Ask HN: Is patio11's salary negotiation guide relevant in today's market?
The market has changed a lot since this classic blogpost[1] on salary negotiation was written. With no specific numbers to back it up, it feels like demand for generalists SWE has decreased, while supply has increased by a lot.
In this market where every company out there tries to minimise costs, is there still room for salary negotiation for generalists that interview with non-FAANG? Do you have any industry insights or anecdotes to share?
[1] https://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/01/23/salary-negotiation/
Ok yes this guide is fine, a lot of things are up for negotiation, and I think it’s a lot more widely known these days to negotiate for stuff.
But man, a lot of the people out there absolutely still do not grok negotiating. They know it’s something you’re supposed to do, but they will try and negotiate things that are not negotiable (like making it a hard ask for extra contributions per paycheck for healthcare to match their former employer, rather than just ask for more money to cover the difference) or they’ll make demands for things we already offer if they had just paid attention and read the benefits packet we emailed them, and it takes a bunch of back and forth to figure out what they’re asking for (nothing, in the end). Or they’ll ask for weird PTO accrual and cash out schemes that just leaves us asking “why didn’t you just ask for more cash and more PTO up front because now HR is pulling people into meetings to try and figure out this demand”.
People need more than knowing to negotiate, they need to know how to negotiate, and that means partially knowing what is negotiable. (We’ll change a lot actually in negotiations, but not everything)
> But man, a lot of the people out there absolutely still do not grok negotiating.
Unless you have some kind of very unique skill or you have other offers and the company really, really wants you, how exactly are you supposed to negotiate?
Every comp negotiation I've ever had with a company has gone kind of like this:
What magical incantations are you guys speaking that allow you to make any progress against these brick walls? I've never once, in my 25 year career history, ever gotten a company to offer more than their initial offer.Negotiation start and stop with BATNA - Best Alternative To Negotiated Agreement.
The employers BATNA is they go to the pool of 35 other candidates. Yours is you go back to your job.
If your job hunting first when your sick to death of your job, your BATNA isn’t very strong.
If this is your only offer, your BATNA isn’t very strong.
If you’re one paycheck away from being out of the street, your BATNA isn’t very strong.
See where I’m going with this?
Yeah this was always step 1 to negotiations as I learned it. The goal was always to try and schedule interviews so you could land multiple offers at one time. If you have 2-3 offers and an existing job your position is insanely strong.
If you are unemployed and this is your first offer in 3 months you cant really negotiate... just take it if it is a reasonable offer.
This comment reads the same to me replacing “BATNA” with “alternative”.
Obviously, as the other letters of the acronym only describe what kind of alternative it is.
I think a better way to phrase your critique would be: "acronyms harm the flow of your text - they're best used sparingly"
BATNA is kind of a dog whistle that this is a slighty hostile business deal. Hostile under the hood. Smiles and handshakes on the surface.
That is every negotiation I’ve ever seen, frankly. What else would you expect?
Friendly tends to be called ‘charity’
Friendly would be win win. We'll pay you so you dont worry about money, and we win because you are great. Batna (looks better as a word) is there but in the distance.
Win/win also has some teeth under it somewhere, or they’d just give you everything yes? In your scenario, why not give you a billion dollars vs a million vs 100k?
BATNA (and I am every familiar with the term, as I’ve had to do a significant amount of negotiation) is the ‘plan B’ if there is no acceptable ‘good’ agreement.
If someone has no acceptable BATNA, their negotiation is essentially ‘please don’t beat me up too bad’, not ‘let’s see if we can agree on something that works for both of us’. No BATNA means you aren’t effectively negotiating, just begging to not be abused too badly.
Sometimes an employer doesn’t have a BATNA option, but that is rare. Usually it’s the employee which doesn’t have a plan B.
A BATNA when doing negotiations over salary, for instance, might be taking another offer with an otherwise less desirable company. Or continuing a job search for more time. Or becoming a sugar baby for an older woman somewhere, etc. or filing for bankruptcy.
Knowing what your own (and what the other sides) plan B is, is important to actually have a successful negotiation, because when your offer starts to look less desirable than their plan B, it isn’t going to go well.
I am struggling to come up with a sentence where using the acronym "BATNA" provides additional utility compared to just using "alternative" (or "option").
In seemingly all situations, a decision maker is considering their most preferred alternatives rather than their least preferred alternatives.
Because it matters that the BATNA is outside the negotiation.
Why does that matter? I would like to see a sentence or scenario where “BATNA” is not interchangeable with “alternative” or “option” or some other synonym.
I read the Wikipedia page, but I’m still unclear what information I gain from BATNA over just “best alternative” or “second best option/choice”.
Well you could have a negotiation like so:
Recruiter: The offer is $100k.
Me: I want 120k and WFH.
Recruiter: I checked with the manager. The best we can do is either 120k but you show up every day or 90k remote.
Me: I'm already paid 110k and work remote. Sorry.
Recruiter: Oh, alright. We can't afford that. We'll continue our search with other candidates. Thanks for your time.
Both "options" presented by the recruiter are "alternatives" and they're both "negotiated agreements" (i.e. a meeting in the middle).
BATNA is short for what you get when negotiations fail and you walk away with no deal. (In this case, staying at the 110k remote job is one party's, the other party's is to keep interviewing more candidates.)
I had once had this aversion to neologisms for the sake of them too. Then I took some math classes and understood that saying "ring" is better than saying "commutative group with multiplication satisfying the following axioms...". Ultimately, it's helpful to invoke words that a group of people commonly understands, even if it seems to the uninitiated that it's saying nothing of importance.
The word "BATNA" is used a lot in discussions on negotiations. These books are full of tips on thinking about/finding out your counterpart's BATNA, coming to the negotiation table with a strong BATNA, conveying your BATNA to the other person, etc. In this context, the word/acronym conveys a very specific meaning that unspecialized English words like "option" and "alternative" don't capture.
Because it is more precise.
'Alternative' or 'option', leave the question 'to what?'.
Unless we’re in a situation where violence concludes every interaction, “negotiated agreement” is the presumed conclusion of every interaction.
I declined this job offer because I had BATNA.
I declined this job offer because I had a better option.
I negotiated more PTO because I had a BATNA.
