9 ms·

Negotiating for me is really about creating a genuine win-win scenario for myself and my counterpart. This is impossible to achieve if you are playing (or are e

Negotiating for me is really about creating a genuine win-win scenario for myself and my counterpart. This is impossible to achieve if you are playing (or are even perceived to be playing) 'hardball.' My basic rules for all negotiations: 1. Be useful to your counterparty. (Simply, this means to be well-informed and listen intently. Present any information they need as they need it. Don't be the type to 'bury' the opposition in paperwork when you know they're looking for a few specific details.) 2. Be empathetic to their needs. (Everyone has a reason to show up to the table. If you can identify, with absolute clarity, what they need - you can help them get there. In return, it's often MUCH easier to get what you need. 3. Don't try to win. (The extra 1-5% you might gain in most cases is outweighed by the negativity of the event. If you're negotiating with a future employer, vendor, or potential client, then the value of having them actually want to talk to you is greater than the difference most of the time.) And lastly, #4 - If your counterparty plays hardball with you, give them a truly fair offer that addresses their needs. If they don't take a fair deal when offered, be prepared to walk away.

duaoebg 7y ago
Some cultures are win-lose, so to strike a deal you have to look like you're losing.
- Proziam 7y ago
  It's totally possible that I've been lucky in my career so far. Or just that my personality type lends well to this sort of thing. There are exceptions to every rule, but I've negotiated with Russians, Chinese, Americans, British, French, Italians...and just about every other European country and probably a few others I'm forgetting. (Deal sizes have been 1m+, but there's definitely layers above that where I don't have experience.) In all my experience thus far, I can honestly say I've only ever had the displeasure of having to manufacture a 'loss' once. And that was dealing with an American, albeit he was working for a large Chinese company. I'm always eager to hear about other folk's experiences, so if you can give some more insight into what cultures you've seen this with and how you've managed to handle it I'd love to listen! edit - I just realized the tone of this might come off as a tad 'superior' and that's truly not my intent. If you have experiences that can potentially make me better at what I do, I'm genuinely eager to learn.
  - nl 7y ago
    I agree with this. I would note that some people view negations as win/lose. Personally I prefer not to do business with them. Edit: this is really covered by the "be prepared to walk away" rule.
    - BubRoss 7y ago
      Walking away is the result of not being able to negotiate at all.
- paulsutter 7y ago
  Would you care to give some examples? I’ve heard this before but haven’t found it to be true in any situation involving repeated negotiations (not one-off transactions)
matwood 7y ago
> Don't try to win. I prefer to think of this as winning the short vs. long game. If a person wins this single deal for +5%, but blows up the relationship, they have likely lost the long game. Now any future deal with the 'loser' will be harder, and there may be ripple effects out to other deals. The above is not only with business deals, but with but life in general.
- WJW 7y ago
  The opposite effect is that if you don't expect to deal with this person in the future again, negotiating harder starts making sense again. If you play soft to improve the relationship with some random trinket vendor in a touristy location for example, you win nothing. The difficult part is in correctly estimating which type of situation you are in.
  - zeveb 7y ago
    > If you play soft to improve the relationship with some random trinket vendor in a touristy location for example, you win nothing. Is it really true that you would win nothing? I think that one might be a better person to leave just a little on the table rather than have that random trinket vendor right on the knife-edge between taking the deal and refusing it. One might even say that one could win one's soul!
    - WJW 7y ago
      You'll find no shortage of people wanting to negotiate with you if you are consistently willing to give up negotiating leverage for feeling good afterwards. In the case of the trinket vendor, they won't spend a second thinking about that one tourist who negotiated better or worse than the other hundred tourists that day. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with charity, but I don't think you should delude yourself into thinking it's anything other than that. Personally I can think of other causes I find more deserving than trinket vendors in touristy areas but whatever floats your boat on that.
    - tacheiordache 7y ago
      For some winning is crushing the opponent. But this mentality works short term only.. I prefer to find the middle ground if possible
gowld 7y ago
Yes you should take good notes, but in my experience if your counterparty isn't documenting their offer and concessions as a matter of course, they are lying and trying to trying to scam you.
anarazel 7y ago
> And lastly, #4 - If your counterparty plays hardball with you, give them a truly fair offer that addresses their needs. If they don't take a fair deal when offered, be prepared to walk away. I think this is easier said than done. A lot of negotiations are invariably started with very incomplete information. Knowing what a fair offer for the other side would be often isn't clear.
jonathanstrange 7y ago
