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Comment by atomicnumber3 | Hacker News Reader

"the best negotiating advice is to have multiple offers"

This is borderline "get in the job cannon and blast off to jobland" territory.

Also - it can be terrifically difficult to line up multiple simultaneous offers because companies would rather explode their offer than generally let people get a better leverage. I know multiple companies who do this on purpose for this explicit reason. Is it inefficient from a market perspective? Of course. But since when has that ever stopped the owner class from oppressing the workers?

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> it can be terrifically difficult to line up multiple simultaneous offers

I've found that too. It seems like even if you apply at the same time, companies move at a variety of speeds. But there are things you can do to help align the offers temporally, at least a bit.

- At the start of each process, ask how long the process will take (how many interviews, number of weeks from start to offer). They'll generally tell you. If you do this for every company, you have an idea of which companies are fast and which companies are slow.

- The fast companies can be slowed down, a least a bit. It's Thursday and they want to schedule an interview for Monday? Say "Unfortunately I'm not available Monday to Wednesday next week, would Thursday next week work for you?" Answer emails the next day, or if they sent you one in the morning answer in the evening "after work".

- The slow companies can be sped up a bit. Firstly, ask for interviews sooner, they might go for it, who knows. If you get an offer from one company, send an email to all the other companies that you have an offer but you'd like to get their offer as well, that might speed them up.

None of this is guaranteed to work but it's worth trying.

Never accept an exploding offer. If they won’t give you more time, then let them see you’re prepared to let it lapse. It’s a ploy to create urgency when there is none, as is never in your interest as a candidate. I’d be very surprised if a single offer actually expired, it’s expensive to lose qualified candidates for the hiring company.

Urgency isn’t a always just a ploy.

My background is consulting and earlier-stage startups in the UK which may mean we’re in a different environment to what you’re used to, but the teams are often lean, and sometimes strained by the time we’re out to hire.

Sourcing and screening often starts a few weeks/months before but generally we move quite quickly through technical to offer stages - I think its healthy and fair for both parties to keep expect these final stages around 1-2 weeks.

Interviewing takes quite a bit of time and energy from the tech team and can impact team health, delivery, and ultimately bottom line - where our salaries come from.

If we’re in the fortunate position to have a final candidate (or two - three), theres going to be an exploding offer because we need to get back to work, and we need to let other candidates know to move on.

As a candidate its very fair to line up your interviews with a few companies and tell them you would like to make a decision by a particular date. If they cant accommodate you or extend an offer with a deadline prior to that, its on them. In my last job hunt no company turned down this request and two adjusted their processes to accommodate it.

It's interesting you mention UK and urgency in the same sentence. In my experience, nothing in the UK happens quickly when it comes to permanent employees (I guess contractors are different). Everyone has 2-3 months of notice period, plus people usually take a month off between switching jobs to relax. So there's usually 3-4 months between when everyone agrees and when they eventually join.

The only time things happen quickly is when someone is jobless, or if they already handed in their notice, they were going to join company X and you manage to snipe them in that 3-4 month period before they've started at company X.

I do agree with your reply but I was saying the only thing quick about the process has been the technical interviewing and offer.

The notice periods do get factored in both planning and _sometimes_ the deciding on a candidate.

> In my last job hunt no company turned down this request and two adjusted their processes to accommodate it.

It’s not that companies don’t want to hire fast (or don’t need to), I’ve worked at startups (in UK too), big tech and worked on hiring.

But if the rush is in their side and they want you, that’s different to an exploding offer in many ways, in that they aren’t trying to pressure you to move fast to improve their negotiating position and worsen yours, they’re the ones on the weaker position, and to get you to move fast for them, that gives you leverage.

You decide if you care about the offer and the company/role etc. and then ask them for a deal that’ll make you cancel your other interviews now in that case.

This is more "job cannon" stuff.

This works well if you don't urgently need income and have significant additional job prospects. The power imbalance between employers and employees means that "just avoid the businesses that exploit you" is not an option for a large number of workers.

The only way to actually defeat exploding offers is collective action.

Perhaps you’re correct, but I’m not saying don’t take an offer from the company. More an advice to accept a little risk that the exploding offer won’t explode and carry on with your job hunt. My advice above was to keep as many cards in play as you can, and recognise where you have leverage (which includes sunk cost of qualifying you as a candidate to hiring company), and try to maximise that leverage as it normally gives you a better return than any in-role pay rise and promotion prospects once you start new role.

Recognising you don’t have much leverage and have no option but to be exploited is a sad reality to have to accept, but of course if your job prospects are not great then that can be the case, and then maybe at least you can wait until the last day before you accept an exploding offer, where you have more knowledge of how the rest of your interview pipeline is progressing.

