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Comment by sokoloff | Hacker News Reader

If you don't have a strong BATNA (Best Alternative to a Negotiated Agreement), you're not going to get very far with just asking.

"I received your offer for $X. I really enjoyed the interviews, meeting the team, and am intrigued by the problems I'd get to solve with them. Unfortunately, I have a competing offer for $1.25X from another company and I need to make sure my family is provided for. If you would match it, I'm excited to join, but if your offer is firm at $X, I'm afraid I won't be taking it."

If they really just need someone to hold down a chair, they'll probably not budge. If they really want specifically you, they're more likely to bend if they believe that's their only move.

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> Unfortunately, I have a competing offer for $1.25X

If you can get multiple companies to time their interviews and offer stages perfectly and then get one of them to match the other, that’s quite lucky.

However, it’s not like it’s an easy solution. It’s transforming one problem into a much harder one: Now you have to get a second offer that’s even higher and get it at exactly the right time to use it as leverage. How do you negotiate that second offer to 1.25 * $X so you can leverage it to get the first to the same level? That’s left as an exercise for the reader.

“Just get a second offer for 25% more” is more of the wishful thinking negotiating strategy. In most cases it’s more realistic to set a target number and stick to it, being willing to walk away and continue the job search until it’s met.

Most companies can expedite the interview process if you let them know you have another offer. If you can get interest from 2 or more companies than it's not too difficult to get offers from each within the decision window of the first offer.

I've been upfront and honest with recruiters and they accommodate. Having 2 offers has 2 clear benefits:

1) It will definitely help you in negotiations

2) Gives you multiple data points on what the market is willing to pay you

Well, I always find these "negotiate your salary" articles very strange because in 20+ years I never did it like that. There is only one rule I follow:

- Get more money than what I'm currently making and by that, I mean at least 20% more

I've no problem telling them my current salary since it's always been in the upper quartile for my area. To get me to switch, the increase has to be significant or else it's not worth the risk of plunging into the unknown and the pain of learning yet another completely different spaghetti mess where generations of architecture astronauts added layers upon layers until the complexity exceeded their mental capacity to maintain it and left.

You forgot to add the cognitive load of needing to learning their business domain. Programming or working on code is very much like replaceable lego blocks, which are made up of your typical functional, procedural, queues, dictionaries, link list, and your data model. The mental load really comes from needing to learn a often narrow niche with all their idiosyncratic edge case conditions and data models.

I've worked on Titling Systems, Game Development (C/C++), Integration Systems, and Backend database systems. All those niche data models/systems live rent free in my head. It is all absolutely worthless to my current employer or people around me because they're focused on solving their unique problems which at the end of the day just become another piece of worthless business procedure in my head. It is worthless because of the fact that business and people only care about solving their problem, once its solved they just move onto the next.

Counterpoint, reorgs do happen. Even if someone is doing a fine job, they can find themselves in a completely new team working in a completely new domain just because bodies needed to be buried.

> that’s quite lucky

The second offer does not have to be real. If it's real, what's the point of negotiating with the first company?

If you are not willing to work for $X, simply saying that you want $1.25X won't work, but mentioning a hypothetical competitive offer might. If it doesn't, well, you weren't going to take the job (for $X) in either case anyway.

If the offer isn't real, be prepared for the company to tell you to take the other offer if you want the money (or potentially just pull the offer on you).

However, if you have two offers for $X, if you tell at one company that the other offer is for $1.25X, and they tell you to take the other offer... you still have that option, and you haven't lost anything (you have to reject one of those offers anyway).

That's the gamble, correct.

If you're slaving in interviews and only have one offer, I can see why the offer is compelling. In this current market, I totally get it. But just a couple short years ago, the parent poster's approach was probably sound.

Also people don't always interview when they are jobless. If you are already employed with a salary of $0.9X, gambling between $X and $1.25X makes perfect sense.

Note the "If you are not willing to work for $X" condition.

> The second offer does not have to be real

Lol people explicitly directly ask to see offer letters. Bluffing like this is a great way to actually have the negotiations end prematurely because you're found to be operating in bad faith.

> explicitly directly ask to see offer letters.

and you tell them that the company do not want their offer to be revealed due to confidentiality reasons. The first employer would need to take your word for it. And if they deem you lying, they can always stand hard on their offer, and risk losing the candidate.

Real or not, I’m not sharing an offer letter with another prospective employer.

I have shared them with my current employer to let them know the market and what I was considering.

Oh well? If the employer is negotiation hard enough that one feels the need to make up another offer, a deal wasn't going to be reached anyway.

Bluffing is a legitimate strategy at times.

