6 ms·

Negotiating a Job Offer with a Company

skrish 15y ago
"In reality, the only things you need to focus on away from the actual salary are specific details surrounding Intellectual Property Agreements and Non-Disclosure Agreements. More and more companies are stifling their developers creativity by restricting them from contributing to open source projects...." Agreed. This is something that is essential to consider. With stackoverflow karma, github check-ins & the like becoming a way to evaluate your expertise, this is something that should be considered carefully.
Drbble 15y ago
This article contradicts the single largest pro-employee piece of wisdom ("don't walk up to the table with your cards showing") without providing any supporting argument. What does your salary in an unrelated job have any relevance at all to another company? Any company that asks the question has shown that it is not "worth its salt" and so the "trust me" advice immediately dissolves. I told my personally retained recruiter my previous salary, under promise of confidence, only to hear it quoted back to me by the hiring manager. I watched the same thing happen on the other side when I sat on a hiring committee. Why would anyone believe him? Divulging your current salary is basically asking for that plus 5%.
- tptacek 15y ago
  To pile cynicism on top of cynicism, remember that recruiters have the same incentive structure as real estate agents: they make their money on deal flow, so they're motivated to spend as little time on you as possible. Giving a recruiter your current salary allows them to be choosy about where they send you. It may keep you away from lower-paid opportunities, but also might keep you away from more senior roles. Not generally a fan of recruiters at all, really. If you code and you're good, you'll do better on your own.
  - patio11 15y ago
    Wow, we really think alike. I posted the same thing and then saw this.
  - Peroni 15y ago
    I had originally included a lengthy argument against disclosing your salary to recruiters and I agree with you completely. That element was removed due to the fact that the post was aimed at graduates who most likely won't have to deal with recruiters for a number of years.
- Too 15y ago
  Similar thing happened to me. Recruiting agent was playing as if they were on my side all the time. They asked what my desired and walk-away salary was "to make sure my desired salary wouldn't sound stupid/outrageous to the company", also under promise of confidence. I smelled something funny and deliberately gave a lower than standard number to test them. Later the company contact quoted me back with the exact same number. I also found out that they called other companies i had been in contact with for other jobs, without going through the agent, to get and share information about me with/from them. This was what raised my suspicion to the agency first and made me test the salary question. Didn't take the job they delegated in the end, but for other reasons. I'm not advising against agencies, they can be useful and land you a good job but don't think for one second that they are your friend. They are there to extract as much information as possible from you. Don't tell them anything that might put you in a bad position for the job and your salary.
  - onemoreact 15y ago
    The proper way to use recruiters is to quote a high salary as your minimum. If your skills set you up for say 80k-120k then it's easy for you to find an 80k job and hard to find a 120k job so quote 115k. If they call you back it's probably worth your time to listen, and if they don't you have lost nothing. PS: Now, this can change if you have been looking for a while and really need a job, but there is little reason to start low balling yourself.
  - rmc 15y ago
    They asked what my desired and walk-away salary was "to make sure my desired salary wouldn't sound stupid/outrageous to the company", also under promise of confidence. A good way to even it out would be to reply with "Well I dunno, why don't you tell me what the company's desired salary is, and I'll tell you if it's outrageous?". After all, if the only reason they want to know is to prevent you sounding stupid, they'd tell you that, right? :P
derekja 15y ago
I was at MSFT for a decade or so and several times saw folks who turned down the first offer get a second offer that was much more to their liking. The hiring manager has to really want you in order to push back sufficiently with HR, but if you're unhappy with the offer and willing to risk losing the job I've seen it pay off...
- patio11 15y ago
  willing to risk losing the job In almost all cases, the original offer is still on the table. "Negotiating with the decisionmaker will cost me this offer, so don't negotiate" is something which is only really believed by engineers who are -- and I say this with love -- abominably incompetent at negotiation. This is regrettable, since skill at negotiation matters a whole heck of a lot more than skill with Chef or mastery of Postgres trivia for determining both the instant results of the negotiation and one's larger career trajectory. Still working on that blog post on negotiation, should be up early Monday for more elaboration on this.
  - derekja 15y ago
    It's hard in a big company in that the decision maker is really the hiring manager, but HR protocol gets in the way. So if the prospective hire is unhappy with the offer they have to formally decline it and then the hiring manager has to come back at HR to get them to tender a better offer. Things can happen in that process - other candidates, having to change leveling to reach the desired offer, etc. If your decision maker is the one actually in charge of the whole process then I absolutely agree that there is no downside to negotiating. Look forward to your blog post!
  - xiaoma 15y ago
    As someone who's been on the other side of the table (in multiple businesses), I really can't agree. In most cases, a business has a desire to fill a position fairly quickly, and especially in start-ups and small businesses, cost is a major concern. In larger businesses or governmental organizations, HR regulations and bureaucracy become a major factor. I've personally filtered out dozens if not hundreds of otherwise qualified people due to salary concerns without a second thought. In two cases within the last six months I've seen the party who pushed for a higher salary reach out again only to find the position filled. My guess is that you've never experienced an employer's market. It may not be one in silicon valley, but it is for most engineers around the world. Being a white guy in Japan, and then a guy with a popular blog following, you've had a far, far different experience than a typical engineer.
tptacek 15y ago
Prospective employers want your current salary so they can get a bead on what the negotiating floor is. Most prospective employers hear "$80k" and immediately assume "we can get this person for $88k". You might be worth $90k, $95k, or $110k, but once you said "$80k", you gave the prospective employer's HR team an excuse to play hardball: they know they're not going to insult you, even if their opening offer is $20k lower than what they expected to pay the role. Don't tell people your current salary unless you know it's going to help you, and be wary of taking negotiating advice from anyone who thinks you should disclose it as a matter of course. Your current salary has nothing to do with how much you are worth to a new employer.
