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Good article, articulated a lot of my own feelings on the subject.

The only part I can never quite get my head around is having multiple offers at once. It takes me months if not years to find a company I actually want to work for. The chance of finding many hiring for a suitable position—let alone receiving offers almost simultaneously—seems miniscule.

I feel like these types of articles assume everyone has a sort of drag net approach to finding employment, but my own approach is more like fly fishing (pardon the analogy). I feel like I've been successful in the past because I can explain exactly why I've applied for the specific position. I suppose this must be atypical, perhaps I'm a terrible negotiator.

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The author says so, but doesn't realize it:

The appropriate advice for an Asian male in Silicon Valley may not be appropriate for a black woman in Birmingham, Alabama.

An Asian male dancing around the FAANGs in SV has a much better chance of getting multiple, simultaneous, offers quickly.

The reality out there is that 99.99% of companies completely suck at recruiting when it comes to first contact, resume/application processing, turnaround time, and interview scheduling. And LinkedIn has made them lazier and suckier.

I love it when recruiters write whiny blog posts that make it to HN complaining about being ghosted by candidates when in reality their companies are treating people way shittier. But we're getting off topic here.

IMO this whole "multiple offers give you leverage!" bullshit knocks a good majority of these job negotiation blogposts off the table. It's you and one company, negotiating a salary 1:1. The BATNA is zero.

The author also makes a dangerous assumption that getting an offer means the company has closed the door on every other candidate. All it means is that you were on top, but that could change. I have no problem extending an offer to #2 and moving on. It's a few clicks of a mouse to do that and get back to my donut.

For most people in tech, the BATNA vs this one company is way higher than zero. It’s stay in your current role or take your own (maybe even unknown to you right now) second-choice company in a few weeks.

> IMO this whole "multiple offers give you leverage!" bullshit knocks a good majority of these job negotiation blogposts off the table.

Pitting multiple buyers against each other seems like the best way to negotiate to me, regardless of what you are selling.

If you were the last available programmer in Silicon Valley, maybe. But that doesn't seem likely.

I do not understand the claim. From anecdotal evidence, it's possible to apply to multiple companies and get multiple offers. Even getting an offer while you currently have a job is pitting at least 2 buyers against each other.

Yes, it's possible to apply to multiple companies. The tactic in the OP is to get multiple successful interviews AND offers with a short timeframe of each other. How likely is that in most places?

Let's talk about that last point.

Have you gotten an offer and gone back to your manager and said "give me $x or I'm leaving"?

Anecdotally, how did that turn out?

No, but the fact that you have the choice of staying with your current income stream means you can walk away from undesirable offers.

I have gone out and gotten an offer, shared that with my boss, and gotten a substantial raise from it, in that case not just me personally but many of our devs did as the written offer (from JPMorgan in my case) was evidence that we weren’t competitively positioned in the market. I didn’t approach it with your proposed language, of course, but the outcome if nothing changed was obvious to all sides.

I’ve also been the manager on the receiving end of that conversation. In general, we’re paying about what the position is worth to us, so we might make a small adjustment but in general the outcome is a handshake and some well wishes, and another datapoint to put into our “what is the true market for this set of facts and circumstances?”

Similarly, it is unlikely that the company is hiring for its last engineer position.

> The BATNA is zero.

It's not though, is it? If you're not currently employed but are employable, the alternative is waiting a few more weeks for the next offer. Whether you want to do that or can even afford to, the company doesn't know.

I'm wary of the given advice for a different reason: tech is a very unique job market. Anything written by someone in tech is always to be considered only from that perspective. This is because the market isn't just (very) favorable to job-seekers, it's downright weird. Here in Montreal, there must be about 10 people in a "city area" of 3 million with my specific skills and experience with certain software. There are thousands of software engineeers with more experience or who are just smarter, better at coding. But almost none of them have my experience (and very few of my skills overlap with any other given individual's). How do you even value a role that is, all in all, incomparable? Well, you negociate.

It would seem irresponsible to me to give the same advice to someone who's unspecialized or to anyone in most job markets (which supply-demand trends tend to favor employers). But that's still not "zero" BATNA : You can always afford to wait (at least until you can't).

And I assume the flip side of having a specialized skill/resume is that there are relative few places that are a good fit for you, especially if you're expensive.

Which to my point in another comment probably means you won't easily find another job immediately while a relatively high-skill mid-level Java developer can probably land several offers fairly quickly if they're in an urban area of any size.

If you are really trying to maximize, you could try to get offers from places you don’t want to work for anyway just to use in negotiations. Personally, I find interviewing tiring enough (or maybe I care too little about maximizing) that I don’t do this. After one interview I’m good to not go through another one for at least a few years.

I agree with you. Also the sentiment that "I can quit my job on Monday and have my choice of plum offers by Friday." To the degree these exist I assume it's some in-demand cookie cutter keyword skill backed up by the right resume.

Certainly the few times I've changed jobs, it's happened fairly quickly but it was very targeted and always came through someone I knew well (and almost certainly involved a degree of luck).

I feel like everything in this article can be automated at some point in the future. I can't wait till the day that an NLP algorithm takes piles and piles of negotiation dialogs and negotiates on your behalf.

This is the kind of stuff that I want Google Assistant to do. I don't need it to get me a silly haircut appointment.

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