I negotiated more PTO because I had a better alternative.
It's an educational concept. Not something you'd use in a sentence like that.
I think you're being a pendent.
Sure, but that’s why I originally replied to brtkdotse, since their comment did use it in a sentence like that.
> I think you're being a pendent.
Oh god help me....
I'm glad someone noticed!
(But a little disappointed my trap wasn't successful ..)
Despicable. A pox on your house.
The BATNA acronym helps people understand negotiating a bit better, but outside of education, I don't see that it has much use.
I would have thought the concept of 'leverage' is more useful.
Sure. But it’s a domain specific term within negotiation that easily researchable if someone would want to learn more.
Just trying to be helpful :)
> See where I’m going with this?
No. Could you elaborate?
The crass answer is maybe you’re not able to negotiate well enough to get more than the initial offer.
The less crass answer: In almost every company, you’re being hired on a salary band, so unless you’re at the top of that band in the initial offer there is room to go up, so you can typically push a bit higher. The trick is to make a request that’s higher than what they initially offer but not so high that they outright reject it without additional conversation, and if they are play hardball, and don’t budge on anything, you just reject their offer. It does mean you have to be comfortable rejecting an otherwise decent or good offer, but presumably most companies are willing to negotiate with a good candidate so this shouldn’t be a problem in practice if the negotiation is done in a considered way.
Hiring manager here. The best way to negotiate is to have multiple offers. Hiring is not fun on our side either. Hundreds of candidates with mostly-identical resumes apply for every open posting. Evaluating resumes and interviewing is a huge time suck. Unless we're at the absolute top of the pay band for the role I'd rather give an extra $10K to someone than go back to the pool, but only under two conditions. One, the applicant has to be rated very highly by the interview panel, not just "I'd be OK with hiring this person." Second, I have to believe that there is a reasonable chance the applicant will actually walk away if I don't raise their offer.
People can & will walk away for reasons other than competing offer. It also depends on how badly they want to get a new job. I both have and have seen others interview on the basis of "sure, why not" and if the pot isn't sweet enough then whatever.
That said, people in this position should cite how sweet that pot needs to be upfront instead of after the fact. But that doesn't always happen.
But see - that's part of "negotiation" too - you need to make them want you before you hit them with higher demands. If you're up-front you might not even get the interview.
If I know what will make me leave my current job, it's not worth my time to "get the interview" if they won't give me that amount.
Also, as a hiring manager, the one way people found themselves with me saying "That's great, go screw" was when it was clear they were playing us comp-wise by lowballing us to get their foot in the door & then raising the bar once the offer came. That's deceptive, and a character flaw I don't want to deal with in an employee.
Now if you mean keep your cards close to the vest and don't reveal your number until after they give theirs, then I agree. That's good negotiating tactics. But it's not always possible. And now we're back to who is in direr straights: is the candidate willing to walk away if the company demands a number & they don't want to give one? Is the company willing to lose a candidate in this situation? Whomever blinks first wins the day on this one.
> when it was clear they were playing us comp-wise by lowballing us to get their foot in the door & then raising the bar once the offer came. Isn’t this just the mirror of a relatively common business practise? At least among smaller companies (maybe non US)
As a candidate, if I detect that happening I also nope out as soon as possible.
Agreed. Regardless of reason, you need to be prepared to walk away if you are serious about negotiating.
I'll take this a step further and say that the optimal time to be job hunting is *before* you're motivated to find a new job: either wanting to leave your current one or finding yourself unemployed.
People always talk about competing offers, but your negotiating power will never be higher than when you literally don't care if you get an offer or not. If I'm perfectly content in my current gig, the only way I'm leaving is for a *serious* upgrade. And it's no skin off my teeth if I walk away from a bad deal.
Unless you’re seeking your first job in a specific industry, this advice is the most valuable in this thread. Competing offers are beneficial only if you’re already a well-known figure in your niche.
Not really, you just have to convince them they are.
Sometimes you're desperate for a job and they have you over a barrel, but there's no reason they need to know that.
The magic incantation is competing offer.
If they know you have alternatives, they are much more likely to negotiate. In fact the modern version of this guide is try to get several offers and negotiate them against each other (not you versus the company). Might be more difficult in the current market.
I'm not sure how this works in practice. This means that timing of the offers needs to align pretty closely. How long will a company let you sit on an offer before they move on? I've only ever interviewed or worked at companies that are at most a few hundred people. When I get an offer, I'm pressured for an answer within days. Once or twice I've been able to stretch that to like 2-3 weeks.
People just need to lie more often. In many cases, they will not verify anything. If they require proof, you can say everything was a verbal offer with no official documentation. That's often how it is because many recruiters don't want to go through the paperwork process before there's an agreement.
That said, I've found the "competing offer" element to be of little to no value. Even when I had 7 competing offers, not one of them negotiated more than maybe 10% on the amount. The one that gave me the largest bump didn't even need to know about competing offers - they just wanted to know what would get me to sign. I said X and they did it.
>The magic incantation is competing offer.
Depends on the company. If you were applying where I work and tried to use a competing offer to get a better offer, they'd just suggest you go with the other offer.
So in other words, the offer is non-negotiable?
In that case you could still work for that company, but would your company offer a higher salary with any other negotiating strategy?
This competing offer thing is relatively new and restricted to the top internet and wall street kind of companies. Where there is too much money and they just want people at the top of the ladder all the time, even if they don't need them.
This kind of requires companies winning above and beyond anybody else. Those are rare.
Every where else, its work as usual and people as usual. Nobody is important. People join and leave all the time. They could care less about whatever other offers you have.
Depends on what an employer is looking for: A relatively better pool of candidates or those who don't know how to ask for things.
That does not match my experience. In small companies, I've asked for more and simply gotten it. At large companies, I've asked for more and in most cases they are willing to move the number as long as I don't push the role up to a higher level/band in their HR structure. And my most recent role, they specifically told me that they would need to give me a higher role/title for the money I wanted... I replied, "Great, re-write the offer for a different role, then." They called me back a couple days later with exactly that.
So I'd call their bluff. When they ask if you want the lower offer, say no. I can tell you that most places have recruiters being told to get you in the door for as little as possible... but still to get you in the door.