- patio11 15y ago
  Without implying any bad will about the author of this post, who is a recruiter, recruiters are incentivized to close deals, not to get you the best possible package. It is possible that this background would convince a recruiter that advice which is against your interests is still a good idea, because if he adopts advice which will predictably results in employees underpricing themselves, his conversion rate from interviews to paychecks will improve, possibly dramatically. If his placements are routinely leaving $10k on the table, that only costs him $3k per placement, which might on a subconscious level either a) not be motivational or b) might be a totally rational decision because of the increased volume of placements he gets by advising people to take any reasonable deal. My father is a real estate agent, and real estate agents have demonstrable blind spots (seriously, academic literature exists on this) for negotiation when negotiating for clients versus when selling their own homes. When they're selling their own home, five hours of extra work might add $5,000 to the sales price, so of course they go the extra mile. When they're selling a client's home, five hours of extra work might add $5,000 to the sales price but their commission check only goes up by $300, so they'll generally opt to tell you "That's a really fair offer. You should take it. Can we close this today? I have a young couple who I'd really like to meet with now about buying a brownstone, and the expected value of my time with them is way higher than the marginal value of my time with you. Oh whoops did I just say that out loud?"
  - mikeinterviewst 15y ago
kibibyte 15y ago
I have seen a lot of posts and advice like this about increasing your starting salary by negotiating with your recruiter. However, I am a college student looking for an internship. How much of a negotiating position would I have? Is it even advisable for me to try negotiating, considering that I'm only a college intern?
- mmavnn 15y ago
  Yes. Be polite, have an accurate view of what your time is worth and be open about what you're asking and why. People may not want (or have the authority) to change the deal, but if they are offended by you asking you do not want to work with them. It implies they are looking for a drone, not a real human being. I've worked in several local government jobs in the UK, where budget (and 'Single Status payscale') constraints mean that the hiring manager normally doesn't have the authority to change the salary offered. Just asking the question has still given me an invaluable insight into the manager's way of thinking.
- rmc 15y ago
  Can you programme FizzBuzz? If so, then you could consider getting a paying job. Unless you really, really want to work at $BIG_COMPANY, and you could only get an internship with them, or you are only looking for something for 3ish months. If you are looking for 'experience' and you have a year, get a paying job.
  - kibibyte 15y ago
    I'm looking for 3-month internships currently. I suppose that it wouldn't be advisable in this case, would it?
bermanoid 15y ago
Does anyone here have any experience (and advice about) negotiating against intellectual property clauses? I'm particularly interested in whether fairly large companies are ever willing to give these up, or if it's just part of the price one has to pay for accepting employment. Right now I'm working as a consultant with a team that keeps trying to convince me to consider coming in-house; up until recently, moving wasn't an option for family reasons, but now, it's become more realistic. It's a great team that I really enjoy working with, and I'm sure that the offer would be more than fair (my current consulting rate implies a pretty tight range for an offer, one that's in line with what they pay their engineers currently), but unfortunately, they are a subsidiary of BigCorp, and I know for a fact that BigCorp places some restrictions on outside projects, and that makes me nervous - having had to aggressively edit my consulting contract so that it was reasonable (to be fair, they accepted those edits without undue drama), I'm all but sure that their employment contracts are going to be very restrictive, and likely include full IP transfer clauses, not to mention long term non-competes and NDAs. State of California, if it matters. Is it a complete pipe dream to hope that I might be able to get them to strike some of those restrictions, or will some big companies play ball on those matters? Non-compete clauses that terminate after a reasonable period I can (reluctantly) accept, but losing the ability to do open source work and/or my own projects would be too much for me, I'd rather just keep on keeping on as a consultant...
- tobiasSoftware 15y ago
  I really want an answer to this too. I just graduated, am nearly broke so I need my first job. However, I have several ideas for a startup that I want to implement soon, I'm at the point where I can have a working business within a couple months. The problem is that I know getting a startup to the point where you can live off of it will take much longer, thus I NEED a real job, and want the startup just to be a few hours a week on the side for the next couple years. However, this startup is my life dream, I don't care if I can't live off of it but I need to get it out there and see what happens at least, and I am pretty sure I would turn down a job if it prevented me from doing that. So I'm kind of stuck if companies will truly demand me to turn over any programming that I do during my employment with them.
gergles 15y ago
The advice about "disclose your salary because companies are honest and fair actors" is still incorrect. Companies are entering into a business deal with you, and they will negotiate it like they negotiate every other business deal - trying to pay as little as possible for the product they want. The author of this post, as a recruiter, is incentivized to get you to disclose your salary (see the excellent post by patio11 above). It is still never to your advantage to do so, unless you are grossly overpaid. The point about not signing NDAs/IPAs is good, and you may be able to negotiate these (I negotiated away the most onerous part of the IPA at my current job by simply lining through the offensive part and initialing, but you may not be that lucky.) The general advice for any negotiation is still "he who says a number first loses" and you should still go into it with that mindset, regardless of who you're talking to (a recruiter, a hiring manager, HR, whatever.) Your past salaries have nothing to do with what you will cost the new employer, and software people absolutely have to learn this if we ever want each other to be able to negotiate effectively and raise the salary floor.
heliodor 15y ago
Worst. Advice. Ever! Go read some classic negotiation texts instead. If you're in the process of getting a job, you owe it to yourself to spend at least five hours reading about and grokking negotiation. Do yourself a favor and never share your salary info with someone looking to hire you. They don't share their numbers, do they? So why put yourself at a disadvantage?