I'd distinguish between scenarios in which there is a win-win solution and those in which there isn't. If there is a win-win scenario, then there should be one or more bargaining equilibria as a rational solution to the problem, and negotiating merely consists in providing the information and insight that allows both parties to reach or get close to an equilibirum. This activity is cooperative. "Real" negotiation takes place when there is no such equilibrium. For example, hostage negotiations, car sales, or a negotiation between a landlord and the tenant are of this sort. Maximizing your utility minimizes the other's utility, and vice versa. These types of negotiations proceed only by using psychology to trick the other side into making concessions. Being a tough guy is mostly counter-productive in such cases, too, it's more about exploiting cognitive biases like the anchoring effect. This activity is adversarial. Good mediators are people who are able to turn such win-lose scenarios into real bargaining with win-win solutions, not by mere "reframing", but by really changing the decision/distribution problem. That's often possible, if you make the goals of the participants and broader setting/presumptions part of the negotiations.
- zeveb 7y ago
  > "Real" negotiation takes place when there is no such equilibrium. For example, hostage negotiations, car sales, or a negotiation between a landlord and the tenant are of this sort. Maximizing your utility minimizes the other's utility, and vice versa. Ummm, hostage negotiations probably don't have a win-win, but I think that it's at least arguable that car sales and landlord-tenant negotiations do. After all, it's a win-win for the car buyer to have a car and the car dealer to have some dollars (lose-lose would be for the car-wanter to have no car, and the dealer to have no dollars). Likewise with landlord-tenant negotiations: the tenant wins by getting a place to use, and the landlord wins by getting money. Sure, the tenant would like to use the place with no restrictions whatsoever, and the landlord would like all the money of the richest tenant ever, but there's a point where each gets enough of what he wants to make the deal worth making.
  - LanceH 7y ago
    The mistake in gp is that a car buyer and a tenant are not in a zero sum negotiation. If you look solely at the car purchase a buy and seller are. But there is more to that -- there is the time spent shopping and the advertising to acquire a customer. The clock is constantly running on both of those. So it is a positive (or elimination of a negative) to complete a deal. This is why it is easiest to negotiate when you don't actually need to.
Spooky23 7y ago
#4 is key, and in business, you often lose that ability. You can’t tell AWS, Microsoft or Oracle to pound sand, for example. (In most cases.) In those situations, usually the path to getting the best outcome is more about you. If you deeply understand what you need, especially as compared to what you want, you can get relative advantage. Usually people who are selling things care about this quarter more than next year. If you understand what they need to get, you can usually find a way to make things work.
denzil_correa 7y ago
All negotiations work in good faith until you encounter Information Asymmetry [0]. Then, it is really a "win-lose" situation. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_asymmetry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_asymmetry
- Proziam 7y ago
  This is absolutely true, and I address this as part of rule #1. -- Below is how I mitigate that in my world, but if anyone has good strategies/tactics to handle such scenarios, please share! Being well-informed means going in with the best possible knowledge. Of course, there's always the chance to step on a land-mine, but more often than not if you put in the work you can learn everything you need to know to frame the negotiation in a constructive manner. Some really important points that are relevant for what I do (and may help others!) 1. Who are the stakeholders in the negotiation? Is it the person I'm speaking with, their superior, or a party much farther removed (shareholder/board member/internal influencer) that must be identified. 2. Who in their company is responsible for the information I need, if such a person even exists? Can I address the relevant questions directly to this person? (Sometimes this is as easy as sending an email and literally just asking. Sometimes not) 3. What are their high-level goals? If they are a public company you can glean a lot from their public reports and financials. Sometimes you can find out that you're basically swimming upstream, and sometimes you find out that your counterpart is basically mandated to make certain decisions. 4. Is there any visible progress towards their goals? If they're struggling to make headway, and you can identify this, you can re-focus the discussion on making their pain point go away. (This depends heavily on what you do, but for my field, I can almost always find accurate information) Ultimately, the prep work for a serious negotiation is what we internally call CIA work. It's a lot of intelligence gathering, asking (sometimes indirect) questions to get some insights, and doing the due diligence to ensure that we're as informed as we can be. Even with all that effort negotiations still fail sometimes. But if they fail, it's usually because the type of deal that would be struck wouldn't make sense in the first place. Of course, this doesn't apply to hostage negotiations or to what I could only describe as 'toxic' scenarios.
  - denzil_correa 7y ago
QuantumGood 7y ago
There is a both a significant overlap and significant difference between bargaining and negotiating. The part of negotiating that is not bargaining includes gaining rapport, what former FBI Hostage Negotiator Chris Voss calls "tactical empathy". President Lincoln summed it up best: "If you would win a man to your cause, first convince him that you are his sincere friend. "Therein is a drop of honey that catches his heart, which, say what he will, is the great high road to his reason, and which, when once gained, you will find but little trouble in convincing his judgment of the justice of your cause, if indeed that cause really be a just one." I teach some of the principles of rapport to stand-up comics. For example, do your material until they start ignoring you, then talk to the audience. When they start paying attention, return to your prepared material.
wrsh07 7y ago