> [Company]: <yawn> if you don't want $X, there's the door. We have 35 other candidates in the hiring pipeline.
That's partly bluff. Hiring a good candidate is costly.
If they make you an offer, they have already sunk the costs of screening you. Having you exit at the negotiation stage is never free for them. You always have some wiggle room.
>Unless you have some kind of very unique skill or you have other offers and the company really, really wants you, how exactly are you supposed to negotiate?
You can play hardball or softball. Hardball works when you have competing offers, and risks your offer being pulled.
Alternatively, you can just ask nicely. I've had luck saying something akin to "hey I'm super excited to join BigCo. I'm just curious, is there any way to move up the comp at all? Just checking, I don't know what the bands are, but if you can come up some, that'd be great. Either way, let me know I don't want to hold anything up, I'm excited to start".
Guess what? Sometimes the hiring manager has the power to come up 5,10,15k if you just ask. I've had luck and other times I've been told "nope" but i've never had anyone be upset.
> risks your offer being pulled
This is almost never a real risk. At worst they will say they can’t budge on price and you need to decide within some deadline (which is also somewhat of a bluff).
Maybe instead of:
> [Me]: I’d like $Y
You could try:
> [Me]: That matches my base salary at the moment but my current employer gives me healthcare and a car allowance so I would be out of pocket if I moved from my current job. In addition I currently am eligible for a 10% bonus. Would you consider an additional $5k/yr to cover some of this? I would love to move… although I can’t justify a pay cut, but think this is a really good opportunity and would love to work with you so hope we can make something work.
Ie you gotta give them a reason to justify paying you more, and to think that paying more is required for you taking the job. Also you have to be realistic in how much you ask (smaller amounts are more likely to be accepted, larger amounts pay more but are more likely to be rejected outright as if something is too large you can’t really counteroffer)
[Company]: We don't care. Your offer is for $X. Are you interested or not?
They could say that, but they haven’t to me in the past.
Of course people can say no to things, but that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t ask when there is a good probability that they would say yes (particularly if you ask for the right amount in the right way) and very little downside.
I am not.
Every hiring manager with any experience should anticipate that candidates are likely to negotiate.
Therefore, any offer should be backed by logic of the form "we want to hire this candidate for $Y or less. We will make an initial of $X (X < Y), so that we have room to negotiate upwards when they ask."
In my experience, usually Y==(X * 1.1).
Strange, I've never had a company not go up from their initial offer. It's almost like it's baked in.
IME I've found there to be the expectation that there's about 10-15% available for negotiation to make the candidate feel like they got a win. Of course, some exceptions may apply.
This, I've never worked for a company where negotiation was an option. The current company has a team that's part of HR that does salary stuff and they pretty much have final say on the offer that's a take it or leave it deal. You can maybe push back once through your recruiter asking them to reconsider based on years of experience or something, but only really if they somehow didn't have that information initially.
Negotiations require two parties willing to negotiate.
In your example one is not, so negotiations aren't possible.
Successful negotiations require more than two parties. That’s the whole point. If you are only getting one offer then you are leaving money on the table. You need to “create a market” by getting multiple. And if you’ve only got one, then stall as much as you can to find another (which could be a counteroffer from your current employer).
“Negotiate from a position of strength” is evergreen advice.
> We have 35 other candidates in the hiring pipeline
Sounds like low skill, or entry-level work. or nah?
1. Tell them you have one other offer (or late stage interview).
2. Ask for more money and/or more shares (if you think the shares are any good).
“Thank you; have a nice day and good luck in your search!”
I think the modern advice that you should always negotiate and ask for more is deeply distressing for many people. They do not want to feel like they are being taken advantage of but they also don’t really want to engage in a negotiation.
And that's perfectly fine. Such people will get less favorable terms.
Patrick's guide explicitly talks about how a lot of people don't want to negotiate. His argument is that if doing something distasteful for a short period of time will get you a significant salary boost, you should try to do it anyway.
Ultimately, if it's distressing to someone to be assertive and negotiate, my first reaction isnt "That's fine! Let's all work together to make things nice and easy for them!" My reaction is "It's sad that it's so distressing, but one way or another they need this important life skill. Let's help them acquire it, even if it's difficult."
> Or they’ll ask for weird PTO accrual and cash out schemes that just leaves us asking “why didn’t you just ask for more cash and more PTO up front because now HR is pulling people into meetings to try and figure out this demand”.
They're trying to get your help in decreasing their tax burden, without explicitly saying that that's what they're doing.
(Dunno why people are so coy about this; tax minimization is not illegal, and companies are totally willing to work with you on it.)
more money solves that in the end doesn't it? Just ask for enough to cover the tax burden
But isn't it better to find a tax avoidance strategy that's mutually beneficial to both sides? Sure, you can ask for an extra $10k that gets taxed down to $5k, but if you can find a creative workaround to get $8k instead for the same $10k, isn't that better than trying to ask them for a $16k raise to make up for the taxes?
That $8k may cost another $5k to implement: current systems used by the would be employer may not be geared up to handle that non-standard asks.
I think the best thing is to ask for $10k or equivalent, and then let the HR team come up with a sane way to construct that value that works under their system. It's kind of like getting requirements where the customer tries to tell you the exact logic to program, but since it's not their codebase/background, they end up coming up with convoluted solutions.
Just tell me what you want, and let me as SME figure out how to get you there.
The problem comes with progressive taxation, especially in vaguely-socialist countries.
When you're in a high-enough tax bracket (in taxation regimes where such high tax-brackets exist), adding a marginal dollar to your net income becomes impractically expensive for the company, compared to basically anything else the company could offer you.
For some people, in some places, getting an extra $20k/yr tacked onto your net income, would cost your employer more than just, say, hiring you a well-paid full-time personal assistant, with the skills necessary to do enough of your job that you go from "overworked" to "takes off early most days to go play golf."
I’m not sure I follow. In a progressive tax system you pay in brackets, so that extra $20k doesn’t mean the rest of the salary is entirely in the new bracket, so why would it cost an exorbitant amount?
Net income is what goes into your bank after taxes/etc. In the US, the higher tax brackets are around 30% for federal taxes alone, so that extra $20k costs the company around $30k. Not counting state taxes or anything else like paying into benefits. Not sure if retirement savings count here. So let's say between $35k and $40k.