"In reality, the only things you need to focus on away from the actual salary are specific details surrounding Intellectual Property Agreements and Non-Disclosure Agreements. More and more companies are stifling their developers creativity by restricting them from contributing to open source projects...." Agreed. This is something that is essential to consider. With stackoverflow karma, github check-ins & the like becoming a way to evaluate your expertise, this is something that should be considered carefully.

Drbble 15y ago

This article contradicts the single largest pro-employee piece of wisdom ("don't walk up to the table with your cards showing") without providing any supporting argument. What does your salary in an unrelated job have any relevance at all to another company? Any company that asks the question has shown that it is not "worth its salt" and so the "trust me" advice immediately dissolves. I told my personally retained recruiter my previous salary, under promise of confidence, only to hear it quoted back to me by the hiring manager. I watched the same thing happen on the other side when I sat on a hiring committee. Why would anyone believe him? Divulging your current salary is basically asking for that plus 5%.

tptacek 15y ago
To pile cynicism on top of cynicism, remember that recruiters have the same incentive structure as real estate agents: they make their money on deal flow, so they're motivated to spend as little time on you as possible. Giving a recruiter your current salary allows them to be choosy about where they send you. It may keep you away from lower-paid opportunities, but also might keep you away from more senior roles. Not generally a fan of recruiters at all, really. If you code and you're good, you'll do better on your own.
- patio11 15y ago
  Wow, we really think alike. I posted the same thing and then saw this.
- Peroni 15y ago
  I had originally included a lengthy argument against disclosing your salary to recruiters and I agree with you completely. That element was removed due to the fact that the post was aimed at graduates who most likely won't have to deal with recruiters for a number of years.
Too 15y ago
Similar thing happened to me. Recruiting agent was playing as if they were on my side all the time. They asked what my desired and walk-away salary was "to make sure my desired salary wouldn't sound stupid/outrageous to the company", also under promise of confidence. I smelled something funny and deliberately gave a lower than standard number to test them. Later the company contact quoted me back with the exact same number. I also found out that they called other companies i had been in contact with for other jobs, without going through the agent, to get and share information about me with/from them. This was what raised my suspicion to the agency first and made me test the salary question. Didn't take the job they delegated in the end, but for other reasons. I'm not advising against agencies, they can be useful and land you a good job but don't think for one second that they are your friend. They are there to extract as much information as possible from you. Don't tell them anything that might put you in a bad position for the job and your salary.
- onemoreact 15y ago
  The proper way to use recruiters is to quote a high salary as your minimum. If your skills set you up for say 80k-120k then it's easy for you to find an 80k job and hard to find a 120k job so quote 115k. If they call you back it's probably worth your time to listen, and if they don't you have lost nothing. PS: Now, this can change if you have been looking for a while and really need a job, but there is little reason to start low balling yourself.
- rmc 15y ago
  They asked what my desired and walk-away salary was "to make sure my desired salary wouldn't sound stupid/outrageous to the company", also under promise of confidence. A good way to even it out would be to reply with "Well I dunno, why don't you tell me what the company's desired salary is, and I'll tell you if it's outrageous?". After all, if the only reason they want to know is to prevent you sounding stupid, they'd tell you that, right? :P

