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I'm not an Amazonian, but I wanted to chime in here to say I think this thread is a great idea and I would love to see more like it. I write about salary negot

I'm not an Amazonian, but I wanted to chime in here to say I think this thread is a great idea and I would love to see more like it. I write about salary negotiation and coach people through it, and I think sharing salaries publicly will encourage more people to negotiate and get paid what they're worth. I recently coached a new Amazon employee, and he got a very good offer, which he increased by about 15% using VERY simple negotiation tactics that we discussed. If he hadn't negotiated, he would've still been paid well, but would have left 15% on the table before he was even in the door. I submitted this link yesterday—it's a Salary Negotiation workshop I did for developers in Orlando last week. It's definitely relevant to this conversation: EDIT: Here's a direct link to the Salary Negotiation workshop summary to save you a click: http://bit.ly/21zFG5q http://bit.ly/21zFG5q Here's the HN submission for posterity: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11305683 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11305683 (Not sure why I originally linked to an HN submission linking to the workshop. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯) Nice job starting this thread!

p4wnc6 11y ago
I'm interested in what your negotiation principles are. I've always heard that a candidate should never share salary information and require the company to provide the first concrete number in the form of their initial offer. However, I've repeatedly used all of the "business-professional" and "HR approved" sorts of conversational techniques to enact this advice, and the only result that has ever occurred is either (a) the company literally refuses to even conduct a single interview with me before knowing salary information, or (b) the company finally makes a job offer and it is extremely low, something around 50%, of what I have earned previously in similar roles. 95% of the time I say I am more focused on assessing cultural and technical fit for the position, making sure I would jell with the team, finding out more about the company, learning more about the trade-offs required for the role, etc., as reasons for not providing salary information as literally the first point of communication with HR, it results in an instantaneous rejection. I still believe candidates should not agree to unfair information asymmetry by revealing their salary or wage preferences first. The problem is it just seems that something like 95% of all hiring managers will outright immediately reject you, on principle, if you don't agree to bear that unfair information asymmetry. All the great techie blog posts on being a better negotiator, like this:< http://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/01/23/salary-negotiation/ http://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/01/23/salary-negotiation/ > -- they sound great and give me a pumped up rah rah feeling, but in practice they basically never work. My interviewing experience with this has covered large multi-national companies, tech firms, small boutique quantitative finance firms, start-ups, consulting companies, and education technology. There certainly are industries I am missing, but it has seemed like a universal phenomenon to me.
- JoshDoody 11y ago
  One of my negotiation principles is "Don't disclose your current or desired salary" during the negotiation. With persistence, the recruiter or hiring manager will usually just move on. Another principle is that you should always counter. So I'm _extremely_ surprised to hear that 95% of the time, people have refused to continue talking with you. I can't refute your experience, but I can say this has never happened to me or anyone that I've worked with to negotiate a starting salary. Patrick's writing, which you alluded to, was a big inspiration for me to write and think more deeply about this subject. He knows what he's talking about. If you watch the Salary Negotiation workshop (linked in my original comment), you'll see a section on "The Dreaded Salary Question" and there was a 15-minute discussion on it in the Q&A. (Both are linked in the notes below the embedded video.) You might watch those segments to see if anything jumps out at you that yo haven't' tried before. Thanks for the question!
  - p4wnc6 11y ago
    In the handful of cases where the company was OK with my non-answer about salary, and I went on to get all the way to a job offer, the salary ended up being entirely miscalibrated to a candidate of my skill and experience, and the overall interview process (which usually included some technical screens, programming tests, take-home tests, and long on-site technical interviews) was a massive waste of my time, not to mention extremely stressful. Places where I experienced this gross miscalibration: a large U.S. food retailer's digital analytics team; a small pharmaceutical research software company; a 25-year-old multinational scientific computing and supercomputing consulting firm; and an FFRDC research lab attached to a university. In one of these places they even went on at length about how much the hiring manager liked me, how I fit all the skills they were seeking, and many team members remarked that I would "mesh instantly" with the team, and so forth. I had walked away from those interviews knowing that I had done a good job and feeling very confident. Then they made a job offer than was around 75% of what I had been making before in a similar job in a similar cost of living area, and the new job's other benefits were far worse. When I told them what I was making before, they just said, "it just looks like there's a bit of a gap here that we are unable to make up, but we think you'll be very happy on this team so we hope you'll consider our offer despite that." The people interviewing me in that company had even gone on at length about how successful their business unit had been recently, signing a new important contract, and how their biggest challenge was recruiting good people and staffing up to support some projects that had important deadlines looming towards the end of 2016. I still continue to avoid sharing salary info, because I'm not convinced that sharing it would be better. But I think what you might not be accounting for is that almost every single candidate in the tech world does share salary, freely and openly, from the very first minute they are asked, without even realizing it might have any side effects. A lot of corporate recruiters are conditioned to expect this, and the minute someone fails to share salary, they flag them as "not a dope, can't hire them cheaply" and they just move on. Constraint number one, above any and all talent requirements, is that they must be cheap to hire ... for a lot of firms.
dclowd9901 11y ago
I've always been a fan of daylight on salaries. People get uncomfortable thinking about their worth in relation to others, but having it exposed means two things: 1) you can easily figure out who you should be more like and 2) it prevents bullshit from being the cause of someone receiving high pay. If I'm going in for a salary negotiation and I ask my boss why so-and-so makes $50k more a year than I do, he or she better have a damn good explanation for it. The problem at this point is societal. It's been taboo for so long that people still harbor deep discomfort with it. Maybe they believe they don't deserve the pay they're getting so they wish for it to be quieted. If that's the case, then fuck those people.
- kazinator 11y ago
  Oops, boss coudn't explain it. Now you, too, make $50K more due to some bullshit cause. :)
jondubois 11y ago
I think you should share your salary with as many people as possible. This "don't share" policy is just a trick used by companies to keep labor costs down. If employees know each other's pay, they will start demanding raises - Then you get in a situation like in the finance sector where companies will be forced to pay big bonuses to hold on to important employees. Companies don't want that - They want their engineers to stay cheap, dependent and foolishly loyal. It's how the system works; nice people get screwed. In your career, you will only receive the minimum amount that you're willing to accept - It's HR people's job to make sure that you don't get anything more than that.
- googsomeday 11y ago
  I think that a quarterly "Ask HN: How much do you make?" Would be a great addition to the "Who's Hiring?" threads. I posted one for Google here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11314449 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11314449 This Amazon thread has been very enlightening.
- diskcat 11y ago
  The problem is that when you share your salary people who make less than you start despising you and people who make more than you start looking down on you. It's less of a corporate conspiracy but more "this is why you can't have nice things". People just can not handle it in a mature and responsible way, which is why the 'don't talk about money' "common sense" developed.
  - ftwynn 11y ago
    My experience is that people tend to hate the employer, not the employee. Less, "You make more than me? You earn too much!" and more "You make more than me? I should be paid more!"
    - diskcat 11y ago
      That's because he's talking to you. He's not gonna tell you he despises you to your face. But secretly he wonders: "why does he get more than me, im smarter than him!!". This is then bottled up under 10 psi of pressure until the perfect moment when the slightest thing sets it off and creates a scene in the office.