Googling "personal assistant salary", it looks like the average in the US is ~$50k/year. So a personal assistant would cost more, but it is in the right ballpark where that could be a better choice than that raise if this is the reason for the raise:
> with the skills necessary to do enough of your job that you go from "overworked" to "takes off early most days to go play golf."
Better and more common example than personal assistant is company car.
Yeah but phrasing/negotiating it this way obfuscates it a little. If you're in negotiations and you ask for $60k/yr more gross, then it's clear you're asking for more than a PA would cost (maybe, factor in total comp for them too and it's probably closer to $65k/$75k). Do people negotiate net?
> Do people negotiate net?
Nobody negotiates net. It's not even practical. Your tax situation will depend of the other revenues you might receive on top of your wages and the deductions you are eligible to and your employer doesn't have to know about that.
Nobody negotiates net, but companies will keep in mind an employee's lowest possible tax bracket given their gross (and therefore their highest possible net) when determining the cost:benefit of offering marginal "material compensation" increases (vs other components of total compensation) — both during initial negotiation, and when trying to design later incentives.
Which is to say, if you're making USD$100k/yr working for Ericsson in Sweden (where you're in the highest, 52.9%, tax bracket for any marginal income above USD$83k), they're gonna be thinking differently about how to reward you as a high performer, vs if you were making USD$100k/yr at Google in the US (where that salary would instead just have you scraping the top of the 22% tax bracket.)
Google would almost certainly just give you more money — and would likely continue to do that indefinitely, as even the highest US federal tax bracket (37% at USD$600k/yr) isn't too onerous. Ericsson, on the other hand, might already rather offer you something non-monetary and "cheap" for them (e.g. a company car), rather than biting the bullet on a "substantial, productivity-incentivizing" raise (i.e. one that meaningfully increases your net income.)
And that is why precisely why salaries tend to be lower in many European countries (that have these high tax brackets); and why everyone in those countries instead expects / demands / enshrines requirements in law for tons of non-monetary benefits, like long vacations! "Purely salary" and "salary levels off, then tons of non-material benefits" are both Nash equilibria in compensation space; just very different ones.
Sorry but that’s unsubstantiated non sense.
To begin with, non monetary benefits have to be declared in most European countries and impact your tax rates and are taxed the same way than giving you more money so your whole dodgy reasoning immediately falls apart.
The only time I've heard of negotiating net is in certain Gulf countries where employers will pay all your taxes for you. Not a thing in the US or Europe though.
> People need more than knowing to negotiate, they need to know how to negotiate, and that means partially knowing what is negotiable.
Everything is negotiable. Some things are just easier than others. Besides, did you tell them up front what was negotiable, or did you just kinda expect them to figure it out?
I suppose this is true in some abstract sense, but not in companies of any reasonable size when it comes to hiring. There are lots of things that are firmly set company-wide, like the type of health plans offered and the company contribution, that are pretty much non-negotiable. Not knowing this makes you look naive or runs the risk of just confusing the hiring manager/HR.
A good example of non-negotiable, while traveling overseas, for one particular company, I was just randomly doing an expense report - and noticed there was a "medical" line-item in my expense report, that I figured I would use for cough-drops that I had purchased. Finance of course went ballistic, because the policy against expensing anything with that line item was absolutely forbidden (which begs the question as to why it was available in the first place).
Here is the thing - the company would have zero difficulty with me asking for a $100/day per diem while traveling for months on end, instead of doing expenses - that was negotiable. But there was absolutely zero chance of getting a $7 bag of cough-drops allowed as a medical-expense. Non-negotiable.
That medical line is not in air quotes. Not "medical", but medical, generally for emergency out-of-pocket expenses associated with urgent medical treatment occurring as a result of the business trip, immediate care due to travel-related or trip-related incidents. Not for pre-existing health, and not for cough-drops.
Trust me very much not for cough drops.
(The thing is - when doing expense reports - it usually was pretty random which line-item you grabbed for some things - there were two or three categories that might make sense. Not so with that medical line item).
If you're joining a company of 15 people? Probably. If you're joining a company of 50,000? Absolutely not, because they're not going to vastly increase the complexity of their HR or payroll just to close a single hire.
Money and equity are easy to negotiate because there's no management overhead. But if you want your 401k to be at a different brokerage, or have other "process" request like that? Probably not gonna happen - not for a line employee.
While this feels true, it isn't in the fundamental sense. Yes, paying taxes is negotiable, but the consequences may not be.
Thank you for sharing the other side of the table.
But how are we supposed to know what is negotiable? HRs main negotiation tactic is to say “not negotiable”
But also, some companies are not willing to negotiate on anything and attempting to negotiate often screws you over.
It's long for today's attention, but negotiation guides are fairly consistent maps of a territory. They teach you it is a way to relate and a perspective to start from. It's a way to protagonize yourself instead of competing to debase yourself more than the next person.
Focus on a high quality agreement and a process that feels good independent of the numbers and you will be happy with the result. My confidence comes from knowing I challenge myself to do hard things, can work effectively while relying on others to scale effort, and that I am a peer in high performance environments.
There's a shorter guide that comes from Pfeffer, which is the triad of Performance, Credentials, and Relationships, where each org weights these differently, and the people whose weighted score is highest will prevail. Know the weights in the place you're considering, and know how you rank in those areas. Use that as confidence to engage in a mutual process of discovery, where you are working together to find the best quality agreement possible. Maybe the best one you find is not what you're looking for, but by agreeing to work together to find the best possible outcome, you're already negotiating.
Thank you for your reply. I'm not a native speaker and find your writing style quite intriguing, which always makes me wonder "what does this person read?". Could you suggest a couple of your favourite books?
Apologies for this public private message, there seems to be no contact info in your profile.
thank you, they are of an era, but read something by W. Sommerset Maugham, Evelyn Waugh, Robertson Davies, P.G. Wodehouse, the economist and weekend FT newspaper columnists. add Christopher Hitchens, Martin Amis, Stephen Fry, Julian Barnes, Ian McEwan, Kazuo Ishiguro, Douglas Hofstader, and Douglas Adams. Do a pass over poetry, so Blake, Auden, and Kipling and try to remember anything funny. Then forget all of it and argue on the internet for 30 years.
