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One thing I often find in salary negotiation advice are lines that go like this "At my last company, I increased sales by 3% by $YADDA_YADDA". The thing is tha

One thing I often find in salary negotiation advice are lines that go like this "At my last company, I increased sales by 3% by $YADDA_YADDA". The thing is that I can't really think of nice metrics like this, and am surprised that a lot of engineers would find something as significant as sales numbers. For one thing, the further your metric is from strict revenue, the harder it is to put a price tag on it. A sales number is easy, but if you optimized some part of the code somewhere, it becomes much more fuzzy and longer to explain. Sure, Patrick also pushes people to get jobs were your contribution is more directly correlated to revenues, but not everyone will want a job like that, and until you do get one, you can't use that. The other thing is that I feel it's easier to consider a sales person as directly responsible for a significant increase in revenue for their market. But engineers work in teams, so saying "I increased sales by x%" is hard to justify: what about the Product Manager that spec'ed it out? What about the rest of the engineering team that worked on that change, reviewed it, pushed it to production? If you're the only one doing all that, sure, but that's rarely the case. So, what's a good way to come up with relevant, justified metrics like that?

lrobb 15y ago
I don't think most engineers or engineering managers really give a flip... At least IME they don't. They want to see that you can produce code. So if you can point to features/apps that you developed, or how you optimized some feature somewhere, that's what they want.
- Timothee 15y ago
  I understand that and that's kind of my point. As an engineer, you can definitely talk about what you've done to convince the other party that you're capable, but it's (IMO) more difficult to tie it to a specific increase in the offer when negotiation starts, which is what Patrick discusses. Specifically, he puts the asked salary increase head-to-head with the potential revenue increase: "Getting me that extra $4,000 would make this a much easier decision. Considering that this is conceivably worth millions to you, we’d be silly not to do business with each other." Which indeed makes it sound like a bargain. :) And I know it's exactly the goal of what Patrick preaches: speak in terms of value created, not technical competence. It's just, y'know, hard :)
patio11 15y ago
Sales guys very rarely tie their stomachs in knots with "So I suppose technically I might have talked to five million in new accounts last quarter, but most of them required new features, so I'm not sure I can justifiably claim credit for that one without splitting it with the engineering team." One might start learning from that example. Did you lead development on a new product with $5 million in sales? Then I might describe that as leading development on a new product with $5 million in sales. I wouldn't recommend optimizing SQL queries on a screen no one actually uses, but if that is your day to day activity, you were improving performance of the company's flagship product which launched to over $5 million in sales. If you're optimizing page load speed then presumably you tracked the before and after and, if you don't have great data about how that trickled into the business results, you can at least say "I shaved 5 seconds off our dashboard. Research from Google / Amazon / Microsoft / etc has found that page load speed has the following quantifiable impacts and that the sensitivity is on the order of 100 ms, or roughly one fiftieth of the improvement I delivered." You can also either a) engineer your transfer to the part of the company which makes money or b) engineer your work duties such that they include things which will help career growth. For example, A/B testing both prints money and gives very relevant, justified metrics which are likely to include things motivational to decisionmakers at current and future employers. If you are an engineer in a company which doesn't A/B test but could, you should make that sale internally, and then nominate yourself as the obvious person to implement it.
- Timothee 15y ago
  I know what you're saying, but sales guys benefits from the perception that they're solely responsible for the close of a sale. That's their job after all. So the $5M in sales? It wouldn't have happened without them! (that's the perception) if that is your day to day activity, you were improving performance of the company's flagship product which launched to over $5 million in sales Already there are more steps. You know he didn't sell that himself, a sales person did, and the link between performance and number of sales is unclear without knowing the product. So, to me, the $5 million number is nice ('ok so he was trusted to work on that important product') but feels a bit irrelevant when asking for a specific offer increase. For whatever reason, it doesn't convince me that this candidate in particular couldn't have been replaced by another candidate for the same result. In the example of a sales person, I'm more easily convinced that s/he was influential in the result. edit: I guess it's because sales is so much more of a "people" job than engineering. But maybe I'm just pointing at what you've been saying: take a job closer to the money…
rmc 15y ago
The thing is that I can't really think of nice metrics like this, and am surprised that a lot of engineers would find something as significant as sales numbers. One way: Did you work on a feature that was then used to sign up a client that is now worth €X?
run4yourlives 15y ago
>So, what's a good way to come up with relevant, justified metrics like that? Make shit up. I'm dead serious. Not in terms of "This product never existed and I'm going to lie to you", but in terms of "Everyone loved that feature I did, it probably helped retain 3-5% of our clients alone, and we were able to hire another two people the following year, so that probably works out to about 10% growth." So: my feature improved helped grow sales by 13%.
jiggy2011 15y ago
Many companies I think will intentionally keep employees in the dark as much as possible about how much they are really worth to the company. I worked in support once for an outsourcing company where I was paid only a little over minimum wage and given a number of SLAs to keep (which I usually exceeded). When I found out years later about the actual costs to the customer of the work I was doing (management flatout refused to give us any of these numbers) I realized that I could have worked about 4 days a week on the same monthly salary and they would still have made a substantial profit on me.
lutorm 15y ago
Coming from academia, where we don't make money, we spend money, I wondered this too. I can come up with a badass Monte Carlo algorithm that does our computation in half the time, but there's absolutely no way to connect this to any monetary value because the end product isn't about money.
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
- patio11 15y ago
  Vis-a-vis your institution, get good at grant writing. You don't make money in academia by doing research, you make money by doing grant proposals. Vis-a-vis the funding agencies, they generally have a set of concerns which are non-monetary, too, so meet them where they are.
  - lutorm 15y ago
    I meant coming from an academic job to a non-academic one. I'm doing well on the grant front, but I don't think that'll help me in getting a "normal" job.
    - thomaslangston 15y ago
      Amount you spent might also be useful, if you can prove you spent it wisely.
    - nagrom 15y ago
      I'm in the exact same situation. My way forward is to get an external consultancy project worth $XM and use that as an example.
    - SatvikBeri 15y ago
      There are three main ways for people to show their business value: 1. Absolute ability to add $ to the bottom line 2. Relative ability compared to others 3. Absolute technical skills Academics transitioning to business do well focusing on 2 and 3, especially 2. If you show me that you were the top 1% of the top 1%, I'm going to be impressed. One quick concrete example: a friend of mine got the top scholarship for graduate students at her school. This was worth maybe $7,000-not a huge amount in business terms. But it marked her as one of the two best out of 10,000 graduate students. Most people would just put the name of the grant, but what's impressive is the fact that only .05% of applicants got the grant. Once she put that as the first line on her resume, she got significantly more call-backs.
anthonyb 15y ago
Start gathering them. Seriously, if you're working on $YADDA_YADDA, then obviously there should be some justification for it, either to yourself or your manager. That's what you need to get down, stuff like: improved response times by x%, killed y open bugs, removed z lines of code, whatever your project's current major issues are. And if you can't come up with an easy justification like that, why are you doing it? :)
thomaslangston 15y ago
> What about the rest of the engineering team that worked on that change, reviewed it, pushed it to production? "I worked as part of a team that $x. My role on the team was $y."
SatvikBeri 15y ago
Real-life example from a friend I coached: -His main role was working on a software process that generated XYZ benefit for the free users -He increased the efficiency of that process, allowing the company to increase the XYZ's they created by 100% -Free users who had XYZ were n% more likely to buy -Sales were worth an average of ABC dollars -Multiplying it all out, he was responsible for increasing the bottom line by a lot Now, he had to make a lot of estimates, and ask people he knew at his company for estimates on some of the information. But by amassing all this information he can make a much stronger case for his value than if he could only talk about the technical work he did.

