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Comment by lealanko | Hacker News Reader

You (and the article) are ignoring smaller companies. In those, you often have the salary negotiations with the owner, or a partner. Your salary comes (effectively) out of their own pocket, and recruiting you is quite possibly a significant and risky investment for the entire company.

In these sorts of situations, negotiation is much harder on a personal level, since the company is not a faceless entity. The company does have a face, that's the face you have to look into when you state your salary request.

On the other hand, it's also harder to accept being underpaid, because if you don't get paid what you're worth, you know the extra profits will go (almost) directly into the pocket of a person you will see daily at work.

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Small companies with smart hiring managers or owners should know that if they pay candidates, especially highly skilled ones, not enough, they will probably jump ship after one or two years which is exactly the period after which employees reach a level of productivity that brings enough value for companies to justify the hiring.

In all the places I've worked, every engineer knew there was another place where they'd likely earn significantly more. Yet, they didn't jump ship. These were not high turnaround places.

Either my experience is exceptional, or your implication that money is the only thing that matters about a job is wrong.

Yeah. I left a good salary behind and went 1/2 time for a super small company this year. Great decision. Money isn’t everything.

That's easy to say after having had a high paying position for a while, which would give you the opportunity to build some financial stability. Never having had any stability, money plays a much larger role.

There was a comment a few weeks ago about someone saying how money doesn’t matter - his family doesn’t care if his networth aged 40 was $2m or $20m.

Many people on HN, after a decade or so of amazon salaries, seem to have no concept of the real world.

Well, yes. It wouldn't have been a good decision for me 20 years ago. But it was a good decision this year. Context is important. Money is important, obviously. But once you have a certain level of stability in your life, other priorities begin to overtake it.

I always traded up.

I have the feeling, that i'm still having a similar amount of fun/happiness when i do my current job vs. my previous job but with more money.

More money means for me: less working later or nicer things now or faster/more stability & safety.

I have also seen enough people being afraid of quitting, people unable to quit, people who did not pull their weight, still complaining, still not quitting.

I have seen people not pulling their weight and being able to find a new/better job where they will still perform the same now just another company doesn't know what to do with them and just having them.

money matters a lot until you have "enough". after that, it only matters as much as you decide. it's a lot easier to have a healthy relationship with work when the possibility of losing your job is no big deal. as a young person, having 2-3 years runway for your current lifestyle is pretty good. once you have this, it's no big deal to take a lower paying job for a few years. as you get close to the point where you want to retire, you want to have enough saved to maintain your lifestyle indefinitely. if you're already there, great!. if not, you gotta make up the difference real quick. you need about ten times as much money to maintain a lifestyle indefinitely as you do to maintain it for two years.

that said, I think a lot of young people have a poor understanding of how much saving early on can impact your retirement.

Maybe you have worked at decent companies, but if someone is "meh" about their job, they will bounce before long.

Yep, that was my entire point.

At one place I've been, the engineers held this same view but would need to move somewhere far off or to the parent company across the country. Also, some might have jumped to more money only for the new employer to learn they aren't very good engineers. I was IT and often was setting up or resolving EE dev issues because they wrote code with a gui and didn't actually now how the hardware worked or connected to their PC reliably. Or it was all on the one offline XP laptop that dual boots to Win2000. They might have an $8k+ engineer dev station with secure VMs for Xp an 2k but still used the old laptop because it was familiar...

You don’t always need “good engineers”. Sometimes you just need yet another software as a service CRUD developer.

That's kind of true, but you should probably ignore it for purposes of salary negotiation. It's not really that different from a bigger company in most cases- they have a budget in mind, and you can probably negotiate up to the limit of the budget. This will sometimes be a hard limit btw - e.g. if it's a Dev shop, they often know how much they're getting paid for a particular project, and can calculate the maximum salary they can profitably pay.

Smaller companies are often more flexible on other terms though, which is worth knowing. Often they can give you eg work from home options, different configuration of vacation days, etc. This if useful to think any for negotiation purposes.

> Your salary comes (effectively) out of their own pocket, and recruiting you is quite possibly a significant and risky investment for the entire company.

So what? It's just like any other expenditure for the company. And it doesn't change the reality the owner is thinking about -- value of hiring you must be higher than cost of wages paid on a regular basis for it to work out. And probably high enough that they'd even bother trying to recruit anyways.

In a way, it's sometimes even easier to have negotiations in the owner because it's so much easier to up-sell them on added value you can provide because you are talking to the person who'd be willing to buy even more of just that. There's no one-size-fits-all HR determined range to deal with.

The corollary of working for smaller companies is once you are working there for a while and are contributing significant value... it is easier to get significant raises because your owner is thinking about "life without you" if they don't pay you well. IF you are really valuable to the company, you have a great chance of getting paid well, in proportion to your value.

I find it is easier to prove your value in these cases and bounds are much wider.

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