Salary Negotiation: Make More Money, Be More Valued

You will have much, much better results if your job search looks something more like:

  1. (Optional but recommended) Establish a reputation in your field as someone who delivers measurable results vis-a-vis improving revenue or reducing costs.
  2. Have a hiring manager talk with you, specifically, about an opening that they want you, specifically, to fill.
  3. Talk informally (and then possibly formally) and come to the conclusion that this would be a great thing if both sides could come to a mutually fulfilling offer.
  4. Let them take a stab at what that mutually fulfilling offer would look like.
  5. Suggest ways that they could improve it such that the path is cleared for you doing that voodoo that you do so well to improve their revenue and/or reduce their costs.
  6. (Optional) Give the guy hiring you a resume to send to HR, for their records.  Nobody will read it, because resumes are an institution created to mean that no one has to read resumes.  Since no one will read it, we put it in the process where it literally doesn’t matter whether it happens or not, because if you had your job offer contingent on a document that everyone knows no one reads, that would be pretty effing stupid now wouldn’t it.

.. The absolute worst outcome of negotiating an offer in good faith is that you will get exactly the contents of that offer.  Let me say that again for emphasis: negotiating never makes (worthwhile) offers worse.

.. I’m sure you can find a company who still makes exploding offers, where you get one yay-or-nay and then the offer is gone.  You have a simple recourse to them: refuse them and deal with people who are willing to be professionals.  You’re not a peasant.  Don’t act like one

.. You then have a high likelihood of doing your salary negotiation over email, which is likely to your advantage versus doing it in real time.  Email gives you arbitrary time to prepare your responses.  Especially for engineers, you are likely less disadvantaged by email than you are by having an experienced negotiator talking to you.

.. he only thing better than “We” is “You” (and variants), because people care a heck of a lot more about their problems than about your problems.  (This advice is stolen shamelessly from Dale Carnegie.)  This means that a) you should talk about their problems, concerns, and wishes and b) you should guard against your own natural tendency to bring up irrelevant things like your own problems, which typically will not help you sell the decisionmaker on adopting the mutual win you’re proposing.

.. There was a post recently on Hacker News about someone’s experience with a job offer from Google.  They wanted more money.  The recruiters offered to think it over, and came back with the reply that Google’s food benefit was worth a significant amount of money, with a calculation to back it up.

.. * Micro-tip: “Interesting” is a wonderful word: it is positive and non-commital at the same time.  If they tell you a number, tell them it is an “interesting” number, not a “wonderful” number.