This advice seems fine but not great for salary negotiation. In general, because of the information asymmetry and extreme advantage the employer has over the employee, accepting a weak offer can mean leaving over 30% on the table, and that matters to individuals. (It matters to some companies) You can have healthy conversations explaining that you want to reach an agreement that's good for both of you and still explain that you need to get paid. Companies and recruiters actually value that _more_. My recommended reading/listening on negotiating as an employee is patio11's posts. As a company, yeah, don't try to "win" and be fair (as much as is possible given funding constraints)
alexhutcheson 7y ago
The appropriate strategy is context-dependent. Your strategy is appropriate for most cases, but there are some situations where your interaction is a one-off, and you don't expect to have to interact with your counterparty at all after the transaction. Buying a car is a typical example here: If you're able to negotiate a car dealership down to a price that's minimal profitable for them, the dealer will be unhappy, but there are no negative consequences for you. In those situations you should absolutely "try to win" - an extra 1-5% off is money in your pocket, and there are no negative consequences beyond some uncomfortable interactions with the dealership staff. TL;DR - Don't buy a car or house using the same negotiating strategy you would use to negotiate a professional services contract.
- joncrane 7y ago
  I did this for a recent car purchase and the >there are no negative consequences for you. did not prove true. I have free service for the first year or so, not to mention all the warranty issues (none of those yet knock on wood) and guess which dealership is the only one close enough to my house to have free shuttle service? That's right, the dealership that I absolutely destroyed in a game of hardball when buying the car. Talk about a Pyrrhic victory. Edit: maybe the service department of my dealer is just really bad. I was assuming the poor work they were doing on my car was related to my experience with the sales staff.
  - pc86 7y ago
    So are you saying they are refusing to give you service or provide you with a shuttle they're providing other customers with simply because you talked them down to a price they still agreed to? Service and Sales are completely different departments. They rarely speak. They rarely interact. They report through different managers, sometimes up to the VP level for large dealer groups. I've known a handful of car salesmen (half dozen or so) and quite frankly can't believe a story like yours would ever happen at any dealership large enough to have both an in-house service center as well as free shuttle service.
    - sk5t 7y ago
slumdev 7y ago
> 3. Don't try to win. (The extra 1-5% you might gain in most cases is outweighed by the negativity of the event. If you're negotiating with a future employer, vendor, or potential client, then the value of having them actually want to talk to you is greater than the difference most of the time.) This one is useful when the two parties are equals, but it is horribly wrong in negotiating with a future employer. Once they've identified you as someone they want, and they've made you an initial offer, nothing you can say* will make them walk. And if you negotiate well, you'll be identified as higher value than someone who didn't. *Within reason - if they offer $120k and you ask $150k, that's fine. If they offer $120k and you ask $500k, you might run into problems.
- Proziam 7y ago
  Positioning fair market value as your asking price (whether it's 500k or 25k) isn't what I'd call trying to win. It's just asking for fair compensation. If you know the rough value of your position, which isn't normally too difficult to ascertain with reasonable accuracy, you can feel pretty good about making such a request. (And of course, if you are in the top x% for your role, then that just tips the scales further)
- P_I_Staker 7y ago
  Hey, this isn't really true. Some management / HR folk will brag about revoking offers. Makes them feel real good about themselves and the power they weild
  - slumdev 7y ago
    I don't want to work for those people. I'll keep negotiating to win when it comes to salary.
  - slumdev 7y ago
    Further, those people are loser PHBs whose antisocial behaviors drive away good talent. Their behavior will eventually catch up with them.
  - dentemple 7y ago
Pigo 7y ago
>be prepared to walk away Like everything, it depends on the situation. But this seems to be key to me. Most people seem to walk in with expectations of leaving with something. If you're not willing (or able) to walk away, you're at some kind of disadvantage.
LaserToy 7y ago
An amazing read - “Never split the difference. Negotiating as your life depended on it.” Interesting approach which uses Emotion aware technics to get what you want. The main point - let your opponent to negotiate with themselves.
- filoleg 7y ago
  That book was my first thought, once i read the parent comment you replied to. That comment pretty much exactly describes a very short summarized version of the approach that the book advocates for.
- steveeq1 7y ago
  A lot of what this book recommends are "psychological manipulation tactics".
  - LaserToy 7y ago
    Yes, exactly.
anarchodev 7y ago
In being empathetic to their needs, make sure you're also being "empathetic" to your own needs. This means recognizing that their "need" to get their development work done without spending too much money on you is directly opposed to your need to have healthcare and money for rent, food, etc. Obviously neither of these needs can be successfully ignored, but thinking of it this way helps me mitigate the guilt that comes with asking for more, without engaging the "winning" rhetoric even subconsciously.
ignoramous 7y ago
If this game at ncase [0] has taught me anything, it is that adversaries tend to exploit good intentions, more often than not. It is really difficult to navigate such waters, imo. I haven't figured out the panacea, but it is safe to assume that negotiation tactics must be in accordance with level of trust and situational context. Looking after one's own self-interest regardless tends be a nice rule of thumb. [0] https://ncase.me/trust/ https://ncase.me/trust/
eric234223 7y ago
This may be good for long term business deals but not optimal for software engineers salary negotiations. Considering the pace of job change, its optimal to take the hard negotiations.