If you haven’t read him already, I bet you’d like Saki.
I found this quite resonates with my approach for a meeting tomorrow
The most important part of negotiation: Having an offer in the first place.
Unfortunately, I and a dozen other software devs (all of whom I know personally, and all of whom are amazing) are not getting any interviews, much less offers.
None of us have ever experienced a drought like this before, either. So... ???
Thankfully, we're all still currently employed.
Any thoughts on root cause from your perspective?
I've been on the other side of the table recently, and I agree it feels like a buyer's market. But it still took a while to find good candidates, and a lot of candidates showed up to interviews weirdly unprepared on even the basics.
If it's a drought for you, then I'd have to add: It seems like an especially weird drought, as well. Supply and demand seem to be doing odd things.
(And, for the spectators of this comment thread, I can confirm: Yes, 2 people with 3 anecdotes each is enough to speculate wildly about an entire industry.)
It’s hard to extrapolate to the whole market, but I can provide my personal experience. I was laid off, and my unemployment benefits have stopped, so finding a job is a bit more desperate for me than it has been in the past.
Now I’m dealing with algorithms technical interviews, but they don’t mesh well with my style of problem solving at all. I like to quietly think on a problem by myself first. If it’s an exceptionally difficult problem, I’ll probably take a walk or the answer might come to me in the shower. If I’m working with someone else, a more collaborative process where we’re both trying to solve the problem and bouncing ideas back-and-fort is my style. Solving the problem in 30 minutes in front of a judge under the context of needing to land a job as soon as possible doesn’t properly test my abilities as a software engineer at all.
Yesterday, I was asked a leetcode hard in an interview from some no name start up. I answered how to theoretically solve it out loud with the interviewer but ran out of time implementing it. I got the impression the interviewer thought I was unprepared and a clueless engineer. I was rejected 15 minutes after the interview.
Overall, I’m not encountering interviews that actually let me display my competency. The interviews seem to all be tailored for a specific type of problem solver (fast in high-pressure test-taking environments) while eliminating every other type of person. I think it’s easy for the interviewer to lose context on the nerves the candidate might be experiencing.
The accounting industry doesn’t do this. If someone has a CPA license, companies trust that credential. If someone doesn’t have a CPA but has experience in Big 4 public accounting, companies trust that experience. If someone lacks those signals, companies may ask more technical questions. But they start from a basis of trust based on clear signals.
Unlike my accounting background where my past experience was based on trust, I have open source projects that can actually be reviewed. Some reviewers have gone through them yet still want to perform an algorithmic interview. Most have not. I feel that the vast majority of interviewers don’t really know how to interview in a more holistic manner.
When you say "a LeetCode hard", is that because the problem is literally on the LeetCode website, among the hard ones?
Or is it similar to LeetCode problems, although not actually on their website?
Does everyone remember all question titles by heart and that's why they say it was Leetcode questions, or is it more figuratively speaking :-)
I hope you'll find a place with an interview process that works for you.
If you've done a fair amount of leetcode problems you can recognize them and feel their levels. Then afterwards you can search and confirm your expectations.
It is not uncommon to have either verbatim or lightly modified leetcode problems as technical challenges for interviews. I think Facebook now makes it standard you need to be able to solve 2 leetcode medium questions in a 45 minute interview.
Interesting, thanks! Good that at least this is apparently pretty well known, so everyone has a chance to prepare
It was a difficult problem, and I was genuinely interested in the solution. So I searched online after the interview and found that leetcode called it a hard problem.
Wow, so that problem was from the LeetCode website itself?
Was it with different parameters or different phrasing, ... Or everything was the same?
If same but different, I wonder how (un)likely it is that they came up with that problem themselves, independently, without knowing about the LeetCode version. (What would you think?)
(Nice that you found it anyway)
I'm not sure on the root cause. Like I said, there's several people that I know who are all experiencing the same things. I have 20 years experience and a phd. Others in my friend group have no degree whatsoever, but have a decade of experience. Several years ago, we were all offered multiple jobs at a time. Now, we are not even getting requests for interviews.
EDIT: adding that, because we all live in a non-metropolitan area, we all have been remote, and are continuing to look for remote work.
I think fully remote expectation in non-metro areas can be a big hurdle. I know many startups here in SF who are looking to hire good candidates. But they want in-office presence at least a few days a week.
Someone summed it up nicely for me - remote work gives you speed. Colocation (typically office) gives you velocity. A startup needs velocity.
With modern teleconferencing tools, it doesn't matter.
If you feel that in-person time is important, then do what we did at my current company: They hired me. I know everyone at the local state university, from professors to students. We hired from that pool. Everyone is still remote, but our local group gets together once a week for lunch. For $100-$150 a week (yes, it really is that cheap in this area), the company maintains a culture and personal interaction for a team of talented programmers (from me, who has a PhD and two decades of experience, down to the best students who just graduated, and others in-between) without the cost of maintaining an office.
We all work on different projects in the company.
Velocity happens with communication. Communication doesn't need to be in-person, but it does need to be real time. So use Teams, Zoom, Hangouts, or whatever. We have the tools for this already.
Final note: The company didn't intend to have half a dozen people in the same city, they just intended to hire me. It just so happens that I'm really good at finding talent in the places that everyone else is ignoring.
> With modern teleconferencing tools, it doesn't matter.
Speak for yourself? I personally find Zoom to be extremely lacking. No eye contact, no body language, people having problems with wifi or other device issues, no serendipitous chats around hallways or watercoolers etc all affect the quality of communication.
As I said, founders and CEOs are already voting with their choices. Most of the big companies have already embraced RTO. A majority of the new startups I am seeing insist on at least few days in office. There are a few which are fully remote but they seem to be a minority.
That is the key. By looking for a remote role you are competing with large pool of workers.
Are you ready to accept a new role as a contractor with 100k USD annual salary and no benefits? How about 60k? Many skilled developers will accept such offer for remote role.
What I can say is that the interview process recently has become so impersonal and kind of automated even for highly skilled positions.
I have commented on this before but if someone is applying for Senior or above, seeing them live code a random algo with weird requirements seems less valuable to me than actually discussing architecture, previous projects and personality.