If a company gives you an exploding offer, it's a strong signal that the culture of that company isn't good, or that they can't afford to hire quality candidates (or both). In companies like this you can assume you'll probably also get poor raises.

In practice, if you get an exploding offer, unless you already think it's an extraordinary offer and love the potential opportunity, you can tell them that you won't be able to make a decision within that time. If the company is worth working for, they'll remove it. If they won't remove it, it's probably best not to take the offer.

This is highly dependent on the role. I have been tasked with growing teams where my mandate is to hire X number of engineers at various levels. If I found X hires and then hire X + 1 shows up and was a great fit, the company would make an exception. No exploding offers necessary.

On the other hand, sometimes you are hiring to fill a specific position rather than to generally grow a team. You have two candidates you like and you can't afford to let candidate 1 sit on the offer for three weeks. People treat it like it's nefarious on the part of the company to ever have an exploding offer, but sometimes it's just not practical.

It may not be nefarious, but it's antagonistic to the candidate getting the exploding offer. If you're hiring for a particular role and the candidate is dragging their feet on the offer, you've likely not made a strong enough offer. Making the offer exploding limits their ability to negotiate.

If you've made an offer to one candidate, and you're holding your response on another, you're already doing a disservice to that other candidate. They should know that you've extended an offer to someone else, and that you'll contact them if that offer falls through.

>>If a company gives you an exploding offer, it's a strong signal that the culture of that company isn't good, or that they can't afford to hire quality candidates (or both).

I work in games - what happens for us quite often is that we'll interview ~10 candidates and 2-3 are actually good enough to hire. So the process is to give the top candidate the offer with a few days to accept it, if they don't then we move on to the next candidate because they also want to know whether we are proceeding or not - otherwise it's just rude(to the candidate). How does that indicate poor culture?

> I work in games

That's your indication. There are a lot of people who want to work in games, but that doesn't mean it's a good culture.

I don't understand. OP suggested that giving people "explosive" offers is an indication of poor culture - I point out that the necessity to make a decision quickly is dictated by respect to candidates since we don't want to make people wait any longer than necessary. So again, how is this an indication of poor culture?

If you really believe you have a good culture, and attract the best talent, you should be able to offer your best candidate the position and wait for them to decline or accept. Other candidates may move on if you tell them you've extended an offer and are waiting to hear back, but forcing someones hand is a poor culture indicator, and being in a rush to hire in the majority of the cases indicates lack of planning.

> I work in games

Are there any gaming companies not known to have a poor culture? That industry is well known to be exploitative, with low pay.

>>Are there any gaming companies not known to have a poor culture?

Of course. Where I work the culture is very good, with strong emphasis against overtime, no crunch and very good benefits, and it's one of the biggest publishers in the industry.

It's generally easy to line up the interviews, at least at big companies you can pretty much pick your interview date.

Then if you've done say 5 interviews (1 per day for a week), you can just wait for the first offer and use that as leverage to get the others to hurry up. Since they already have all the data they need.

I haven’t pursued it seriously so I don’t know how much you can hurry things along, but most of the interview processes I’ve seen are weeks long. Google even warns you up front that it’ll probably take on the order of months. So it’s kind of tricky to get them to all line up like that.

It's still valuable info. Like let's say you actually made it thorough all the rounds at Google per your example, and are 'stuck' in hiring committee. That's a huge signal to you that you are in striking distance of the level you interviewed for, even if you don't ultimately make it this time.

That means you can for example use levels.fyi number for that level at Google as 'something that applies to me'

It all depends. I have done first phone call -> offer in 2 weeks at FAANG.

Or at the tier below FAANG- I did one afternoon of interviews at Adobe and got an offer a few days later.

I agree it can be hard to line up multiple at the same time, but unless you're in a desperate situation you can get much the same effect by being prepared to walk. I've talked offers up by being entirely opened that I walked away from an offer of $X, because it was a clear signal to the place I was interviewing at that I was confident I could land more, and I was confident I could because that first offer helped confirm I understood the right salary levels.

It's not quite as powerful as having a simultaneous offer, but the point is not whether or not you go to a specific other company, but whether or not they believe a) you'll actually turn them down, b) you're worth roughly what you demand. Another offer, even if turned down will help in both respects.

IMHO, ability to do this varies based on role, market, experience, etc. In my past 3 job searches, I went the multiple opportunity route. I let each company know that I was in-process elsewhere, what my rough timeline was, and that if things got to offer stage that I wouldn't share that info between companies (i.e. bring your best offer). I stated these things not as demands, but in a friendly, agreeable way. e.g. "I'm very interested, but I also have anothet good opportunity as well and want to be able to choose what fits me best."

