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Just throwing a crazy idea out in the wild here: Have a service where a professional negotiates salary on your behalf. 1. Is there interest in this? 2. Woul

by DevX101 16y ago

Just throwing a crazy idea out in the wild here: Have a service where a professional negotiates salary on your behalf. 1. Is there interest in this? 2. Would this be feasible? Employers sure as hell wouldn't like it, but I wonder if they'd tolerate it.

mistermann 16y ago
That's supposedly what my headhunter does for me on my behalf (part of how they try to justify their $10 to $25 per hour cut), but I've never seen them do this successfully. It makes no difference to them, they get paid the same either way.
- smanek 16y ago
  In my experience, head hunters usually get paid a fee equal to N months of your salary (where, most often, 3<=N<=6). If they negotiate my monthly salary up to 12K instead of 10K they'll probably make 6K-12K extra, so they do have an incentive to negotiate. Of course, their incentive is much smaller than mine, since an initial 2K/month salary boost might translate to 50K in extra salary over my tenure with that company and, conceivably, extra hundreds of thousands over my career.
  - andrewf 16y ago
    If it would take a recruiter more than 20% more effort to get your salary up by 20%, they are better off putting their time into placing as many people as possible. Because they can increase their total commissions by 20% if they increase their number of employees placed by that much.
    - natch 16y ago
      True if they can find a pool of candidates that don't care about getting better compensation. Many people, like me, are not in that pool. If they can't get me the compensation I ask for, they won't place me. Someone else will place me instead. So by not doing that 20% of work, they are losing not 20%, but 100% of what they would make from my placement. But yes, perhaps they can make it up by finding people who don't care about compensation. But really my take on this is different. If it takes an extra 20% of work, then the hiring company is probably not for me. I'd rather work for companies where good compensation is a given, because they tend to do other things better as well.
  - prostoalex 16y ago
    Exactly, they could spend next day negotiating on your behalf to get extra 10% for you and 2% for themselves, or placing another candidate, and boosting their revenue by extra 100%.
- capstone 16y ago
  My experience has been the opposite. A few observations based on 7+ years consulting in NYC, some through headhunters, some direct: - Companies that hire through recruiters have deep yearly budgets; companies that hire direct have shallow project budgets. I have never not gotten a higher rate through a recruiter. - Companies that hire through recruiters pay on time; companies that hire direct pay late and usually after repeated prodding; sometimes they don't pay at all. - Companies that hire through recruiters pay for hours worked; companies that hire direct fight for upfront concessions and then fight some more when the bill comes. - Most recruiters make a percentage and not a set fee, although yes, it's usually capped at around $25/hour. However that means that you need to be making upward of $100/hour to hit that cap. Which means that for the majority of people, the recruiter does make more when you make more. All in all I never understood the customary programmer/recruiter animosity. Making more and never having to deal with collections is awesome. In my book, recruiters' cut is well-deserved.
  - mistermann 16y ago
    My experiences are the exact opposite of yours....not that you're wrong, more likely because of different industries. Here, headhunters add almost no value to the equation. More than 50% of them don't have the remotest clue what the technologies they're screening for are. It's really a sad state. Whenever I work direct for a company, I always make way more (basically, my cut, and the headhunters cut). Despite this, companies seem to always work through headhunters...I've never seen any manager ask any developer "do you know any good ____ people that might be available?" It's really bizarre.
    - metageek 16y ago
      At the past few companies I've worked at, managers have definitely tried to get employees to recommend people, and have offered substantial referral bonuses. (Less than a recruiter would get, but still a nice chunk of money.)
dabent 16y ago
A recruiter can do this to some extent, but the recruiter is driven by a need to get the deal closed, so they can get their fee from the employer. In other words, the recruiter will get you the minimum amount needed to get you to sign on. I honestly don't think it would even work that well if you were paying the fee, either. The third party would still have a strong incentive to get you to sign on quickly, rather than extracting the N+1th dollar from the employer. To complicate matters, I've worked with many BigCo HR departments, and really doubt that they'd deal with a third party that they didn't have on their approved vendor list. In fact, a third party would probably be a deal breaker.
- Peroni 16y ago
  * the recruiter will get you the minimum amount needed to get you to sign on.* Rubbish. Why would we compromise our bottom line for the sake of getting a deal done? Sure I could push you in at your absolute minimum salary but if you get a better offer in the mean time then I lose my fee. It's in my best interests to get you as high a salary as I can possibly get you.
