7 ms·

The 1 commandment that has always worked for me: If you're happy with the salary and the work, take the job. Life is too short to fight for every penny.

• willis936 5y ago
  OTOH life is too short to forgo being able to own a home or raise kids because you forwent a bigger paycheck indefinitely.
  • hellisothers 5y ago
    OP didn’t say don’t negotiate a salary, they said when you’re happy with it take it. There is definitely a danger in driving a hard bargain just to “win” when you would have been happier accepting what you’ve been offered/negotiated so far.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • _jal 5y ago
    You pay opportunity costs no matter what you do. Including bargaining too hard.
    • maerF0x0 5y ago
      right, but some of them have a positive EROI . Negotiating well is one such thing.
  • ineedasername 5y ago
    They said: If you're happy with the salary You said: life is too short to forgo being able to own a home or raise kids Why would you think someone would be happy with their salary if they wanted to own a home & have kids, if that salary didn't let them? Implicit in the caveat if you're happy are all of those the goals predicated on having a salary at a specific level. If the salary won't let you afford a home & kids, you're not going to be happy with it. So you don't take it.
    • tshaddox 5y ago
      > Why would you think someone would be happy with their salary if they wanted to own a home & have kids, if that salary didn't let them? I think the clear implication is that if someone didn't realize that a small amount of negotiation on their part could have made the difference between being able to buy a home or not, they might regret not having negotiated when they do realize it, regardless of how happy they were in the past with their salary. Your interpretation is essentially "if you are as happy as you could possibly be, and a higher salary couldn't possibly make you any happier, then don't negotiate," which is logically valid but fairly unrealistic.
    • willis936 5y ago
      Being happy with a salary today/tomorrow doesn't mean you'll be happy with the concessions you made yesterday. Being able to afford a house and kids doesn't happen as soon as you decide you want a higher paying job: it happens a decade later.
• ianai 5y ago
  There’s a lot of potential in realizing that if you were happy with a transaction it doesn’t matter what other transactions are going on around you. You can replace “transaction” with many things in that statement. We’d probably be much further along as a species if we all let go of our egos a little more often (though not completely! I’m not arguing for that.)
  • silicon2401 5y ago
    The flip side of that is making yourself easily taken advantage of. Hence the cliche of the hapless, happy fool. If you're in a position to not care about 5-figure differences in salaries, job opportunities, preserving your existing resources, etc, then I agree it's not worth caring. However most people have pretty limited resources, it's important to be wary of getting taken advantage of at least, if not to try and maximize your gain.
    • ianai 5y ago
      Which is why I put “though not completely! I’m not arguing for that.” It’s probably helpful to not have your ego in the drivers seat absolutely all of the time, but also to check in with it. Kinda like a really close friend that you may spend a lot of time with but nonetheless still know when to step back from and not mindlessly follow. Edit-aka “mindfulness”
• devnulll 5y ago
  I've been on both sides of this. At large FAANG companies, I've seen candidates leave $100k+ on the table, as they simply accepted the first offer (on-hire stock awards and signing bonuses). On the other hand, I've seen candidates spend weeks negotiating over some trivial point and spoil their relationship(s) before they even started the job. Knowing the range for the role you're applying for (via Blind, or Levels.fyi, or similar) makes this process so much easier.
  • dustintrex 5y ago
    In any large company, the team you're negotiating comp with is almost entirely unrelated to the team you'll actually be working with. The only overlap is the hiring manager, and hearing that somebody I want to hire is negotiating comp is not going to make it think worse of them, quite the opposite. I once referred an acquaintance I knew was underpaid to a job on my team, with explicit instructions to negotiate their initial offer. They did not, and I was quite disappointed.
    • bobbiechen 5y ago
      I think the Patrick Mckenzie post is a great reference here: > It is Bob’s job to get you signed with the company as cheaply as possible, but Bob is not super motivated to do so, because Bob is not spending Bob’s money to hire you. Bob is spending Bob’s budget. Bob generally does not get large performance incentives for shaving money off of his hiring budget: you get a new Macbook if you convince Bob to give you $5k extra, but Bob gets (if he is anomalously lucky) a dinner at TGIFridays if he convinces you to take $5k less. https://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/01/23/salary-negotiation/ https://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/01/23/salary-negotiation/
      • cutemonster 5y ago
        Thanks! Found some other interesting posts over there as well
    • deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
• gscho 5y ago
  100% this. When I told some of my peers that I accepted a job with FAGNAM without negotiating I felt looked down on because “everybody does it”. I was happy with the salary, stock and terms /shrug.
  • xkcd-sucks 5y ago
    At least for the FG, consider it a matter of duty - Every dollar "wasted" on a supraoptimal salary is unavailable to further advance the mission of Being Evil :)
• slg 5y ago
  I agree with the sentiment and salary is not in my top few priorities in terms of job satisfaction. However I will also add that anecdotally I have never known anyone who had a company retract an offer because the candidate asked for more. The worst answer you will usually get is "that was our best offer". You don't have to make it a long drawn out negotiation. You can just make it a standard practice to respond to any job offer asking for at least 10% more. There is little downside and the difference will add up over a career.
  • Areading314 5y ago
    I have seen it happen, if a candidate is asking for so much that they seem entitled in the eyes of the hiring manager.
    • slg 5y ago
      I’m sure it can happen if you are rude about it or if you ask for a 50% increase or something, but any company that would be offended by asking for 10% more is probably not somewhere you want to work anyway.