lrobb 15y ago

I don't think most engineers or engineering managers really give a flip... At least IME they don't. They want to see that you can produce code. So if you can point to features/apps that you developed, or how you optimized some feature somewhere, that's what they want.

Timothee 15y ago
I understand that and that's kind of my point. As an engineer, you can definitely talk about what you've done to convince the other party that you're capable, but it's (IMO) more difficult to tie it to a specific increase in the offer when negotiation starts, which is what Patrick discusses. Specifically, he puts the asked salary increase head-to-head with the potential revenue increase: "Getting me that extra $4,000 would make this a much easier decision. Considering that this is conceivably worth millions to you, we’d be silly not to do business with each other." Which indeed makes it sound like a bargain. :) And I know it's exactly the goal of what Patrick preaches: speak in terms of value created, not technical competence. It's just, y'know, hard :)

patio11 15y ago

Sales guys very rarely tie their stomachs in knots with "So I suppose technically I might have talked to five million in new accounts last quarter, but most of them required new features, so I'm not sure I can justifiably claim credit for that one without splitting it with the engineering team." One might start learning from that example. Did you lead development on a new product with $5 million in sales? Then I might describe that as leading development on a new product with $5 million in sales. I wouldn't recommend optimizing SQL queries on a screen no one actually uses, but if that is your day to day activity, you were improving performance of the company's flagship product which launched to over $5 million in sales. If you're optimizing page load speed then presumably you tracked the before and after and, if you don't have great data about how that trickled into the business results, you can at least say "I shaved 5 seconds off our dashboard. Research from Google / Amazon / Microsoft / etc has found that page load speed has the following quantifiable impacts and that the sensitivity is on the order of 100 ms, or roughly one fiftieth of the improvement I delivered." You can also either a) engineer your transfer to the part of the company which makes money or b) engineer your work duties such that they include things which will help career growth. For example, A/B testing both prints money and gives very relevant, justified metrics which are likely to include things motivational to decisionmakers at current and future employers. If you are an engineer in a company which doesn't A/B test but could, you should make that sale internally, and then nominate yourself as the obvious person to implement it.

