> Why can’t you just tell me how much it’ll be, and then we can move on?
On the other hand, why don't you just tell them the lowest number you'll accept?
> Well, the reason we have to play this game is because, like it or not, everyone else is playing it.
The real reason is it is completely unworkable to require a best offer from one side and not the other side.
Negotiation is central and inevitable to life with more than one person. Negotiating also means giving up things you don't value for things that you do value - making for much better allocation of resources.
The real problem with these guides is that they always assume the hiring manager is 100% adversarial and will be using everything in their power to minimize your salary.
Some companies definitely operate that way, but as a hiring manager I have a lot of incentives to hire and retain good employees. If I'm constantly low-balling every candidate and squeezing the lowest possible salary out of them, I'm also going to be constantly losing my best people when they realize they're underpaid in 6 months. Then I have to go out and recruit, hire, and re-train someone else.
It depends on the company, of course, but many hiring managers are more than happy to carve out as much compensation as they can get away with for new hires. It improves team morale, decreases team turnover, and gives the hiring manager additional leverage over highly paid employees who know they can't just walk out the door into a higher salary somewhere else.
Unfortunately, most candidates these days have been taught (by guides like this and other internet wisdom) that salary negotiation must be played like an ultra-competitive game where the first move is to always force the company to name their price first. Hiring managers aren't dumb and we do this all the time, so whenever a candidate starts reciting hardball negotiation playbooks I just start with an offer that's 5-10% lower than what I think we'll end up with. The candidate then comes back and demands something 5-10% higher and we settle back at the number I had in mind anyway.
In the odd event that the candidate doesn't negotiate back up after forcing me to go first, I just throw the extra money into the offer anyway. Employees are even happier to see that I've come up on my initial offer, which is a great way to start the relationship.
On the other hand, when some candidates come in demanding multiple months of delays while they collect competing offers and want to go through endless rounds of re-negotiation even after we've agreed on a number, I just cut them loose and wish them luck on their career search. Unless you're a FAANG hiring many people at once, it doesn't make sense to play endless games with candidates who are going to end up at a FAANG anyway.
> Unfortunately, most candidates these days have been taught (by guides like this and other internet wisdom) that salary negotiation must be played like an ultra-competitive game where the first move is to always force the company to name their price first
I have to say, it hardly seems to me like an applicant asking a potential employer to name a figure first is an ultra-competitive hard-core tactic.
May I ask if you're located in California? If so, how do you deal with AB 168, which requires companies to disclose salary ranges upon request?
True, though there's lots of different experiences. Some companies don't even allow the hiring manager to see/know the offer until after it's accepted. All delegated to some HR "compensation" group that is definitely adversarial.
Candidates can't really reliably know who's pulling the strings.
Agree. Further, if I bring you in too low and you do stay, you’re going to be consuming more of next year’s raise pool to bring you up to where I think you should be comp-wise.
I’m neither trying to over nor under pay incoming employees. On balance, underpaying slightly seems to have worse effects than overpaying slightly.
Is that actually how it works? If everyone in a group does a good job, or if everyone does a great job, they'll get the same raises either way? Furthermore, if management is convinced that one person did a bad job, then that increases the amount available to the rest? The incentives are fascinating. How many people are in the group to which the raise pool applies?
The way it ought to work is the entire team gets a communal raise depending on how well the company is doing. That way, the incentive is to collaborate and solve problems together for the better of the company, as it should be.
It's very unusual that an individual performs significantly (three sigma) above or below the team performance, but in the case of that happening, they could be withheld from the main pool or split a side pot.
But not without first either getting the assistance they need to catch up with the team, or teaching the team in their superior methods.
We don’t have to solve the pool to the last hundred dollars, but this is how it works to a very strong first-order approx, and is definitely how the tooling is setup (we use an SAP module to do it, so I seriously doubt we’re alone here).
In terms of how concentrated the problem is, the overall pool covers 1000+ people, but we use the same general formula to break it down to cover groups of 15-50. That’s enough that if you have one outlier low, you’re probably okay (including just explaining why you propose granting raises over the pool because of this). But if you strategically “hire low”, your whole group suffers. (Which is another reason to not bias your offers low-leading is hard enough, so don’t start out to do it on hard mode.)
To the “if everyone did a great job” concern. If everyone did a great job, the business does better and the share-based comp becomes more valuable automatically; we would also likely make the raise pool and SBC pool larger because the company was out-performing because everyone did a great job.
Quite a few companies I've worked for have raises budgetted by department/business unit/whatever. The average may be 3% over the department, which means only a few people get to have an above average rating. If everyone does an amazing job, everyone gets 3%. Usually I've found that translates to a few people getting a great rating, and other people getting a good rating, because there's only so much to go around.
My last company, only 2 people in the department could get the highest rating, other people were passed over, including myself. I warned my manager about this, but not surprisingly we lost quite a few good people because the market is good for devs and its really easy to get a solid increase in salary. Especially if you get passed over because corporates are going to corporate.
> Hiring managers aren't dumb and we do this all the time
Just as with technical interviews, it’s a perpetual cat and mouse game between employers and the prospective employees. It’s what happens when there’s a power asymmetry, a lot of money on the table, and a lot of prospects. So expect that internet guides will eventually catch on to your tactics and devise counter-strategies of their own, forcing you to come up with new counter-counter-strategies, and so on.