  - deong 16y ago
    Because you have more than one person you're working with at a time. You get X% of their offer. If they get a higher offer, you get (X+delta)%. If that delta% of the offer that makes up your difference is lower than the value of your time spent doing other things (finding someone else a job), then it doesn't make sense for you to spend the time. That's the basic issue. If you're getting 5%, then by definition you should care 5% as much as the candidate what the final salary ends up being, and thus care much less if it's a little bit lower than it could have been.
    - Peroni 16y ago
      Firstly, our percentage is a lot higher than 5% so we have more invested than you may think. Secondly, negotiating an offer is the quickest and easiest part. It hardly consumes any time at all by comparison to the amount of time and effort invested just to get to the point where there is any offer at all. If I've invested a massive amount of time and effort into getting a candidate through the process to the point where the employer wants to make them an offer, believe me, I am going to fight tooth and nail to squeeze every penny from the employer that I can get.
ulrich 16y ago
I was thinking about this a lot of times. Having some person to handle the kind of work I dislike. But in the end, I guess it's too hard to realize. Headhunters are supposed to help you with it, but they never do. There had to be a different, employee-friendly incentive for them. However, I'd love to be proved wrong.
brk 16y ago
This would only work if you did it in scale. It would be hard to have someone negotiate just on your behalf, there is more strength in numbers. If you could get a unified group of employees to all sign an agreement to be represented as a group, then you would have collective bargaining power...
- jedsmith 16y ago
  United Computer Nerds Local 0x55AA?
  - krakensden 16y ago
    Something about that name suddenly makes me want a union. Or maybe a t-shirt.
    - Natsu 16y ago
      Should get out the list of hex words that was posted to HN a while back. There have to be more interesting hex strings than 0x55AA.
      - metageek 16y ago
        0xDEADBEEF
- sethg 16y ago
  The two routes to that kind of arrangement would be to either organize your immediate co-workers into a union (http://www.cwa-union.org/pages/how_to_organize_a_union http://www.cwa-union.org/pages/how_to_organize_a_union) or to get together with colleagues and form a contracting firm.
- ohyes 16y ago
  The only problem with this is that then you would be negotiating on the merits of the entire group of employees, rather than the merits of your own work. If we take the 'order of magnitude of productivity' difference in programmers seriously, it seems that the best programmers would have a serious incentive not to join the union, were they actually able to negotiate proportional to their ability level. (Granted, they don't and it is unlikely you will find an employer willing to pay you 10x as much as one of your coworkers, so maybe it does make sense). Also, the governor of Wisconsin wouldn't stand for it, and the company would likely fire the lot of you as soon as you decided to unionize.
tptacek 16y ago
They would not tolerate it and it wouldn't work. The only way to negotiate effectively is to come armed with information. As an employee of a company, you have no authority to delegate your confidentiality agreement to other parties (very few people in real companies actually have any signing authority). At most companies, you'd also be violating the unspoken norm that salaries are private. You can disagree with the the reasonableness of those two points, but the simple fact is the "service" would get you fired. A far better idea for a service would be for negotiation counseling. This service actually already exists, but is so touchy- feely- that it isn't taken seriously by hard-nosed tech workers, who as a result get rolled by their employers.
- khafra 16y ago
  For clarification: "Negotiation counseling" sounds different from "negotiation class." Is the difference that a counselor studies your portfolio and credentials and tells you how much to ask for, as well as how to ask for it? Or is it just a variation on learning to negotiate?
- ScottBurson 16y ago
  I think the idea is that the agent would negotiate the terms of the initial offer, i.e., this would happen before the tech worker joined the company. Certainly, once you're in, an agent is unlikely to be able to do anything for you. So the question is not whether it would get you fired but whether a prospective employer would negotiate with your agent. It depends on the circumstances, I'm sure, but in Silicon Valley, if you have skills that are in great demand, we just might be at a point where this could begin to work.
jtbigwoo 16y ago
Almost everybody in the entertainment business has an agent or manager that does the negotiation for them and tracks down additional opportunities for personal appearances and endorsements. Even the producer on the local talk radio show has an agent negotiating her pay and looking for additional revenue opportunities. It probably wouldn't work in other industries without a huge shift in expectations, but it really does work at thousands of employers.
pushingbits 16y ago
You mean like... a union?