p4wnc6 11y ago

I'm interested in what your negotiation principles are. I've always heard that a candidate should never share salary information and require the company to provide the first concrete number in the form of their initial offer. However, I've repeatedly used all of the "business-professional" and "HR approved" sorts of conversational techniques to enact this advice, and the only result that has ever occurred is either (a) the company literally refuses to even conduct a single interview with me before knowing salary information, or (b) the company finally makes a job offer and it is extremely low, something around 50%, of what I have earned previously in similar roles. 95% of the time I say I am more focused on assessing cultural and technical fit for the position, making sure I would jell with the team, finding out more about the company, learning more about the trade-offs required for the role, etc., as reasons for not providing salary information as literally the first point of communication with HR, it results in an instantaneous rejection. I still believe candidates should not agree to unfair information asymmetry by revealing their salary or wage preferences first. The problem is it just seems that something like 95% of all hiring managers will outright immediately reject you, on principle, if you don't agree to bear that unfair information asymmetry. All the great techie blog posts on being a better negotiator, like this:< http://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/01/23/salary-negotiation/ http://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/01/23/salary-negotiation/ > -- they sound great and give me a pumped up rah rah feeling, but in practice they basically never work. My interviewing experience with this has covered large multi-national companies, tech firms, small boutique quantitative finance firms, start-ups, consulting companies, and education technology. There certainly are industries I am missing, but it has seemed like a universal phenomenon to me.