duaoebg 7y ago

Some cultures are win-lose, so to strike a deal you have to look like you're losing.

Proziam 7y ago
It's totally possible that I've been lucky in my career so far. Or just that my personality type lends well to this sort of thing. There are exceptions to every rule, but I've negotiated with Russians, Chinese, Americans, British, French, Italians...and just about every other European country and probably a few others I'm forgetting. (Deal sizes have been 1m+, but there's definitely layers above that where I don't have experience.) In all my experience thus far, I can honestly say I've only ever had the displeasure of having to manufacture a 'loss' once. And that was dealing with an American, albeit he was working for a large Chinese company. I'm always eager to hear about other folk's experiences, so if you can give some more insight into what cultures you've seen this with and how you've managed to handle it I'd love to listen! edit - I just realized the tone of this might come off as a tad 'superior' and that's truly not my intent. If you have experiences that can potentially make me better at what I do, I'm genuinely eager to learn.
- nl 7y ago
  I agree with this. I would note that some people view negations as win/lose. Personally I prefer not to do business with them. Edit: this is really covered by the "be prepared to walk away" rule.
  - BubRoss 7y ago
    Walking away is the result of not being able to negotiate at all.
paulsutter 7y ago
Would you care to give some examples? I’ve heard this before but haven’t found it to be true in any situation involving repeated negotiations (not one-off transactions)

matwood 7y ago

> Don't try to win. I prefer to think of this as winning the short vs. long game. If a person wins this single deal for +5%, but blows up the relationship, they have likely lost the long game. Now any future deal with the 'loser' will be harder, and there may be ripple effects out to other deals. The above is not only with business deals, but with but life in general.