derekja 15y ago

I was at MSFT for a decade or so and several times saw folks who turned down the first offer get a second offer that was much more to their liking. The hiring manager has to really want you in order to push back sufficiently with HR, but if you're unhappy with the offer and willing to risk losing the job I've seen it pay off...

patio11 15y ago
willing to risk losing the job In almost all cases, the original offer is still on the table. "Negotiating with the decisionmaker will cost me this offer, so don't negotiate" is something which is only really believed by engineers who are -- and I say this with love -- abominably incompetent at negotiation. This is regrettable, since skill at negotiation matters a whole heck of a lot more than skill with Chef or mastery of Postgres trivia for determining both the instant results of the negotiation and one's larger career trajectory. Still working on that blog post on negotiation, should be up early Monday for more elaboration on this.
- derekja 15y ago
  It's hard in a big company in that the decision maker is really the hiring manager, but HR protocol gets in the way. So if the prospective hire is unhappy with the offer they have to formally decline it and then the hiring manager has to come back at HR to get them to tender a better offer. Things can happen in that process - other candidates, having to change leveling to reach the desired offer, etc. If your decision maker is the one actually in charge of the whole process then I absolutely agree that there is no downside to negotiating. Look forward to your blog post!
- xiaoma 15y ago
  As someone who's been on the other side of the table (in multiple businesses), I really can't agree. In most cases, a business has a desire to fill a position fairly quickly, and especially in start-ups and small businesses, cost is a major concern. In larger businesses or governmental organizations, HR regulations and bureaucracy become a major factor. I've personally filtered out dozens if not hundreds of otherwise qualified people due to salary concerns without a second thought. In two cases within the last six months I've seen the party who pushed for a higher salary reach out again only to find the position filled. My guess is that you've never experienced an employer's market. It may not be one in silicon valley, but it is for most engineers around the world. Being a white guy in Japan, and then a guy with a popular blog following, you've had a far, far different experience than a typical engineer.

tptacek 15y ago

Prospective employers want your current salary so they can get a bead on what the negotiating floor is. Most prospective employers hear "$80k" and immediately assume "we can get this person for $88k". You might be worth $90k, $95k, or $110k, but once you said "$80k", you gave the prospective employer's HR team an excuse to play hardball: they know they're not going to insult you, even if their opening offer is $20k lower than what they expected to pay the role. Don't tell people your current salary unless you know it's going to help you, and be wary of taking negotiating advice from anyone who thinks you should disclose it as a matter of course. Your current salary has nothing to do with how much you are worth to a new employer.

patio11 15y ago
Without implying any bad will about the author of this post, who is a recruiter, recruiters are incentivized to close deals, not to get you the best possible package. It is possible that this background would convince a recruiter that advice which is against your interests is still a good idea, because if he adopts advice which will predictably results in employees underpricing themselves, his conversion rate from interviews to paychecks will improve, possibly dramatically. If his placements are routinely leaving $10k on the table, that only costs him $3k per placement, which might on a subconscious level either a) not be motivational or b) might be a totally rational decision because of the increased volume of placements he gets by advising people to take any reasonable deal. My father is a real estate agent, and real estate agents have demonstrable blind spots (seriously, academic literature exists on this) for negotiation when negotiating for clients versus when selling their own homes. When they're selling their own home, five hours of extra work might add $5,000 to the sales price, so of course they go the extra mile. When they're selling a client's home, five hours of extra work might add $5,000 to the sales price but their commission check only goes up by $300, so they'll generally opt to tell you "That's a really fair offer. You should take it. Can we close this today? I have a young couple who I'd really like to meet with now about buying a brownstone, and the expected value of my time with them is way higher than the marginal value of my time with you. Oh whoops did I just say that out loud?"
- mikeinterviewst 15y ago

kibibyte 15y ago

I have seen a lot of posts and advice like this about increasing your starting salary by negotiating with your recruiter. However, I am a college student looking for an internship. How much of a negotiating position would I have? Is it even advisable for me to try negotiating, considering that I'm only a college intern?