JoshDoody 11y ago
One of my negotiation principles is "Don't disclose your current or desired salary" during the negotiation. With persistence, the recruiter or hiring manager will usually just move on. Another principle is that you should always counter. So I'm _extremely_ surprised to hear that 95% of the time, people have refused to continue talking with you. I can't refute your experience, but I can say this has never happened to me or anyone that I've worked with to negotiate a starting salary. Patrick's writing, which you alluded to, was a big inspiration for me to write and think more deeply about this subject. He knows what he's talking about. If you watch the Salary Negotiation workshop (linked in my original comment), you'll see a section on "The Dreaded Salary Question" and there was a 15-minute discussion on it in the Q&A. (Both are linked in the notes below the embedded video.) You might watch those segments to see if anything jumps out at you that yo haven't' tried before. Thanks for the question!
- p4wnc6 11y ago
  In the handful of cases where the company was OK with my non-answer about salary, and I went on to get all the way to a job offer, the salary ended up being entirely miscalibrated to a candidate of my skill and experience, and the overall interview process (which usually included some technical screens, programming tests, take-home tests, and long on-site technical interviews) was a massive waste of my time, not to mention extremely stressful. Places where I experienced this gross miscalibration: a large U.S. food retailer's digital analytics team; a small pharmaceutical research software company; a 25-year-old multinational scientific computing and supercomputing consulting firm; and an FFRDC research lab attached to a university. In one of these places they even went on at length about how much the hiring manager liked me, how I fit all the skills they were seeking, and many team members remarked that I would "mesh instantly" with the team, and so forth. I had walked away from those interviews knowing that I had done a good job and feeling very confident. Then they made a job offer than was around 75% of what I had been making before in a similar job in a similar cost of living area, and the new job's other benefits were far worse. When I told them what I was making before, they just said, "it just looks like there's a bit of a gap here that we are unable to make up, but we think you'll be very happy on this team so we hope you'll consider our offer despite that." The people interviewing me in that company had even gone on at length about how successful their business unit had been recently, signing a new important contract, and how their biggest challenge was recruiting good people and staffing up to support some projects that had important deadlines looming towards the end of 2016. I still continue to avoid sharing salary info, because I'm not convinced that sharing it would be better. But I think what you might not be accounting for is that almost every single candidate in the tech world does share salary, freely and openly, from the very first minute they are asked, without even realizing it might have any side effects. A lot of corporate recruiters are conditioned to expect this, and the minute someone fails to share salary, they flag them as "not a dope, can't hire them cheaply" and they just move on. Constraint number one, above any and all talent requirements, is that they must be cheap to hire ... for a lot of firms.

dclowd9901 11y ago

I've always been a fan of daylight on salaries. People get uncomfortable thinking about their worth in relation to others, but having it exposed means two things: 1) you can easily figure out who you should be more like and 2) it prevents bullshit from being the cause of someone receiving high pay. If I'm going in for a salary negotiation and I ask my boss why so-and-so makes $50k more a year than I do, he or she better have a damn good explanation for it. The problem at this point is societal. It's been taboo for so long that people still harbor deep discomfort with it. Maybe they believe they don't deserve the pay they're getting so they wish for it to be quieted. If that's the case, then fuck those people.

kazinator 11y ago
Oops, boss coudn't explain it. Now you, too, make $50K more due to some bullshit cause. :)

jondubois 11y ago

I think you should share your salary with as many people as possible. This "don't share" policy is just a trick used by companies to keep labor costs down. If employees know each other's pay, they will start demanding raises - Then you get in a situation like in the finance sector where companies will be forced to pay big bonuses to hold on to important employees. Companies don't want that - They want their engineers to stay cheap, dependent and foolishly loyal. It's how the system works; nice people get screwed. In your career, you will only receive the minimum amount that you're willing to accept - It's HR people's job to make sure that you don't get anything more than that.

googsomeday 11y ago
I think that a quarterly "Ask HN: How much do you make?" Would be a great addition to the "Who's Hiring?" threads. I posted one for Google here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11314449 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11314449 This Amazon thread has been very enlightening.
diskcat 11y ago
The problem is that when you share your salary people who make less than you start despising you and people who make more than you start looking down on you. It's less of a corporate conspiracy but more "this is why you can't have nice things". People just can not handle it in a mature and responsible way, which is why the 'don't talk about money' "common sense" developed.
- ftwynn 11y ago
  My experience is that people tend to hate the employer, not the employee. Less, "You make more than me? You earn too much!" and more "You make more than me? I should be paid more!"
  - diskcat 11y ago
    That's because he's talking to you. He's not gonna tell you he despises you to your face. But secretly he wonders: "why does he get more than me, im smarter than him!!". This is then bottled up under 10 psi of pressure until the perfect moment when the slightest thing sets it off and creates a scene in the office.