WJW 7y ago
The opposite effect is that if you don't expect to deal with this person in the future again, negotiating harder starts making sense again. If you play soft to improve the relationship with some random trinket vendor in a touristy location for example, you win nothing. The difficult part is in correctly estimating which type of situation you are in.
- zeveb 7y ago
  > If you play soft to improve the relationship with some random trinket vendor in a touristy location for example, you win nothing. Is it really true that you would win nothing? I think that one might be a better person to leave just a little on the table rather than have that random trinket vendor right on the knife-edge between taking the deal and refusing it. One might even say that one could win one's soul!
  - WJW 7y ago
    You'll find no shortage of people wanting to negotiate with you if you are consistently willing to give up negotiating leverage for feeling good afterwards. In the case of the trinket vendor, they won't spend a second thinking about that one tourist who negotiated better or worse than the other hundred tourists that day. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with charity, but I don't think you should delude yourself into thinking it's anything other than that. Personally I can think of other causes I find more deserving than trinket vendors in touristy areas but whatever floats your boat on that.
  - tacheiordache 7y ago
    For some winning is crushing the opponent. But this mentality works short term only.. I prefer to find the middle ground if possible

gowld 7y ago

Yes you should take good notes, but in my experience if your counterparty isn't documenting their offer and concessions as a matter of course, they are lying and trying to trying to scam you.

anarazel 7y ago

> And lastly, #4 - If your counterparty plays hardball with you, give them a truly fair offer that addresses their needs. If they don't take a fair deal when offered, be prepared to walk away. I think this is easier said than done. A lot of negotiations are invariably started with very incomplete information. Knowing what a fair offer for the other side would be often isn't clear.

jonathanstrange 7y ago

I'd distinguish between scenarios in which there is a win-win solution and those in which there isn't. If there is a win-win scenario, then there should be one or more bargaining equilibria as a rational solution to the problem, and negotiating merely consists in providing the information and insight that allows both parties to reach or get close to an equilibirum. This activity is cooperative. "Real" negotiation takes place when there is no such equilibrium. For example, hostage negotiations, car sales, or a negotiation between a landlord and the tenant are of this sort. Maximizing your utility minimizes the other's utility, and vice versa. These types of negotiations proceed only by using psychology to trick the other side into making concessions. Being a tough guy is mostly counter-productive in such cases, too, it's more about exploiting cognitive biases like the anchoring effect. This activity is adversarial. Good mediators are people who are able to turn such win-lose scenarios into real bargaining with win-win solutions, not by mere "reframing", but by really changing the decision/distribution problem. That's often possible, if you make the goals of the participants and broader setting/presumptions part of the negotiations.

zeveb 7y ago
> "Real" negotiation takes place when there is no such equilibrium. For example, hostage negotiations, car sales, or a negotiation between a landlord and the tenant are of this sort. Maximizing your utility minimizes the other's utility, and vice versa. Ummm, hostage negotiations probably don't have a win-win, but I think that it's at least arguable that car sales and landlord-tenant negotiations do. After all, it's a win-win for the car buyer to have a car and the car dealer to have some dollars (lose-lose would be for the car-wanter to have no car, and the dealer to have no dollars). Likewise with landlord-tenant negotiations: the tenant wins by getting a place to use, and the landlord wins by getting money. Sure, the tenant would like to use the place with no restrictions whatsoever, and the landlord would like all the money of the richest tenant ever, but there's a point where each gets enough of what he wants to make the deal worth making.
- LanceH 7y ago
  The mistake in gp is that a car buyer and a tenant are not in a zero sum negotiation. If you look solely at the car purchase a buy and seller are. But there is more to that -- there is the time spent shopping and the advertising to acquire a customer. The clock is constantly running on both of those. So it is a positive (or elimination of a negative) to complete a deal. This is why it is easiest to negotiate when you don't actually need to.

