them cookie cutter salaries.

BATNA is king. If you have a great alternative, you're not being difficult, you're just being honest. My second-most-linked negotiation post, after the OP, is https://haseebq.com/how-not-to-bomb-your-offer-negotiation/

I have troubles taking your article seriously. These whole paragraphs of text, nobody would say that over the phone (wouldn't even write that in an email).

I can't imagine the person on the other side NOT dropping you when you're being this incredibly difficult. I certainly would have.

Maybe you're in the valley and they're really struggling to get candidates?

I was reading this comment on my phone and had to jump on my computer to say: you should absolutely take this article/Haseeb seriously, yes people say these exact things over the phone.

I was looking for a new job in the recent past along with a family member (both software eng. roles), and spent a good chunk of time doing research - reading articles like this - and practicing (eventually via companies early in my "pipeline"), and while I didn't use these lines verbatim, the conversation was actually a lot closer to that than you think.

And we both received NON-TRIVIAL adjustments to non-negotiable offers. And we were both very surprised it worked.

It may seem stilted or awkward, but I think that's the point. Recruiters and experienced managers have their own script that is more-or-less designed to make you feel awkward; make you feel like you're getting a great deal and asking for more is greedy. If you get more comfortable with being awkward, while still remaining professional and having clear expectations (vs. saying "not good enough, want more"), and you have a good alternative, you can use these strategies.

And you're in the bay area as well?

I'm arguing against the specific examples, not negotiating in general (that is a good thing to do). I really don't see these long messages/emails getting anywhere, in my experience HR have dropped the ball for less than that. It's over the top to send them long messages in writing that you will never accept whatever number they give and reserve the right to disagree anytime.

I use similar language in all my salary negotiations. Never had pushback, and every time I’ve gotten massive comp bumps as a result (up to ~50% increase, which happened twice).

Nope, middle-tier US city.

One of the offers was FAANG, but a small office. To be clear, I did not do most of this over email, but I used very similar wording in my phone calls.

I never had more than 2 offers at once, and I don't think you need to try and time everything so that you can bet everyone against each other. You really just need 1 other good offer, which was my case. And non-negotiable deadlines have always been extended. Some companies got annoyed that I didn't decide within a few days(especially startups, probably since they are trying to hire super fast), but others were very patient and willing to let me finish interviewing as long as I was upfront with the timing.

> It's over the top to send them long messages in writing that you will never accept whatever number they give and reserve the right to disagree anytime.

I don't think that is the take away at all. You need to be clear that you are still interviewing and thinking things over, and once I got offers from my top choices, I made it clear exactly what it would take to get me to accept immediately, and that counter-offer was not a fantastical number. If you set goal posts, you can always point to them as your reason for not accepting. It's definitely bad form to not provide any feedback on what you're willing to take once you get far enough into the negotiation.

If you're not a compelling candidate, and for at least one of the companies, I wasn't compelling enough, they absolutely will stop the conversation.

But I think it's a case-by-case thing. Not every company will respond the same. I also spent a fair amount of time researching what different companies probably paid for a generalist SWE, which for FAANGs is a lot easier these days, so I knew what some boundaries were.

Counter example: Got offer from two companies, the second a few weeks later.

Preferred the second but their offer was slightly lower. They could match easily (big company) but they didn't want to. I got calls by HR and by the manager to convince me to take the job but they wouldn't bulge on the offer.

Well. Went to work for the first company. I still got a call from HR after I started working at the company, to try to get me. I was upfront, I like your company and your project more, I want to work for you, all you have to do is to match £XYZ salary and I can start working for you on the XYth (notice period). They still refused to match the offer.

Take it seriously, I've used this one and OPs to earn quite a bit more money.

The most important thing these authors are trying to teach isn't dogma to repeat verbatim, it's an overall mindset and high level strategy. And you're right that know one you know talks like that... So don't, make it natural by tailoring the phrases to your needs, it's a framework with examples not something to memorize.

Another good one is: https://medium.com/@bayareabelletrist/how-i-negotiated-a-sof...

It's certainly less refined but provides a rough draft on how to play offers off each other. I found his wording slightly rude in his text examples so I mixed and matched strategies with the other articles and adapted the wording for my needs. I ended up negotiating a 50% salary increase and a signing bonus by using this strategy.

To answer my question, yes, you are in the valley and you got offers from 6 large companies including: Google, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft (LinkedIn), Amazon.

Thus it is utterly inapplicable to anyone not living in the valley (or not having that many offers at once). The offers were tightly packed and half of the companies dropped off rather quickly as you noticed. You should understand here that there isn't that much room to negotiate when dealing with 2 companies that ain't Google/Facebook.

I think you give too much credit to yourself for negotiating while the outcome actually had fairly little to do with that. Don't get me wrong, it is great that you managed to get the job and it's fantastic that you wrote about it =)

They are standard offers in the area (the cost of living being insane). On a rather low to mid level actually? Looks like one of the company decided to bump you one level and that's why you got a better offer in the end (you both worked hard for it AND you got lucky).

Given how great you are doing at interviewing. You should go at it again within 1-3 years for the level higher (maybe L5 at Google/Facebook, ICT4 at Apple). Think of what you're having now as a stepping stone =)

I live in Nebraska and I've never interviewed with any of the companies you named.

Having alternatives when negotiating is not unusual

> Would I really want to miss the opportunity to work for an exciting company over some marginal sum of money?

The reply to this seems obvious. Do you really want to miss the opportunity to hire a strong and promising candidate over some marginal sum of money?

Hiring is HARD. Hiring good engineers is almost impossible.

If a company has a strong history of success and a positive work culture, good engineers will be knocking their doors down.

Think 37signals.

These places are super rare.

Some comments:

- I’m not sure about the extent to which this is scalable, especially at a VC-funded startup.

- I am not sure if Wealthfront falls into this category.

> good engineers will be knocking their doors down.

If good engineers are knocking their doors down then an army of average, mediocre, and bad engineers are knocking too. Identifying which is which is a notoriously difficult problem.

Good engineers are generally employed and happy, or at least satisfied. Changing jobs is an extremely high risk move. How often do good engineers change jobs? Not often.

Almost all companies hire heavily through word of mouth. Employee referrals are king. But eventually you exhaust that pool. It's a very hard hump to get over imho.

But the market for those good engineers is extremely hot. So other companies will be offering them better compensation.

Good engineers are never looking for a job. They are in their job when new better opportunities arise and they decide to move.

I personally view salary negotiation as one of my leading indicators of how a company actually views me as an employee.

I expect my salary to roughly follow the market trends. If I negotiate within that range and you don't budge at all, I find that's an indicator of poor internal views and culture.

I don't need you to exactly match another offer, but I do need to see you at least try to work with me to get a better place.

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