Timothee 15y ago
I know what you're saying, but sales guys benefits from the perception that they're solely responsible for the close of a sale. That's their job after all. So the $5M in sales? It wouldn't have happened without them! (that's the perception) if that is your day to day activity, you were improving performance of the company's flagship product which launched to over $5 million in sales Already there are more steps. You know he didn't sell that himself, a sales person did, and the link between performance and number of sales is unclear without knowing the product. So, to me, the $5 million number is nice ('ok so he was trusted to work on that important product') but feels a bit irrelevant when asking for a specific offer increase. For whatever reason, it doesn't convince me that this candidate in particular couldn't have been replaced by another candidate for the same result. In the example of a sales person, I'm more easily convinced that s/he was influential in the result. edit: I guess it's because sales is so much more of a "people" job than engineering. But maybe I'm just pointing at what you've been saying: take a job closer to the money…

rmc 15y ago

The thing is that I can't really think of nice metrics like this, and am surprised that a lot of engineers would find something as significant as sales numbers. One way: Did you work on a feature that was then used to sign up a client that is now worth €X?

run4yourlives 15y ago

>So, what's a good way to come up with relevant, justified metrics like that? Make shit up. I'm dead serious. Not in terms of "This product never existed and I'm going to lie to you", but in terms of "Everyone loved that feature I did, it probably helped retain 3-5% of our clients alone, and we were able to hire another two people the following year, so that probably works out to about 10% growth." So: my feature improved helped grow sales by 13%.

jiggy2011 15y ago

Many companies I think will intentionally keep employees in the dark as much as possible about how much they are really worth to the company. I worked in support once for an outsourcing company where I was paid only a little over minimum wage and given a number of SLAs to keep (which I usually exceeded). When I found out years later about the actual costs to the customer of the work I was doing (management flatout refused to give us any of these numbers) I realized that I could have worked about 4 days a week on the same monthly salary and they would still have made a substantial profit on me.

lutorm 15y ago

Coming from academia, where we don't make money, we spend money, I wondered this too. I can come up with a badass Monte Carlo algorithm that does our computation in half the time, but there's absolutely no way to connect this to any monetary value because the end product isn't about money.

deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
patio11 15y ago
Vis-a-vis your institution, get good at grant writing. You don't make money in academia by doing research, you make money by doing grant proposals. Vis-a-vis the funding agencies, they generally have a set of concerns which are non-monetary, too, so meet them where they are.
- lutorm 15y ago
  I meant coming from an academic job to a non-academic one. I'm doing well on the grant front, but I don't think that'll help me in getting a "normal" job.
  - thomaslangston 15y ago
    Amount you spent might also be useful, if you can prove you spent it wisely.
  - nagrom 15y ago
    I'm in the exact same situation. My way forward is to get an external consultancy project worth $XM and use that as an example.
  - SatvikBeri 15y ago
    There are three main ways for people to show their business value: 1. Absolute ability to add $ to the bottom line 2. Relative ability compared to others 3. Absolute technical skills Academics transitioning to business do well focusing on 2 and 3, especially 2. If you show me that you were the top 1% of the top 1%, I'm going to be impressed. One quick concrete example: a friend of mine got the top scholarship for graduate students at her school. This was worth maybe $7,000-not a huge amount in business terms. But it marked her as one of the two best out of 10,000 graduate students. Most people would just put the name of the grant, but what's impressive is the fact that only .05% of applicants got the grant. Once she put that as the first line on her resume, she got significantly more call-backs.

anthonyb 15y ago

Start gathering them. Seriously, if you're working on $YADDA_YADDA, then obviously there should be some justification for it, either to yourself or your manager. That's what you need to get down, stuff like: improved response times by x%, killed y open bugs, removed z lines of code, whatever your project's current major issues are. And if you can't come up with an easy justification like that, why are you doing it? :)

thomaslangston 15y ago

> What about the rest of the engineering team that worked on that change, reviewed it, pushed it to production? "I worked as part of a team that $x. My role on the team was $y."

SatvikBeri 15y ago

Real-life example from a friend I coached: -His main role was working on a software process that generated XYZ benefit for the free users -He increased the efficiency of that process, allowing the company to increase the XYZ's they created by 100% -Free users who had XYZ were n% more likely to buy -Sales were worth an average of ABC dollars -Multiplying it all out, he was responsible for increasing the bottom line by a lot Now, he had to make a lot of estimates, and ask people he knew at his company for estimates on some of the information. But by amassing all this information he can make a much stronger case for his value than if he could only talk about the technical work he did.