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The dirty secret here is that well-funded early stage startups usually want to pay candidates as little as they're willing to accept, and not a cent more, thoug

The dirty secret here is that well-funded early stage startups usually want to pay candidates as little as they're willing to accept, and not a cent more, though that doesn't mean they're not willing/able to compete with FAANG-level comp for a really good candidate (we're talking about the well funded ones, remember?). So usually early stage hires end up having a wildly varying range of offers depending on factors like experience, previous comp, negotiation skills, etc. They can't discriminate on comp very effectively if they stated their ranges up front, and if they were truthful about it, it would look ridiculous enough that it wouldn't be useful to anybody anyways (think ranges like 100k-500k). Source: I was burnt by this (fell on the very low end of the range) and later learned about it when I got a 50%+ raise when the company matured and implemented comp bands.

chii 5y ago
> fell on the very low end of the range did you ever work out what reason the comp was on the low end? Any advice to someone who might want to negotiate for the higher end?
- eins1234 5y ago
  I was just coming from a position with even lower comp, told them what the comp was, and basically just said yes to their first number that was reasonably higher than the old comp. Yes I was young and naive at the time. Basically if you just follow the conventional wisdom of not disclosing your number and just keep saying no and asking for higher until they tell you it's their final offer, you should end up in a better spot than I did. If you want to do even better than that, you should really be interviewing at multiple places and have multiple offers lined up and pit them against each other in a bidding war, all while still not disclosing actual numbers to any of them, i.e. just keep telling them their offer is not good enough and you have better offers elsewhere, and then just say yes to the last one standing. The key technique here as you might have noticed is to not give them a number no matter how hard they try to push for it. Any number you give will give them an idea of where to stop with a reasonable chance of you accepting, and basically put a soft limit on your potential upside with no real benefit to you. You want them to be the ones having to tell you where their limits are. Even if you know about this technique it can be hard to stick to it in practice in sync conversations where you're under pressure and have to think on your feet, so it can be helpful to direct most of your negotiations towards async channels like email/text where you have ample time to think about and compose your responses and avoid making mistakes. Best of luck with your negotiations!

chii 5y ago

> fell on the very low end of the range did you ever work out what reason the comp was on the low end? Any advice to someone who might want to negotiate for the higher end?

eins1234 5y ago
I was just coming from a position with even lower comp, told them what the comp was, and basically just said yes to their first number that was reasonably higher than the old comp. Yes I was young and naive at the time. Basically if you just follow the conventional wisdom of not disclosing your number and just keep saying no and asking for higher until they tell you it's their final offer, you should end up in a better spot than I did. If you want to do even better than that, you should really be interviewing at multiple places and have multiple offers lined up and pit them against each other in a bidding war, all while still not disclosing actual numbers to any of them, i.e. just keep telling them their offer is not good enough and you have better offers elsewhere, and then just say yes to the last one standing. The key technique here as you might have noticed is to not give them a number no matter how hard they try to push for it. Any number you give will give them an idea of where to stop with a reasonable chance of you accepting, and basically put a soft limit on your potential upside with no real benefit to you. You want them to be the ones having to tell you where their limits are. Even if you know about this technique it can be hard to stick to it in practice in sync conversations where you're under pressure and have to think on your feet, so it can be helpful to direct most of your negotiations towards async channels like email/text where you have ample time to think about and compose your responses and avoid making mistakes. Best of luck with your negotiations!