You can also just lie and say you have a competing offer.

Last time I got a job offer the hiring process took ~4 months with seven steps, and I had to answer within 3 days.

I do not get how is anyone realistically supposed to coincide the multiple offers they get. Unless you are already in an extremely privileged position, I cannot even imagine how you can do that.

> I had to answer within 3 days.

If you re-read the transcript, I hope you will come to the understanding that this is a lie. The company is trying to leverage your desperation for a job.

> Last time I got a job offer the hiring process took ~4 months with seven steps

Just like increased compensation, gettting the timeline you want requires leverage. When interviewing I always communicate that I expect an offer from a peer competitor within the next few weeks - this expedies my interview process. I always end up with a minimum of 4 competing offers to use as a BATNA.

Something the article winks at here is that negotation has only a small expected payoff if you've navigated your career such that you're a "small fish in a big pond" so to speak.

Someone who can barely pass a FAANG interview likely can't negotiate much with Google but probably could negotiate at lower tier company like SAP.

*edit* I do this strategy 12-18 months whether or not I leave a company, it has never failed me

> If you re-read the transcript, I hope you will come to the understanding that this is a lie. The company is trying to leverage your desperation for a job.

From the hiring side: It’s not a lie at all, it’s just that we have other serious candidates we also like. If you’re not serious about taking the job then we need to move on to the next candidate quickly.

Generally you can come back and ask if they’ll re-issue the offer letter past the expiration. Most companies will happily do it if the position hasn’t already been filled, but you may have to wait for their second-choice offer letter to also expire (see why the expiration dates exist? It’s like locking a database row with a timeout added).

In my experience, the candidates who want to extend out the negotiation process for weeks or even months are rarely serious about joining the company. Statistically they’re a waste of time to continue holding up other hires.

> From the hiring side: It’s not a lie at all, it’s just that we have other serious candidates we also like. If you’re not serious about taking the job then we need to move on to the next candidate quickly.

This would be a reasonable argument if the timeline was at least 7-10 days. Three days is a red flag: they’re clearly pressing you to make a bad decision.

Serious candidates have to talk things over with their family, and often have busy spouses. They often have to get legal advice, which can end up in a few days of phone tag.

So you'll take months of time from a candidate but won't give them at least a week?

A take it or leave it offer with a three day window to accept is, to be blunt, a terrible offer. That combined with the number of interviews to get that far show just how little the company respects the candidates.

You're selecting for a specific type of person, and you're going to get a culture that reflects it.

It's just strategy. They very likely do it to prevent candidates holding multiple offers

In my experience on the hiring side, expiration dates exist mostly to prevent candidates stacking offers.

This was the standard advice 2-3 years ago when the market was hot, I can’t imagine this being feasible for most people right now.

This has never stopped working for me - I interview every year or so as a matter of course.

My experience helping others is that in a tightening labor market they are experiencing "small fish in a big pond" syndrome mentioned above.

Compensation for the bottom 50-75% of talent has dropped significantly since 2021* - if you are in that band and chasing the same comp you're dealing with the "small fish in a big pond" situation. If these people drop their compensation expectations back to 2017 levels many of them will find jobs much more plentiful - though the very bottom of the pool is being driven out of the industry entirely.

* this estimate pulled from conversations with engineering leaders and recruiters at large SV tech companies

Post 2022, there are hundreds of people applying for every job and they can easily find someone good enough to fill the position.

Have you tried your strategy in the last 2-3 years?

I have - it works.

I can also assure you that despite the 100s of applicants hiring remains hard even with competitive market compensation. Filling a generalist senior eng headcount with $500k liquid total compensation can take months. Many engineers have wildly inflated ideas about their own abilities.

Many shops have wildly inflated ideas about their ability to judge applicants.

If you’re applying to Google, apply to them way ahead of the others…

you tell everyone up front what your timeline is, months ahead of time. that way, all of them coincide and you get maximum leverage.

last job search i got 4 offers to line up that i could use in negotiations.

> you tell everyone up front what your timeline is, months ahead of time

Honestly curious how this conversation goes, like "I'm busy with xyz for the next four weeks, then I can do round two of interviews..." or how does that go?

i was simply transparent that i wanted to make an informed decision and was talking with multiple other companies. i let the recruiter themselves schedule when they'd like me to do interviews for the timing of the offer to work out -- after all that's i think one of the recruiters main assets / abilities, knowing the inside of how the company works and how long a certain stage usually takes.

one company offered to give me an offer early but warned that it would expire before my timeline. i told them they can give me an offer whenever but I will not be making a decision before the timeline i communicated. they ended up giving it to me early anyway and then extending the expiration when I said I hadn't made a decision by their original date.