by DevX101 16y ago

mistermann 16y ago

That's supposedly what my headhunter does for me on my behalf (part of how they try to justify their $10 to $25 per hour cut), but I've never seen them do this successfully. It makes no difference to them, they get paid the same either way.

smanek 16y ago
In my experience, head hunters usually get paid a fee equal to N months of your salary (where, most often, 3<=N<=6). If they negotiate my monthly salary up to 12K instead of 10K they'll probably make 6K-12K extra, so they do have an incentive to negotiate. Of course, their incentive is much smaller than mine, since an initial 2K/month salary boost might translate to 50K in extra salary over my tenure with that company and, conceivably, extra hundreds of thousands over my career.
- andrewf 16y ago
  If it would take a recruiter more than 20% more effort to get your salary up by 20%, they are better off putting their time into placing as many people as possible. Because they can increase their total commissions by 20% if they increase their number of employees placed by that much.
  - natch 16y ago
    True if they can find a pool of candidates that don't care about getting better compensation. Many people, like me, are not in that pool. If they can't get me the compensation I ask for, they won't place me. Someone else will place me instead. So by not doing that 20% of work, they are losing not 20%, but 100% of what they would make from my placement. But yes, perhaps they can make it up by finding people who don't care about compensation. But really my take on this is different. If it takes an extra 20% of work, then the hiring company is probably not for me. I'd rather work for companies where good compensation is a given, because they tend to do other things better as well.
- prostoalex 16y ago
  Exactly, they could spend next day negotiating on your behalf to get extra 10% for you and 2% for themselves, or placing another candidate, and boosting their revenue by extra 100%.
capstone 16y ago
My experience has been the opposite. A few observations based on 7+ years consulting in NYC, some through headhunters, some direct: - Companies that hire through recruiters have deep yearly budgets; companies that hire direct have shallow project budgets. I have never not gotten a higher rate through a recruiter. - Companies that hire through recruiters pay on time; companies that hire direct pay late and usually after repeated prodding; sometimes they don't pay at all. - Companies that hire through recruiters pay for hours worked; companies that hire direct fight for upfront concessions and then fight some more when the bill comes. - Most recruiters make a percentage and not a set fee, although yes, it's usually capped at around $25/hour. However that means that you need to be making upward of $100/hour to hit that cap. Which means that for the majority of people, the recruiter does make more when you make more. All in all I never understood the customary programmer/recruiter animosity. Making more and never having to deal with collections is awesome. In my book, recruiters' cut is well-deserved.
- mistermann 16y ago
  My experiences are the exact opposite of yours....not that you're wrong, more likely because of different industries. Here, headhunters add almost no value to the equation. More than 50% of them don't have the remotest clue what the technologies they're screening for are. It's really a sad state. Whenever I work direct for a company, I always make way more (basically, my cut, and the headhunters cut). Despite this, companies seem to always work through headhunters...I've never seen any manager ask any developer "do you know any good ____ people that might be available?" It's really bizarre.
  - metageek 16y ago
    At the past few companies I've worked at, managers have definitely tried to get employees to recommend people, and have offered substantial referral bonuses. (Less than a recruiter would get, but still a nice chunk of money.)

dabent 16y ago

A recruiter can do this to some extent, but the recruiter is driven by a need to get the deal closed, so they can get their fee from the employer. In other words, the recruiter will get you the minimum amount needed to get you to sign on. I honestly don't think it would even work that well if you were paying the fee, either. The third party would still have a strong incentive to get you to sign on quickly, rather than extracting the N+1th dollar from the employer. To complicate matters, I've worked with many BigCo HR departments, and really doubt that they'd deal with a third party that they didn't have on their approved vendor list. In fact, a third party would probably be a deal breaker.