> Unless you're a FAANG hiring many people at once
Yeah, this state of affairs is also caused by an industry dominated by omni-resourced companies as well as a secondary tier of cutthroat former startups such as as Uber.
>> whenever a candidate starts reciting hardball negotiation playbooks I just start with an offer that's 5-10% lower than what I think we'll end up with. The candidate then comes back and demands something 5-10% higher and we settle back at the number I had in mind anyway
That's not the way it has worked out for me. When I have made the hiring manager give a number first, the number has been 2x of the number I would have given. Maybe I just undervalue myself. 2x + 5-10% is a pretty good outcome.
> The real reason is it is completely unworkable to require a best offer from one side and not the other side.
Only if you think the power dynamics between the two parties are equal. Or in other words, only if you think that both parties would get the same benefit (or harm) from some sort of mediated negotiation (e.g. both parties share their best offer with a third party who then follows some agreed-upon rule to settle the transaction at some price in the range of mutually-acceptable prices if any exist).
What you're describing (both sides providing a best offer) obviously doesn't work without some sort of agreed-upon method for sharing the offers before knowing the other party's offer and then settling on a price if any mutually-acceptable prices exist.
In reality, even an auction among a large set of workers and employers is unlikely to be have "ideal" outcomes (according to some reasonable definitions, although all definitions would be debatable), particularly when relevant qualities of the two parties are different (like how much information about the market each party has, how risk-averse each party is, etc.).
It’s pretty rare in our field for someone to be able to land one job offer but not a second one.
Sure, there are a lot of applicants banging away hopelessly (because they’re not qualified and those people should not negotiate), but most everyone else in software who can land job offer N can land job offer N+1 without undue difficulty.
IMO, SWEs have never had more “walk away” power since I joined the field about 3 decades years ago.
In an industry that is deadset on focusing on worthless leetcode puzzles as the major gating factor for a hire decision, I struggle to understand how someone "banging away hopelessly" is decidedly unqualified.
There are literally people applying for SWE jobs who couldn’t write FizzBuzz or a function to sum a non-overflowing array of ints in a language of their choosing. That’s tablestakecode, not leetcode, IMO.
That is fair. I have not encountered them myself, nor ever been an interviewee where "tablestakes" is the bar and not "hard leetcode haha I know the answer and you don't~~", but I absolutely acknowledge, recognize, and understand that this is a real occurrence as well. In those cases, I wholeheartedly agree with the label.
In most cases, the company will continue to survive without the labor of any one given worker, while that worker will starve without the capital provided by the company. Even in the ability to walk away, there is a huge asymmetry.
Why do so many instantly go to the false dichotomy of "accept new job" vs "be unemployed".
The vast number of people changing jobs don't leave one before securing another.
And even if you're unemployed, it doesn't change the negotiating power, just the relative value of your personal choices. Ie job1 vs job2 or job1 vs unemployed.
To blame the lopsided value of the latter on negotiating power is to grossly misunderstand negotiating tactics.
Nobody is starving in America. Jobs are going begging. I needed some work done on the house, and I called the outfit that usually does such things. They are overwhelmed with work, and can't find workers.
Besides there are around 250,000,000 jobs in America. Am I to believe that it is commonplace, or even ever happens, that an individual somehow has managed to find the only job opening in America?
I agree with everything you wrote except your last sentence:
> "Negotiating also means giving up things you don't value for things that you do..."
That describes "compromise", not "negotiation".
In my experience (23 years in software, 5y consulting), in some ways negotiation is more like poker: coming out on top doesn't always mean you had the best hand, just that you played it right. On the other hand, it's not necessarily such a starkly zero-sum game. Of course it is in the sense of absolute #s, ie the less they pay me the more they get to keep -- but by insisting on being well-compensated for your skills and experience, you rule out the wrong workplaces and send the right message. If "I'm expensive, and worth it" isn't how you -- and your employer or clients -- see yourself, you're doing it wrong.
Consider you're having a garage sale. You're giving up things you do not value for things you do value (cash).
When negotiation for a job, an offer usually includes various benefits in addition to the salary. Such as paid time off, relocation expenses, stock options, etc. Some you may want more than others. So you trade away for the benefits you have little use for in exchange for more salary or other benefits you value more.
A good negotiator can produce a win-win both sides benefit solution by mutual determination of what each side values and does not value - it is not zero sum, just like your garage sale is not zero sum.
You're right. The point I had intended to make was more like setting a price on the garage sale items and simply saying "no" to lowball offers; getting market value doesn't have to require giving up anything.
To be fair, i don’t think OP described a situation where one side is winning, so there is no compromise. In the case of compromise, i envision having to give up something i want for something I want more. Giving up something i don’t want for something I want feels like just regular negotiating, and feels like a space in which everyone can win.
Ending up with a significantly higher salary than your peers isn't always the best outcome either. It sets expectations that you may not be able to meet.
On the other hand, why don't you just tell them the lowest number you'll accept?
> Well, the reason we have to play this game is because, like it or not, everyone else is playing it.
The real reason is it is completely unworkable to require a best offer from one side and not the other side.
Negotiation is central and inevitable to life with more than one person. Negotiating also means giving up things you don't value for things that you do value - making for much better allocation of resources.