It happened for me once by pure chance.

I was looking to leave a secondment I was on, and received an offer, right as the leader of the client I was seconded to said we’d like to take you on permanently and we’ve cleared it with your company, here’s the offer. I used that as leverage and left.

Otherwise, I agree, it’s a snowball chance in hell to coincide them.

Do the alternative offers need to actually be real? They just need to be realistic, no?

They just have to be real enough for you to convince them you’re not taking their offer. That risks you having to not take their offer, of course.

In areas with dominant employers who are doing layoff s, I have been told that I have 12 hours to make a decision.

Basically correct. I guess my point is Patrick could have saved a lot of typing and simply wrote "Have one or more competing offers."

In my experience, the proclivity of a company to negotiate entirely depends on how quickly they need to hire someone. If the requirement is to scale up immediately, once at the offer stage you're the fastest person on the planet who can start working in the role, and this gives you significant leverage.

If the company can afford to onboard someone any time in the next few months, they don't need to negotiate. They just need to keep the pipeline flowing until some candidate accepts their lowball number.

In my experience, some employers don't even care if you have a competing offer. They will change nothing. I've written about this before [1]. To me, the best thing about having multiple offers is that you can at least make a choice.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43598192

I worked at a company where HR would request a copy of the competing offer. Very frequently, the candidate would come up with reasons why they couldn’t show the offer letter to HR. Often it was some story about having a verbal offer or something equally flimsy.

HR eventually just assumed the mythical competing offer was a bluff, and to be honest from everything I saw that was most likely correct for the average applicant.

As someone who always interviewed and negotiated honestly, it was kind of shocking to learn how often candidates lied about everything from where they worked in the past to having competing offers.

Is that legal ? I guess it is. Can't you just say "no" and not come up with an excuse ?

That was my first thought. I'm sorry, no. That offer is between them and me, and I'm not comfortable sharing information that isn't owned solely by me. All you need to take out of it is that that offer is my current lower bar and, if you're not willing interesting in negotiating based on it, then we're probably done here.

Sure you can. But then they'll just assume it's a bluff.

> I worked at a company where HR would request a copy of the competing offer

"I'm sorry, but the offer is from a stealth startup who does not wish their name to be known."

> it was kind of shocking to learn how often candidates lied about everything from where they worked in the past to having competing offers.

That's the real gut punch. Honest hard-working people are getting shafted while liars and thieves get ahead.

honestly I have no problem with that if they are firm about not negotiating - I actually respect that stance greatly and see it as a green flag. it just bothers me if I am shortchanging myself working somewhere that other people have successfully negotiated higher salaries for and I have not.

This just means you'll be working with people that had no other option. Massive red flag.

or that i'll be working with people who also appreciate a culture where your salary is not based on your negotiation skills, and you don't have to worry about making less than someone doing the same job as you simply because you were less convincing or had less leverage when you joined.

Why would you think that just because nobody negotiated, somehow everyone doing the same job will be making the same amount? In reality, they will all be making the lowest amount the hiring manager was comfortable offering at the time.

You are confusing lack of negotiation with transparent compensation, which is extremely rare in the US (outside the government).

> Why would you think that just because nobody negotiated, somehow everyone doing the same job will be making the same amount?

well, at least from personal experience, I'm talking about the kind of company that explicitly says "we want to make you an offer as a software engineer, at such and such level, and this is the fixed salary for that job+level". they could have been lying of course, but once you start going down that rabbit hole you might as well not take the offer.

Based on my 35 years of hiring and being hired in the tech industry, that kind of company is also extremely rare.

for sure, which is why I appreciate them all the more when I encounter them! I wish more of the industry operated that way.

Seems like a fight against reality

There are plenty of places where this is the standard.

Anecdote time: I joined a not-quite-FAANG in an acquihire. Some of my teammates negotiated hard on the way in; I did not. After I got into management, I learned that they're perfectly willing to give you an extra $10k on your initial salary offer, but then you just get a lower raise after the first year, so everyone ends up in the same spot almost immediately anyway. The $10k was a rounding error in the total comp, and anyway they preferred to have steady employees who could be happy in a good situation for many years, rather than mercenaries who were more likely to chase vanity metrics and leave half-finished projects when they left in 18 months. Equity comp was generous and non-negotiable.

I don’t get the impression that his brand is based on conciseness.

Do you consider yourself an _excellent_ negotiator already? It really feels like you’re trying to suggest that negotiation can’t ever work for anyone except a handful of celebrities, even for those who are excellent negotiators.