Spooky23 7y ago

#4 is key, and in business, you often lose that ability. You can’t tell AWS, Microsoft or Oracle to pound sand, for example. (In most cases.) In those situations, usually the path to getting the best outcome is more about you. If you deeply understand what you need, especially as compared to what you want, you can get relative advantage. Usually people who are selling things care about this quarter more than next year. If you understand what they need to get, you can usually find a way to make things work.

denzil_correa 7y ago

All negotiations work in good faith until you encounter Information Asymmetry [0]. Then, it is really a "win-lose" situation. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_asymmetry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_asymmetry

Proziam 7y ago
This is absolutely true, and I address this as part of rule #1. -- Below is how I mitigate that in my world, but if anyone has good strategies/tactics to handle such scenarios, please share! Being well-informed means going in with the best possible knowledge. Of course, there's always the chance to step on a land-mine, but more often than not if you put in the work you can learn everything you need to know to frame the negotiation in a constructive manner. Some really important points that are relevant for what I do (and may help others!) 1. Who are the stakeholders in the negotiation? Is it the person I'm speaking with, their superior, or a party much farther removed (shareholder/board member/internal influencer) that must be identified. 2. Who in their company is responsible for the information I need, if such a person even exists? Can I address the relevant questions directly to this person? (Sometimes this is as easy as sending an email and literally just asking. Sometimes not) 3. What are their high-level goals? If they are a public company you can glean a lot from their public reports and financials. Sometimes you can find out that you're basically swimming upstream, and sometimes you find out that your counterpart is basically mandated to make certain decisions. 4. Is there any visible progress towards their goals? If they're struggling to make headway, and you can identify this, you can re-focus the discussion on making their pain point go away. (This depends heavily on what you do, but for my field, I can almost always find accurate information) Ultimately, the prep work for a serious negotiation is what we internally call CIA work. It's a lot of intelligence gathering, asking (sometimes indirect) questions to get some insights, and doing the due diligence to ensure that we're as informed as we can be. Even with all that effort negotiations still fail sometimes. But if they fail, it's usually because the type of deal that would be struck wouldn't make sense in the first place. Of course, this doesn't apply to hostage negotiations or to what I could only describe as 'toxic' scenarios.
- denzil_correa 7y ago

QuantumGood 7y ago

There is a both a significant overlap and significant difference between bargaining and negotiating. The part of negotiating that is not bargaining includes gaining rapport, what former FBI Hostage Negotiator Chris Voss calls "tactical empathy". President Lincoln summed it up best: "If you would win a man to your cause, first convince him that you are his sincere friend. "Therein is a drop of honey that catches his heart, which, say what he will, is the great high road to his reason, and which, when once gained, you will find but little trouble in convincing his judgment of the justice of your cause, if indeed that cause really be a just one." I teach some of the principles of rapport to stand-up comics. For example, do your material until they start ignoring you, then talk to the audience. When they start paying attention, return to your prepared material.

wrsh07 7y ago

This advice seems fine but not great for salary negotiation. In general, because of the information asymmetry and extreme advantage the employer has over the employee, accepting a weak offer can mean leaving over 30% on the table, and that matters to individuals. (It matters to some companies) You can have healthy conversations explaining that you want to reach an agreement that's good for both of you and still explain that you need to get paid. Companies and recruiters actually value that _more_. My recommended reading/listening on negotiating as an employee is patio11's posts. As a company, yeah, don't try to "win" and be fair (as much as is possible given funding constraints)

alexhutcheson 7y ago

The appropriate strategy is context-dependent. Your strategy is appropriate for most cases, but there are some situations where your interaction is a one-off, and you don't expect to have to interact with your counterparty at all after the transaction. Buying a car is a typical example here: If you're able to negotiate a car dealership down to a price that's minimal profitable for them, the dealer will be unhappy, but there are no negative consequences for you. In those situations you should absolutely "try to win" - an extra 1-5% off is money in your pocket, and there are no negative consequences beyond some uncomfortable interactions with the dealership staff. TL;DR - Don't buy a car or house using the same negotiating strategy you would use to negotiate a professional services contract.