Even talking through a small project (with 0 code involved) would tell me so much about someone than what I've experienced in the last year or so while looking for a job.
So, in my opinion companies are what became weird. I don't know but even the smallest startup seems to feel they need to have their hiring pipeline be like Google or something.
10-15 years ago, I would just meet a manager and someone in the engineering team, have 1 hour chat with them and instantly know whether I'm hired or not. Now it's 4 interviews from the CEO to the HR and their grandmas.
Young people in the CS field consider any time period in which they aren't being actively headhunted and constantly presented with multiple offers from multiple companies to be a drought. r/cscareerquestions/ over on reddit is full of doom and gloom from new grads being unable to find jobs as software engineers at big tech companies.
There is definitely a down turn, because before you didn't need to be a good candidate, whereas now only good candidates are getting the interviews and ultimately the jobs but historically it still seems better than the downturns in 03 and 09.
I’m from France where the market is still tense, so I have hard times understanding whether it’s a general trend or a local problem:
- How do you know it’s not just your surroundings (technologies, skills, area) which are dry?
- Are you maybe getting aged? (The programmer market is very ageist, hopefully I’m not turning the knife into the wound, but I’m not young either) and maybe you are experiencing the dry part of life for the first time?
- Or did you take the $500k+ post-Covid market as the norm? Here in France, beginners are at 38k€ gross annually, and the high end was 85k€ during Covid, but historically the high-end had been capped around 65k€ until Covid.
All in all, developers aren’t magicians. We deserve a high engineer pay, but look at electrical engineers, they have shit pay. We’ve been getting far too much money, for far too long. In normal office jobs, it takes a lifetime of sacrifices to get to higher pay grade. And this is the 3-year experience mark for a developer.
So, are you expecting Facebook-level pay, or higher-engineer-office-worker kind of pay?
>We’ve been getting far too much money, for far too long. In normal office jobs, it takes a lifetime of sacrifices to get to higher pay grade.
I don't understand this mindset. We should all support our working class brothers to get better wages. Just because the custodian, accountant, and jr HR person are also paid crap doesn't mean we should all grin and bear because at least we're not the day laborers outside.
Well I would love to have found a $500k job, that's definitely not my point of reference.
The problem is that I'm not even getting to the stage of asking about salary, because I'm not getting any interviews in the first place. Neither is anyone else in my friend group.
I am probably overqualified for a lot of jobs, but my friend group, which has a lot of variance in age and experience, would definitely not fall into that classification.
Yes, I understand.
I hope I didn’t come across, my comment was not delicate but I was genuinely curious about the answer. I’ve created a product which luckily works for now, so I’m out of the job market, but I think everyone on HN knows that your situation is the normal one that awaits all of us in the second half of our career.
>We’ve been getting far too much money, for far too long. In normal office jobs, it takes a lifetime of sacrifices to get to higher pay grade.
Normal office jobs don't bring the value that STEM jobs do, that's why STEM jobs command more money. It's like comparing doctors to other careers and being surprised that doctors get paid more.
From what I'm hearing/see, it's worse than 2002 by a long shot. :\ 2001-2004 was pretty bad (from what I recall Cisco laid off about 20% of it's engineering team), but it was clear by 2003/4 that the growth of dial up subscribers was going to continue, so people were able to find jobs again although senior devs moved to much lower paid jobs.
Your most powerful tool in negotiation is the ability to say no. That comes when you have competing offers.
The "when it rains, it pours" phenomena I think most of us (anectodtally obviously) think we've seen is especially amusing in this context.
They're really shooting themselves in the foot by only hiring people everyone wants already instead of finding people who they can train for two weeks and bring up to speed.
I don't think they can tell the difference.
Can I hire you and fire you in two weeks if you’re not a senior React+Java dev? Because most candidates who say that, ask for the senior price, while not being trained in the tech we’re asking.
There’s a lot of value in getting someone who has already done some React. Or some Typescript. Or some Java. There’s a triple-your-salary kind of value, and everyone asks for the tripled salary.
Senior people that need years of training in a specific tool are the exception that proves the rule.
A ton of people basically know enough to do a new role with a few weeks or months of mentorship. Remember orgs are a pyramid, for every senior person there are many many people who aren't, or who have entirely support roles like answering phones. People underestimate how many mid-level skills are easily transferable.
exactly this. the problem is that you and i know that but the people making hiring decisions apparently don't. i always explain in my applications that learning that new to me tool or language should not be a big issue because i have enough experience with other similar tools or languages, but so far no luck.
Just today a recruiter called me and told me about a job that I think could be a good fit for me, and I do intend to interview for that.
I hate negotiations. So I'll be frank. I was already frank with the recruiter today: I love my current job, on Mondays I can't wait to get to work. Moving to another company entails risk. I need to be compensated for that risk, so I don't intend to even interview if they can't offer me at least a 20% raise. Many think that this becomes the ceiling rather than the floor. But if I get the offer, I'll simply tell the guys that I am an honest person, and I don't play games, and I would appreciate them not playing games either. More precisely, I tell them that I am not interviewing with them in order to get leverage for a raise at my current job (lots of people do that). But, if my current company will make me a counteroffer, I will accept it and I stop there. I do not want to be the subject of a bidding war ( * ). In other words, they have only one opportunity to make an offer. The should think twice about making a low-ball offer.
That's it. That's my non-negotiation tactic.
( * ) Why not let people bid on your compensation? Because word leaks out. The new colleagues at the new company will think "who does this guy think he is?". I need to work with these guys, and I don't want to start from this position. The colleagues at the old company will think "what a prima donna". Plus, I think it's a better position from a game theory point of view, a-la Thomas Shelling. I did not study game theory, so I have no idea if this is true, but it's not impossible. More importantly, I just find the idea quite distateful. Other people might find it flattering, but to me it's just gross.
HR really likes folks like you, because you're selling your services at a discount.
I got one FAANG to increase their offer to 2.5 times the original amount. I'm fine with taking a bit of heat from the team if I get paid that much.
If you got an offer bumped up by 2.5x, was the original one above your current comp? If it was below, then it was a total low-ball, but if it was above, it follows that you tolerated being underpaid at your job. By maybe a factor of 3. Are you sure you are in a position to give salary negotiation advice?