  • reverend_gonzo 5y ago
    So, at least in my industry (softwares development in trading) your bonus can be more than your salary, so while they won’t pull the offer, it can have longer effects. I agree with the above poster which is, if you’re happy, take it. The great part about America and especially developed, if you become unhappy there’s 100 other jobs waiting.
    • hammock 5y ago
      Do you know someone who had a future bonus withheld because they had asked for more in the job negotiation?
      • valdiorn 5y ago
        That's actually fairly.cpmmom practice in finance. If you base is considered a bit high for your position, the bonus just gets docked a bit instead. It's all 100 percent discretionary so...
• arvinsim 5y ago
  The corollary is that if one is not happy with the salary or work, either ask for a raise or switch. Life is too short to subscribe to company loyalty.
• Moodles 5y ago
  Life is short, but is a back and forth and awkward phone call really that big a bother when it could be hundreds of thousands of dollars extra for you and your family? If anything, you probably maximize your utility by negotiating just a little bit before taking the job.
  • ggoo 5y ago
    I never said not to negotiate your salary, it's just not the number one thing to focus on in life. I've negotiated salaries successfully in the past. Did I squeeze every dollar possible out the situation? Probably not.
• sillysaurusx 5y ago
  I recently had the option to take a $200k/yr salary working on something that greatly appealed to me. Today, after a lot of negotiation, we've agreed that I'll be brought on as a contractor for 3 months at $200/hr. The difference between those two outcomes is nontrivial. By paying myself through an S corporation, and then distributing out 40% of the income as tax-free dividends, I'll be further magnifying this opportunity. In my opinion, I wasted too much of my life not doing this. And all it took was playing a little hardball and being willing to walk away. (For curious readers, my secret superpower was that I already had a banking job I was happy with. Sure, this was my dream job, but from a game theory POV that really doesn't matter. What matters is whether you're spending your days doing something you want. Are you sure you want to make small, lateral movements?) Part of the reason this is hard to discuss is because I truly never believed that opportunities like this were ever going to be available to someone like me. The choice between a $200k/yr salary and a $200/hr contract is so far of an outlier that you read it on HN and just roll your eyes. Right? Or at least, I did. For years. And then one day I woke up and realized I should've had kids about 8 years ago. It's a lot harder at 33. It means that by the time they're 18, you'll be so old they can barely relate to you. I try not to think about it too much or I'll get a bit sad. The real motive was that IVF costs $40k in America. $40k! Forty fucking thousand dollars to have a baby. That really lit a fire under my ass. I looked at it from the point of view of "Okay, my wife's salary pays the bills. I've heard of people making $40k. It's a thing that happens. How can I make $40k?" It's more tractable than it seems. But it requires you to be "selfless" in a certain sense: it's so tempting to take a cool programming job that you really enjoy. It was almost physically painful to decline their original offer. It was like, which would you rather do? Banking, or ML? Hell yes I'd rather do ML. Give me that ML! ... Except the salary would be the same. And unlike banking, where everyone is pretty chill (we're all here for the people and the money), ML is often on a time crunch that reminds me of gamedev. Which means I'd be trading a relaxing job for a stressful job, with no compensation other than "being happy with the salary and the work." Why? Why do that, when you don't need to? All you have to do is say no and shop around. But us programmers rarely seem to do it. By the way, if the amount of money here seems enormous, it turns out to be roughly standard salary for a Google ML engineer. That was my baseline: step one was to ask a buddy at Google "How much would you get paid for this?" and step two was to refuse offers less than that. Google pays RSUs, which startups can't offer. But they can pay you equivalent amounts of cash. Think of it like selling your stock today rather than waiting for it to vest: I won't be receiving stock, so I won't have the chance to become a millionaire, but I will be having a reliable stream of "holy crap, my bank account isn't negative for the first time in a decade" amounts of money. Honestly I think there's something wrong with me, because I can't even talk about this without feeling incredibly guilty. I know (too well) how much people struggle just to make end's meet. And I know how many programmers struggle too. I was one of them. Here I am, making it sound easy. ... but what do you do when it actually is easy? All it requires is for you to focus on it for a year or so. I am incredibly lucky, but I also know how to exploit opportunities that fall in my lap. I encourage you to do the same, dear reader; the diff between me and you isn't as big as you'd think. I'll console myself that this comment will be buried nice and far down the site, and that the story is falling off anyway. (For some reason, audiences are starting to scare me.) But I did want to encourage some lone reader to stop and think. Are you sure you're not inventing reasons why you can't do this? If you decided to buy a car for $100k over the course of a year, you'd probably wince. Yet I didn't realize I was doing the same thing. Turns out, you have to focus on making money if you want to make a lot of money.
• friedman23 5y ago
  Seems like an excuse to avoid negotiating because it makes you uncomfortable. Ironically, the life is too short argument is horrible in this context due to the fact that the amount of time you are forced to work while you live is dependent on the amount of money you make. If you can increase your salary by 10% by negotiating, the total amount of time you have to work in your life just decreased by 10%. Your next raise will also be 10% added to your salary that was already increased by 10%.
• dopidopHN 5y ago
  Ok, fine. But that how I realized that I grossly. Grossly underpay in my first job in the US.
• foogazi 5y ago
  I just read this on Blind: > Why are you even working if not money?
• vagab0nd 5y ago
  For me, the premise is that you are not taken advantage of by acting that way. And therein lies the conundrum.