I have asked up front if people attach timelines to their offers or use exploding offers and just decline to interview. Those offers are, in my experience, always less competitive.

It's hard to see how making $400k offers is exploiting the worker, rather than the worker exploiting the company.

The first time I applied to work for a high frequency trading group in a hedge fund, my boss asked me what my desired comp would be? I replied 400k, to which he immediately responded saying that's extremely reasonable... So clearly, I f*** myself over in the negotiation.

No company in our capitalist society pays any worker at any level. What the worker thinks they are worth- they pay the worker the absolute bare minimum that they think they can get away with. Doesn't matter if it's an entry level job, or ( like mine) a high end algo trading outfit etc

That is the same principle in any market, not just the labor market. It is based on the laws of supply and demand, not what the product's "worth" is (how would you even know that at a large scale without price discovery?).

Depending on skill and experience that salary request's an incredible feat of self-sabotage.

When you sell your house, do you sell it for as much as you can? When you buy a house, do you make the minimum offer you hope the seller will accept?

Exploitation is not about whether each party is making a lot of money, it is whether one party makes a disproportionate amount of money over the value the other party produces.

I think the word "exploitation" colloquially has the connotation of exploiting the poor as they cannot afford to leave the exploiting conditions.

Exploitation is labor is never usually headlined in the context of $400k/year salary. Technically, you're right. But we can take this to the limit, instead of $400k, let's say $4M/year for a job that's worth $5M/year? Are they "exploited". Yes, but not by the common use of the term.

Perhaps the reason for GP's take was that it robs away the colloquial definition of exploiration in an entirely different context where it's the least meaningful, i.e. exploitation of Bangladeshi child laborers vs. a programmer earning $400k year salary.

No, they are talking about the Marxist theory of exploitation, where excess profits belong to the workers. It is however not a very useful model in the real world when market principles like supply and demand have much more predictive power.

They're talking about exploitation in the Marxist sense, that excess profit belongs to the workers. Of course, I don't believe in the Labor Theory of Value, as supply and demand is a much more useful model of the world, but that's what they mean by exploitation, not what it's seen as colloquially.

Depends, most companies paying that kind of money expects the employee to bring in enough money for additional hires.

Under capitalism, man exploits man. Under socialism, it's the other way around!

I make around 600k. My employer has enough cash in the bank to give every single full time employee a bonus of more than half a million dollars. Net income per quarter is something like 100k per full time employee.

Yes, I am incredibly fortunate. Yes, I make a very very large amount of money compared to a typical american worker. Still, I capture only a fraction of the value I generate for my employer.

// I make around 600k ... Still, I capture only a fraction of the value I generate for my employer.

There seems to be a two way street here. Presumably if you could make 600K or more by yourself, you'd be doing that rather than working for your employer.

Your employer, likely way before you got there, created an environment where you could come in and earn this much. If they and companies of that profile didn't exist, would you have a place to earn even 200K? So maybe you actually are splitting the value you are generating half-way.

The other people working for my employer created that environment. The shareholders who own pieces of it didn't do that.

Would you agree at least that the founders and initial employees took on the most risk and did the bulk of the heavy lift to get the company to that place? EG does the proverbial guy who ran the company out of his garage for 5 years funding it on his credit card deserve outsized reward for the risk and work he put in?

Yes, but the way shares work is that someone paid either the original founders or the company itself for a share, then someone paid that person, and so on. The current shareholders are certainly profiting, but they exist only because the company needed them to exist in order to create the company as it is now.

The shareholders literally provided the cash to get the company started and sustained until it was profitable.

> I capture only a fraction of the value I generate for my employer.

I think this is a misunderstanding of how companies perceive value. You could be making your company a billion dollars a year, but if any schmuck off the street could do the same you're not actually providing much value at all. Your value is the difference between what you provide and what a similar replacement worker would provide.

Clearly they can't find a "random schmuck" willing to do it for less than 600k.

Right, Mr. Meat's value to their company is at least $600k otherwise they wouldn't be making that much. We have no idea how high above that it is though even though the company is extremely profitable because they might be easy to replace for 700k

You and those employees can quit and start their own business and you can capture 100% of that value for yourselves.

If you don't want to do that, doesn't that admit the company is providing that value, not you?

For example, I know a top salesman at Microsoft. He'd call up a customer, drop in, get ushered right in to see the CEO, and close another sale.

One day, he decided to capture that value he was provided by working for a startup. He did not close a single sale the entire year. He could not get an appointment with any CEO. He finally quit and got his old job back at Microsoft.

Microsoft has produced a lot of people who made gobs of cash at Microsoft, and left to form startups for the easy money. Only to get a very rude shock about how hard it is to make money with a company.

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