The original offer was about 50% above my current comp.
Sure I was underpaid, but that's life working for a startup run by a friend.
After this situation, I heard of several situations where this company generally starts low and can go high.
I usually did this in the past, and it has worked every time so far (four times). Not in the US, this from Switzerland.
I think of a number I want to earn in the new job. For example, if I would currently make 100k, I say I currently make 115k in my current role, and then they offer 120k. I accept, done.
I did this after a bad experience. Made-up numbers. They offer me 80k, I already make 90k, I say I already make more. They ask how much, I say 90k, they say we can match that and one more week of vacations. I give them a pass, they ask why, I say I got another offer for 110k, they say we could have given you 110k too.
If they are allowed to lie, I can too.
Lying about previous salary is not illegal in the U.S. but it will probably cause you to lose your offer if the employer finds out (and there are ways they can check it).
And there’s no reason to do it. Negotiation is about what you will bring to the new company, and how much that is worth to them. Your old salary is irrelevant.
If you want 110k just say that. If they ask what you made before, you can say something like “I was underpaid at 80k, which is why I’m talking to you now.”
> If they ask what you made before, you can say something like “I was underpaid at 80k, which is why I’m talking to you now.”
Agreed that it's best not to give false information but you can also respond with something like, "What is your budget for this position?"
It makes it obvious -- at least, it should -- that you know they're only asking, as patio11 puts it, as an attempt to get you to compromise your negotiating position.
Giving the number and calling it out as low isn't a bad idea, just offering another for those who would prefer not to give a number at all.
They never found out or cared or followed up on it in any way possible.
I think it works so well because it is not a negotiation. Just stating my fake current number and they can make up their number.
I am a generalist. Not once in my twenty years of experience have I met anyone like me. I can write firmware just as well as I can design and implement UX and UI. Heck, I can design circuits or even products in fusion 360. Where are all these so called generalists? If you mean “fullstack”, that is only a small fraction of software, and the bar has lowered a lot since JavaScript has become ubiquitous (so you only need to know TS/JS to call yourself fullstack…I don’t think you need to include even something like SQL).
As such, demand for me is so high that I’ve simply retired from all the money that was thrown at me (it’s also pretty easy for me to start my own business…although exiting is another story). I have no LinkedIn or other online presence and I still get headhunted despite having no interest.
Just remember your BATNA when you enter a negotiation.
I can do all these things too, and learn more, but without recent professional experience on the resume, it’s not generally known or believed. (Part of the problem is that interviewers default to disbelief these days.)
No one is knocking on my door looking for generalists, and a large majority of job listings are short-sighted on specifics. i.e. no one cares about my computer architecture, QA, or sysad chops.
The bulk of my nest egg comes from equity. As you grow you find that the more of a generalist you are the smaller a company you should be at to maximize your impact.
As a company grows the roles get pigeonholed further and further, diminishing the value of your generalist skillset. The main antidote to this is to be higher up in the org, but that usually doesn’t happen organically over a generalist career (you have to create those jobs for yourself).
Not a single offer for me from a startup since I got older, so not really a viable path. Can’t blame this year on ageism however, because I’ve not been interviewed.
demand for generalists? where do u live?
i have 35+ years. Been quite a few places and hats. Dozens of languages, assemblers, client/server, UI+UX, Prolog, hardware down to transistors, even mechanics ; methodologies and cultures, ..., you-name-it. i bet my cv is too-long-didnt-read.
And Noone gives a damn. They all look for their 3y "senior js dev" and don't see anything else. And those "seniors" grow on trees anyway.
Both firmware and UX, makes me wonder, what did you study? (Something closer to hardware and theory than to design and UX if I were to guess?)
A few decades ago everyone learned C/C+ in school. Then might take an interest in gui programming, later read a book on what makes good ui. Over a decade or three, quite doable.
Yes but not firmware and circuits! :-)
Unless they studied sth like electrical engineering?
Firmware is C (and I forgot to mention asm) and a few special rules about boot. Less difficult than tedious in modern times.
Electronics is a different subject, but I took physics in school and dabbled in soldering etc. Amateur electronics at least is pretty approachable if you have the interest.
Computer Architecture class bridges the two nicely. There you go—well rounded.
Clickable link for the lazy https://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/01/23/salary-negotiation/
I think the overall thrust of the article — "always try to negotiate, try to get better at it, it's low-downside and high upside" — is still very relevant and I frequently share it with friends interviewing even today.
Some specific things haven't aged well from this article in my recent experience:
1. Many companies have comp bands advertised and enforced by local law, and even outside of this many have implemented more regimented/structured comp in an attempt to reduce bias. 2. Relatedly I've seen more companies take a "no negotiation" policy, especially for more junior roles. 3. The market overall is much more an employer's market and is not growing as quickly, so the median SWE has less leverage.
I think the biggest impact of these changes is that the cost of not negotiating has become lower, and consequently the upside to negotiation is less, especially if you don't have competing offers or are more junior.
That said: competing offers is still the single most effective negotiation tool, as others have said. I've seen companies be relatively inflexible on cash comp but highly flexible on equity comp, which tends to not be required as part of job listing bands, and becomes the lion's share of comp as you get more senior. And often there are carve-outs of matching offers.
TL;DR: Still worth a read, but many of the specifics need discounting.
The only thing that really matters is that you can casually say no, and that you have multiple options.
I can confirm - in the past three weeks, I requested a $5K raise in salary on offer and it was accepted in <20 seconds by hiring manager. This has a roughly $100K NPV. This is identical to the predictions in patio11's original piece.
If you make it to an offer, it probably means you are the best of the lot. You can always negotiate somewhat. Unless your ask is outlandish, they can always say "no, but the offer stands". If you ask for 10x what youre offered / marker, that's different of course.
I'd like to suggest an alternate method that worked for me. I only applied to jobs that 1) I thought I'd enjoy greatly, and that 2) I felt my skills could benefit the employer more than most other applicants. Generally I didn't get fantastic salary jumps but I chose jobs in good companies that didn't cause me too much stress. This let me be a better team player.
Over time it meant that I could study for my next job at night while still having a good work experience. I am paranoid so I always worked close enough to the job that I could bike there if necessary, and I saved money for a rainy day. I even chose to avoid Silicon Valley because I didn't like the ultracompetitive vibe.