Someone’s already asking about your BATNA, and I’m wondering if you negotiate all benefits (amount of time off for example) since your story focused on salary alone.

Based on my results, I am clearly not a skilled negotiator! I have found most companies to be inflexible around everything, from salary to equity to vacation time to health benefits to 401(k). The package is what it is, and if you don't want to take it, you can leave it.

Interesting. I think there’s definitely a “meta-game” that negotiation requires you to prepare in advance if you want success. For example, knowing if the job opening is in a “cost center” or “revenue center” for the company, or how the job is funded. Clearly a well-funded department can offer more salary, and a revenue increasing job can pay more than a cost-savings one, since revenue has no upper bound and savings is bounded. Companies that have high revenue per developer can pay more in general. Companies that have to compete globally for talent have pay more than those that only have to compete in a local market. I can go on but you get the idea.

As a hiring manager and someone who’s an employee rep on the 401k committee, I can’t even imagine how I could customize the 401k for an individual candidate. I think the same is true for health insurance.

If someone came with that request, I’d probably be amused but I doubt I could change anything.

Something is going on here. If the company and team is excited about hiring you, there will typically be some flexibility unless you are already coming in at the top of their range, or above. In which case they should be telling you so, and even somewhat apologetic about it.

If that's not the case, they are not excited about you (in which case, why are they hiring you?), or you have not made your case firmly and clearly.

We're you willing to walk away if you didn't get what you wanted? Or were you just hoping they would capitulate? IMHO, The key to negotiating is knowing where your red line is, and being willing to walk away if you don't reach it.

I can imagine many people's view of negotiation is asking "Can I have X" and when they get rejected just moving on with "Ok that's fine".

Sure, because you personally aren’t in a place you can just leave it.

If you don’t have a good competing alternative offer/option, you’re not negotiating, you’re begging.

And chances are, they have alternatives.

Yes, BATNA is a fanciful and useless buzzword.

I saw it when it was first mentioned here, many years ago, and thought the same then.

Though yours is good, it can be even simpler:

Be ready to say no.

I mean, they don't know AND you only need one "yes"...

pretty much, my first bigco job I made the mistake of only applying to the one place (had a job already, was looking for a change but without any urgency), and they would not budge on salary, just said the offer was already very generous and at the top of their salary band for my level. the next time I was job hunting I had just been laid off and so was frantically applying to a lot of places, ended up getting several offers and that definitely made a difference (though interestingly enough no one was willing to negotiate on base pay, but they would on things like stock and signing bonuses)

> If they really just need someone to hold down a chair

I would not jump to this conclusion. The company might have a very deliberate compensation strategy. Giving $Y instead of $X to a newcomer at a given level without aligning other people at the same level to $Y raises serious concerns.

As a company, you don't have to let yourself bullied by other companies.

Agreed. If they just need a chair spring compressed, they won’t budge. That doesn’t mean if they don’t budge that they just need the spring compressed.

P implies Q doesn’t necessitate Q implies P.

"rank-and-file employee number 12887"s don't tend to find it easy to get multiple job offers at once to use as leverage ! Even more so in today's climate

I don't think you even have to say that you have competing offer $1.25X.

Simply stating you have a competing offer also for $X is completely believable and will probably get you a improved offer from one of the two interviewing teams.

Even if it doesn't and you accept at $X then at the very least your new employer now knows that you liked them best. Which is not a bad way to start a new job.

Either way I would never lie and say I had an offer when I didn't. Lying in general is a bad faith strategy and will often come back on you at some point.

Re: BATNA. It’s extremely difficult to get two offers to coincide at the same time.

So in reality, your BATNA is your current job (if you’re employed).

My experience is the same as OP.

    > If they really just need someone to hold down a chair, they'll probably not budge. If they really want specifically you, they're more likely to bend if they believe that's their only move.

Except for super stars (literally, nerd famous people), 100% of companies and job offers will just let you walk away. One thing that I tell myself as a normie employee: There are many more people qualified to do my job than there are jobs.

As someone who has been involved in hiring, that's definitely not the case. The people I've seen who got hired are those who got through the interview process without any major red flags. There usually isn't any other potential candidate.

If there was, we'd try to hire both of them, because hiring is a long process, and if you find someone who seems good enough you want them on your team. You can always fire them during the trial phase if they turn out to be a bad fit.

> There are many more people qualified to do my job than there are jobs.

Maybe. But are they in your city or prepared to move there? Are they available now? Have they applied for this job? Would they even want this job?

All of these, and many more, are considerations that you need to take into account before writing yourself off so easily.

I think if you had a BATNA then you are much more likely to succeed at negotiation even without one.

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