joncrane 7y ago
I did this for a recent car purchase and the >there are no negative consequences for you. did not prove true. I have free service for the first year or so, not to mention all the warranty issues (none of those yet knock on wood) and guess which dealership is the only one close enough to my house to have free shuttle service? That's right, the dealership that I absolutely destroyed in a game of hardball when buying the car. Talk about a Pyrrhic victory. Edit: maybe the service department of my dealer is just really bad. I was assuming the poor work they were doing on my car was related to my experience with the sales staff.
- pc86 7y ago
  So are you saying they are refusing to give you service or provide you with a shuttle they're providing other customers with simply because you talked them down to a price they still agreed to? Service and Sales are completely different departments. They rarely speak. They rarely interact. They report through different managers, sometimes up to the VP level for large dealer groups. I've known a handful of car salesmen (half dozen or so) and quite frankly can't believe a story like yours would ever happen at any dealership large enough to have both an in-house service center as well as free shuttle service.
  - sk5t 7y ago

slumdev 7y ago

> 3. Don't try to win. (The extra 1-5% you might gain in most cases is outweighed by the negativity of the event. If you're negotiating with a future employer, vendor, or potential client, then the value of having them actually want to talk to you is greater than the difference most of the time.) This one is useful when the two parties are equals, but it is horribly wrong in negotiating with a future employer. Once they've identified you as someone they want, and they've made you an initial offer, nothing you can say* will make them walk. And if you negotiate well, you'll be identified as higher value than someone who didn't. *Within reason - if they offer $120k and you ask $150k, that's fine. If they offer $120k and you ask $500k, you might run into problems.

Proziam 7y ago
Positioning fair market value as your asking price (whether it's 500k or 25k) isn't what I'd call trying to win. It's just asking for fair compensation. If you know the rough value of your position, which isn't normally too difficult to ascertain with reasonable accuracy, you can feel pretty good about making such a request. (And of course, if you are in the top x% for your role, then that just tips the scales further)
P_I_Staker 7y ago
Hey, this isn't really true. Some management / HR folk will brag about revoking offers. Makes them feel real good about themselves and the power they weild
- slumdev 7y ago
  I don't want to work for those people. I'll keep negotiating to win when it comes to salary.
- slumdev 7y ago
  Further, those people are loser PHBs whose antisocial behaviors drive away good talent. Their behavior will eventually catch up with them.
- dentemple 7y ago

Pigo 7y ago

>be prepared to walk away Like everything, it depends on the situation. But this seems to be key to me. Most people seem to walk in with expectations of leaving with something. If you're not willing (or able) to walk away, you're at some kind of disadvantage.

LaserToy 7y ago

An amazing read - “Never split the difference. Negotiating as your life depended on it.” Interesting approach which uses Emotion aware technics to get what you want. The main point - let your opponent to negotiate with themselves.

filoleg 7y ago
That book was my first thought, once i read the parent comment you replied to. That comment pretty much exactly describes a very short summarized version of the approach that the book advocates for.
steveeq1 7y ago
A lot of what this book recommends are "psychological manipulation tactics".
- LaserToy 7y ago
  Yes, exactly.

anarchodev 7y ago

In being empathetic to their needs, make sure you're also being "empathetic" to your own needs. This means recognizing that their "need" to get their development work done without spending too much money on you is directly opposed to your need to have healthcare and money for rent, food, etc. Obviously neither of these needs can be successfully ignored, but thinking of it this way helps me mitigate the guilt that comes with asking for more, without engaging the "winning" rhetoric even subconsciously.

ignoramous 7y ago

If this game at ncase [0] has taught me anything, it is that adversaries tend to exploit good intentions, more often than not. It is really difficult to navigate such waters, imo. I haven't figured out the panacea, but it is safe to assume that negotiation tactics must be in accordance with level of trust and situational context. Looking after one's own self-interest regardless tends be a nice rule of thumb. [0] https://ncase.me/trust/ https://ncase.me/trust/

eric234223 7y ago

This may be good for long term business deals but not optimal for software engineers salary negotiations. Considering the pace of job change, its optimal to take the hard negotiations.