Peroni 16y ago
* the recruiter will get you the minimum amount needed to get you to sign on.* Rubbish. Why would we compromise our bottom line for the sake of getting a deal done? Sure I could push you in at your absolute minimum salary but if you get a better offer in the mean time then I lose my fee. It's in my best interests to get you as high a salary as I can possibly get you.
- deong 16y ago
  Because you have more than one person you're working with at a time. You get X% of their offer. If they get a higher offer, you get (X+delta)%. If that delta% of the offer that makes up your difference is lower than the value of your time spent doing other things (finding someone else a job), then it doesn't make sense for you to spend the time. That's the basic issue. If you're getting 5%, then by definition you should care 5% as much as the candidate what the final salary ends up being, and thus care much less if it's a little bit lower than it could have been.
  - Peroni 16y ago
    Firstly, our percentage is a lot higher than 5% so we have more invested than you may think. Secondly, negotiating an offer is the quickest and easiest part. It hardly consumes any time at all by comparison to the amount of time and effort invested just to get to the point where there is any offer at all. If I've invested a massive amount of time and effort into getting a candidate through the process to the point where the employer wants to make them an offer, believe me, I am going to fight tooth and nail to squeeze every penny from the employer that I can get.

ulrich 16y ago

I was thinking about this a lot of times. Having some person to handle the kind of work I dislike. But in the end, I guess it's too hard to realize. Headhunters are supposed to help you with it, but they never do. There had to be a different, employee-friendly incentive for them. However, I'd love to be proved wrong.

brk 16y ago

This would only work if you did it in scale. It would be hard to have someone negotiate just on your behalf, there is more strength in numbers. If you could get a unified group of employees to all sign an agreement to be represented as a group, then you would have collective bargaining power...

jedsmith 16y ago
United Computer Nerds Local 0x55AA?
- krakensden 16y ago
  Something about that name suddenly makes me want a union. Or maybe a t-shirt.
  - Natsu 16y ago
    Should get out the list of hex words that was posted to HN a while back. There have to be more interesting hex strings than 0x55AA.
    - metageek 16y ago
      0xDEADBEEF
sethg 16y ago
The two routes to that kind of arrangement would be to either organize your immediate co-workers into a union (http://www.cwa-union.org/pages/how_to_organize_a_union http://www.cwa-union.org/pages/how_to_organize_a_union) or to get together with colleagues and form a contracting firm.
ohyes 16y ago
The only problem with this is that then you would be negotiating on the merits of the entire group of employees, rather than the merits of your own work. If we take the 'order of magnitude of productivity' difference in programmers seriously, it seems that the best programmers would have a serious incentive not to join the union, were they actually able to negotiate proportional to their ability level. (Granted, they don't and it is unlikely you will find an employer willing to pay you 10x as much as one of your coworkers, so maybe it does make sense). Also, the governor of Wisconsin wouldn't stand for it, and the company would likely fire the lot of you as soon as you decided to unionize.

tptacek 16y ago

They would not tolerate it and it wouldn't work. The only way to negotiate effectively is to come armed with information. As an employee of a company, you have no authority to delegate your confidentiality agreement to other parties (very few people in real companies actually have any signing authority). At most companies, you'd also be violating the unspoken norm that salaries are private. You can disagree with the the reasonableness of those two points, but the simple fact is the "service" would get you fired. A far better idea for a service would be for negotiation counseling. This service actually already exists, but is so touchy- feely- that it isn't taken seriously by hard-nosed tech workers, who as a result get rolled by their employers.

khafra 16y ago
For clarification: "Negotiation counseling" sounds different from "negotiation class." Is the difference that a counselor studies your portfolio and credentials and tells you how much to ask for, as well as how to ask for it? Or is it just a variation on learning to negotiate?
ScottBurson 16y ago
I think the idea is that the agent would negotiate the terms of the initial offer, i.e., this would happen before the tech worker joined the company. Certainly, once you're in, an agent is unlikely to be able to do anything for you. So the question is not whether it would get you fired but whether a prospective employer would negotiate with your agent. It depends on the circumstances, I'm sure, but in Silicon Valley, if you have skills that are in great demand, we just might be at a point where this could begin to work.

jtbigwoo 16y ago

Almost everybody in the entertainment business has an agent or manager that does the negotiation for them and tracks down additional opportunities for personal appearances and endorsements. Even the producer on the local talk radio show has an agent negotiating her pay and looking for additional revenue opportunities. It probably wouldn't work in other industries without a huge shift in expectations, but it really does work at thousands of employers.

pushingbits 16y ago

You mean like... a union?