mmavnn 15y ago
Yes. Be polite, have an accurate view of what your time is worth and be open about what you're asking and why. People may not want (or have the authority) to change the deal, but if they are offended by you asking you do not want to work with them. It implies they are looking for a drone, not a real human being. I've worked in several local government jobs in the UK, where budget (and 'Single Status payscale') constraints mean that the hiring manager normally doesn't have the authority to change the salary offered. Just asking the question has still given me an invaluable insight into the manager's way of thinking.
rmc 15y ago
Can you programme FizzBuzz? If so, then you could consider getting a paying job. Unless you really, really want to work at $BIG_COMPANY, and you could only get an internship with them, or you are only looking for something for 3ish months. If you are looking for 'experience' and you have a year, get a paying job.
- kibibyte 15y ago
  I'm looking for 3-month internships currently. I suppose that it wouldn't be advisable in this case, would it?

bermanoid 15y ago

Does anyone here have any experience (and advice about) negotiating against intellectual property clauses? I'm particularly interested in whether fairly large companies are ever willing to give these up, or if it's just part of the price one has to pay for accepting employment. Right now I'm working as a consultant with a team that keeps trying to convince me to consider coming in-house; up until recently, moving wasn't an option for family reasons, but now, it's become more realistic. It's a great team that I really enjoy working with, and I'm sure that the offer would be more than fair (my current consulting rate implies a pretty tight range for an offer, one that's in line with what they pay their engineers currently), but unfortunately, they are a subsidiary of BigCorp, and I know for a fact that BigCorp places some restrictions on outside projects, and that makes me nervous - having had to aggressively edit my consulting contract so that it was reasonable (to be fair, they accepted those edits without undue drama), I'm all but sure that their employment contracts are going to be very restrictive, and likely include full IP transfer clauses, not to mention long term non-competes and NDAs. State of California, if it matters. Is it a complete pipe dream to hope that I might be able to get them to strike some of those restrictions, or will some big companies play ball on those matters? Non-compete clauses that terminate after a reasonable period I can (reluctantly) accept, but losing the ability to do open source work and/or my own projects would be too much for me, I'd rather just keep on keeping on as a consultant...

tobiasSoftware 15y ago
I really want an answer to this too. I just graduated, am nearly broke so I need my first job. However, I have several ideas for a startup that I want to implement soon, I'm at the point where I can have a working business within a couple months. The problem is that I know getting a startup to the point where you can live off of it will take much longer, thus I NEED a real job, and want the startup just to be a few hours a week on the side for the next couple years. However, this startup is my life dream, I don't care if I can't live off of it but I need to get it out there and see what happens at least, and I am pretty sure I would turn down a job if it prevented me from doing that. So I'm kind of stuck if companies will truly demand me to turn over any programming that I do during my employment with them.

gergles 15y ago

The advice about "disclose your salary because companies are honest and fair actors" is still incorrect. Companies are entering into a business deal with you, and they will negotiate it like they negotiate every other business deal - trying to pay as little as possible for the product they want. The author of this post, as a recruiter, is incentivized to get you to disclose your salary (see the excellent post by patio11 above). It is still never to your advantage to do so, unless you are grossly overpaid. The point about not signing NDAs/IPAs is good, and you may be able to negotiate these (I negotiated away the most onerous part of the IPA at my current job by simply lining through the offensive part and initialing, but you may not be that lucky.) The general advice for any negotiation is still "he who says a number first loses" and you should still go into it with that mindset, regardless of who you're talking to (a recruiter, a hiring manager, HR, whatever.) Your past salaries have nothing to do with what you will cost the new employer, and software people absolutely have to learn this if we ever want each other to be able to negotiate effectively and raise the salary floor.

heliodor 15y ago

Worst. Advice. Ever! Go read some classic negotiation texts instead. If you're in the process of getting a job, you owe it to yourself to spend at least five hours reading about and grokking negotiation. Do yourself a favor and never share your salary info with someone looking to hire you. They don't share their numbers, do they? So why put yourself at a disadvantage?