I ended up with a big payout from one job that started on the path to my own long-term business, but all along the work/life balance was excellent.
I'm sure I could have negotiated higher but programmers tend to make good money anyhow. Never bothered me when I made $90K but it could have been $105K or whatever.
Leverage is also about timing your market which is a matter of local and overall trends. You can use google trends to figure out when the global market trend is in your favor: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=a...
Get a sense for how your industry is doing as well. Your best leverage is a competing offer.
Whenever you have more than one offer, there is room for negotiation.
In the past I would have said "this" but I've seen a lot of people declining good offers for better ones that never materialized. Be careful playing chicken if you can't afford to.
With the amount of scatterbrained recruiters out there these days, what kind of magic does one pull to get multiple offers to appear so close together?
I've never managed that, but everyone I know who has had some combination of the following:
- brilliant
- lucky
- juggled like 50 interview processes at once
Only one you can do anything about.
I got three FAANG offers at once 3 years ago. I stalled the first one and used it as leverage to speed up the laggards.
College recruiting can make this happen. Granted really only for new grads but it is totally normal in that setting to get multiple offers within a week or two of each other.
Feels intentional by recruiters as a part of the hiring meta-game tbh
I hate negotiation with a passion. However, IME, just being semi transparent about your max offer lets anyone else come back with new numbers without having to ask for a specific number.
Another is to ask for additional benefits in monetary value. IE if one company that provides parking/commuter/better health coverage benefits, ask for an additional $X per year to the companies that don't.
That also make it like you're trying to equalize total comp instead of asking for an arbitrary higher number.
Even if you have one offer there is room for negotiation if you’re willing to accept that you might end up with 0 offers.
Not even. You have to handle the negotiation like a complete asshole before your counterparty will withdraw their offer entirely. For the most part, asking (respectfully and politely) for the moon will just result in a "no, we can't accommodate that". Then you decide if you're ok with that, and accept or decline.
I agree that withdrawing an offer is rare but you have to be OK with some non-zero chance of withdrawal if you’re going to negotiate with only a single offer in hand.
You’re making the negotiating mistake of projecting onto counterparties. “I wouldn’t pull an offer except to an asshole” becomes, “My counterparty won’t withdraw the offer unless I’m an asshole.”
If you absolutely 100% need a job and can leave nothing to chance then you should probably not negotiate with only a single offer in hand.
It's an employers market, so probably no.
Not for senior roles it isn't.
Sure it is.
I've noticed only slightly larger pool of decent candidates when recruiting, but nothing crazy.
The number of unsolicited messages from recruiters with serious offers I receive haven't changed much either.
The only serious change I see is in the number of borderline spam recruiter messages coming to the linkedin profile I haven't updated in almost a decade.
Anyone got numbers?
Maybe they don't live in the same place or work with the same things, or one is remote the other isn't
I'm at a disadvantage here: remote only + moved out of NA.
Interesting! I mean, that it's still a good job market for you (senior developer something?).
There is always room. If a company makes you an offer it means thyley want to hire you over every other candidates so far and their first offer is unlikely to be the best they can do.
Here is one top tip from the Chris Voss book: Don't ask for a round number. If you ask for a more precise number it sounds like you have done more research etc.
EG Not: "I've looked at my finances and similar roles, and I need $130,000 for me to take the role."
Instead: "I've looked at my finances and similar roles, and I need $133,700 for me to take the role."
Yeah. Nah that makes you sound silly (at least for software jobs) unless there is a good reason for it, like currency conversions or peverse tax incentives.
There is a tiny chance that asking for 133700 might get a smile at a smaller tech focused company though.
Worked for me at a large bank.
Hard to know that unless you got some inside to what they were thinking during hire.
If it worked I wonder if it worked as a shibboleth.
I have negotiated every SWE offer I’ve had. It doesn’t “feel” good, but it’s helpful to know virtually all roles have wiggle room.
The truth is engineers are still being hired and it costs money (and time/money) to interview more people or continue interviewing people in the pipeline, so offering more to a good candidate is worth it for most companies.
> In this market where every company out there tries to minimise costs
That was always true. Guide reminds you that significant amount of money for you is a rounding error for most of companies, so negotiating is always a good idea.
Observations:
- posted salary ranges are BS. Companies are as likely to go significantly over the upper limit as to refuse to entertain anything remotely close to upper bound even with the most amazing of candidates. You won't know until you negotiate.
- vc backed companies are supposed to grow fast, not balance budget. if you can convince them you will help with that growth more than the next guy many limits become very negotiable
- some companies have fixed / very narrow ranges for roles except the most senior ones. usually they are significantly below market rates. if they straight up refuse to budge don't waste your time - same mechanism is going to manage your future salary increases
I wouldn't know. I have a disability and I don't feel I could ever negotiate.
Try the TCP algorithm... raise your rates until you start losing dollars, then back off until peak cashflow restored. Try again every so often.
If anyone has any good reads about consulting compensation structures, I would appreciate it.
Ask for a yearly inflation correction.
Not sure but if Trump wins and turns H1B visas on its head again, we might see a reversal.
My company opened up a highly technical position in the greater Boston area and we were flooded with 250 applications in a week. Phone screens went out to almost everyone remotely qualified but so much of the applications were spam/YOLO from people from the asian subcontinent, close to 80% were not even remotely qualified. I went out of my way to sift through any qualified female applicants and there were less than five in total and none had the experience we were looking for, even very remotely. In the end we hired a handful very talented people from very different backgrounds and none were from the public channels. We worked with a handful of recruiters that had established relationships with top talent. We also had to fire some recruiters that kept sending us low IQ people.
They got you distracted with H1b, when the real problem is outsourcing. Companies want to make dollars here, but they don't want to keep the dollar circulating. And then we end up in a situation where they run out of customers and need a bailout.
Enough. The number of available H1-B visas available each year has not changed since 2005.
https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/research/h1b-visa...
Trump created huge delays and people I worked with that went on vacation were stuck in India. Lots of companies were put on notice for abusing H1B and legitimate candidates were impacted.
The issues was never the quantity, it’s been the quality. I believe companies like Deloitte had created corruption pipelines where money got you on the path to H1B.