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Comment by AlwaysRock | Hacker News Reader

I was playing a board game with my 7-year-old niece recently. She negotiates the same way most companies do. She holds the line firmly until her bluff is called, and then backtracks quickly once it's too late.

The biggest différance is my 7-year-old will learn, while companies will continue to make the same mistakes.

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I highly support playing negotiation and/or lying+consequence board games with children. The skills are lifelong, and the stakes are much lower than when they have to exercise them in the real world.

Coup [0] and Love Letter [1] are both easy entry and quick play examples.

Also, I got in the habit of making my kids negotiate their own payment for household tasks. With agreement based on the skill with which they do so. ;)

[0] https://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/131357/coup

[1] https://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/129622/love-letter

Cockroach Poker is another good bluffing game that 4-year-olds can play.

That's a good one to play with in-laws who don't speak your language as well.

But as much as I enjoy it, I'm not entirely convinced there's any more to it than straight up luck.

What part of Love Letter has negotiation or lying(+consequences)? In my house it's nearly strictly deduction.

Maybe it's because I played Coup first, but the way we play there's continuous talking about what's in ones hand. Which gives it more of a poker flavor.

Or maybe companies negotiate this way because it's an effective strategy. If, say, 90% of employees never call their bluff, they come out ahead, even if they occasionally lose someone. And backtracking later will convince some percentage of people to stay, while having zero cost if unsuccessful.

The optimal strategy for you and the company may differ because you can only work one place at a time, but the company employs many people at the same time.

Usually the 90% of the employees that don't call their bluff are the bottom 90%. If a company affords to lose the top 10% on a regular basis, it's a bad business model.

Meh ... It's the top 10% at interviewing and moving, not necessarily the most productive 10%, right? Although they may be over-represented.

The best people are the first people to leave. I've seen it time and again. Once you lose your best engineers, the prospects of the successful delivery of a quality product are greatly reduced.

Negotiation was one of my favorite classes I took in college, I think it should be taught as soon as possible. I must say applying it in real life under stressful conditions has been much harder than in the classroom! At the end of the day I think a lot of companies don't operate from a standpoint of both parties coming out fairly, which just leads to mistrust in the end.

It was one of my favorite classes too!

I remember that BATNA (best alternative to a negotiated agreement) was the most important factor (but the least interesting, it can't be improved as a skill). If the figures of employees switching jobs are as high as they say, that means either lots of impossible negotiations (misfits) or lots of negotiation failures.

Same, good ole BATNA! No better BATNA than being able to walk away from the table.

TIL there are colleges who actually have a class dedicated to the topic of negotiation.

Is this "new", say within the past 15-20 years?

I took it back in 2012 at a fairly large but run of the mill public college, but it seemed like a fairly mature class. I would imagine that given it’s prevalence in intelligence communities, it has probably been offered for a while, but maybe not everywhere.

It's more likely that those saying 'it's too late' don't have experience negotiating and have misjudged what 'too late' means.

Even in a 'kids board game' with short negotiations, there's literally no such thing as 'too late' - unless the game has already moved on to something else, but before next moves have really been taken, it's not too late.

It's like they all take the same crappy HR seminar from 20 years ago and haven't updated their skills since. Times have changed.

No, times have not changed. People are still human, employee problems are the same as ever.

HR was never good at dealing with this, that’s not a new thing.

People haven't changed, times have; the market currently favors employees in a way that pushes poor HR policies from "annoying" to "people call your bluff".

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