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Comment by Duff | Hacker News Reader

Sounds like one of the upsides of working at a place where I work now, where there is a salary scale.

Places that play these kinds of games with salary really annoy me. For my first post-college job, as a DBA, I was offered $29,000/year (this was in 2000). I knew they had just lost key people and had a bad reputation for compensation, so I laughed and walked out of the room.

In the parking lot, we agreed to $65k + stock. Most of my colleagues didn't bother, and got stuck with lousy pay for a couple of years.

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Thats quite a nice improvement you got there. Care to elaborate on what happened (who said what, etc) between walking out and getting the offer?

The interviewer followed me, and asked in the stairwell what it would take to get me hired. I said that I had multiple opportunities in the Boston area north of $80k, but wanted to stay local. He countered with "I'll get you $35k, and review your compensation in 3 months". I kept walking.

In the parking lot, we reached an agreement. IMO, it was the first time someone had walked out on him, and he got flustered. I worked in a busy sales job when I was in college, so I was used to dealing with his style. Once they start following you, you've won the negotiation.

Basically, his strategy for any purchase was to dramatically low-ball and act very important. It worked enough that he was very proud of it -- he would extract huge concessions from unwary vendors.

I am not trying to offend you, and am only commenting because I believe stories like these hurt less experienced people who are trying to learn how to handle salary negotiations.

I personally do not believe this actually happened. Nobody will ever follow you out of an interview to beg you to take a job, or casually double a salary offer in a stairwell.

There is no "hard ball" negotiating like this where you walk out and somehow bring a company to its knees. It's just never that dramatic.

IF you receive a concrete job offer then you accept, decline, or counter. You should know the pay range by the time a company puts an actual offer on paper.

Sorry that you don't believe it.

The guy went from an offer that was low-ball to an offer that was basically market-rate at that time.

With a big company, there's no way this would have happened. But this was company that was somewhere between "startup" and "mid size" business. They hadn't really adopted normal corporate processes.

There was no paper offer. I reported to work on a saturday (to get oriented by my predecessor, who had left the company already). My paperwork was on my chair, and I turned it into the VP's secretary on Monday.

He did say that this was in "2000".

Exactly. Being prepared to walk away gives you huge leverage in any negotiation.

Nicely done, although it sounds like you agreed to work for gigantic jackasses. :)

It was the best and worst job that I ever had. The guy wasn't too bad of a boss -- he pretty much left us alone, and was pretty effective managing the company execs. I had an opportunity to fix a bunch of stuff that was screwed up (due to turnover, mostly). There was no dev environment, so failure was not an option. It was an amazing learning experience.

On the other hand, I was paged 8-9 times a week to fix stuff. This came down once we fixed some problems, but it wasn't very good for my social life. I took off after a year.

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