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I used to work in trading and I think some of the principles I learned there apply directly to salary negotiations. Two key things I think about all the time a

I used to work in trading and I think some of the principles I learned there apply directly to salary negotiations. Two key things I think about all the time are price discovery and competition. Price discovery means that in some illiquid markets, you don't really know what a thing will trade at unless you try to trade it (which itself reveals some information to the counterparty but that's not important in the job case) From that point of view, I am always surprised to hear people who hate interviewing, are reluctant to interview, etc. Interviewing is the only real way to learn "the market" - what offers to you would actually look like, and other information as well. Like if you always get offers at the low end of a range - or if you always fail interviews - is very good signal that you can act on. Competition - when we traded bonds, we'd always go to multiple dealers for quotes. The dealers would know that we always ask at least X of their competitors by rule, so they knew that whatever number they gave us, we'd compare against others. That prompted them to strike the balance between a good deal for them and a price we'd actually accept. From that point of view, the best negotiating advice is to have multiple offers, because (1) you see what the highest one is (2) you can see how close or dispersed they are and you can infer something from that (3) they give you leverage. EG: let's say you want job X most, but job Y gave you $20K more on the offer or whatever. You can always tell job X "I'd love to work with you but it's hard to accept a lower offer, can you match?" This isn't even a game, you'd be saying this sincerely. Or, if your offers are close, you can push the highest one a bit because you know they aren't so far out of the norm with more confidence.

mixmastamyk 3y ago
Unfortunately, a big problem is getting offers in the first place. Very hard to be the last candidate standing, and that's by design. Very little practice equals poor performance.
JohnFen 3y ago
> From that point of view, I am always surprised to hear people who hate interviewing, are reluctant to interview, etc. Interviewing is the only real way to learn "the market" Interviewing may be the best way to gather market information, but does that make it surprising that people hate doing it? There are very few activities I hate more than taking part in a job interview (on either side of the desk). That it's useful and necessary doesn't make it any less unpleasant.
- xyzelement 3y ago
  I can agree w that but with a caveat. There are lots of activities that fit that description (eg public speaking, exercise) that are good for you but many people hate. But there's also room to learn to enjoy and have fun with it. Maybe not available to everyone.
- ABCLAW 3y ago
  >but does that make it surprising that people hate doing it? When an activity validates you, it's tough to imagine other people having the opposite experience with it. Imagine every time you went to a round of interviews you were offered riches and status. It would be tough to understand why others just didn't muster up the gumption to go downtown and get what they're worth.
  - xyzelement 3y ago
    I am the person y'all replying to. This is a good prompt for my mental model on interviewing. I assume that the answer in any interview process I go into will be "no" 90%+ of the time. That's not some defeated pessimism, it's just reality that the process is hairy (how many people do you go on dates with before you get married?) and every single instance can fail for reasons that have to do with you (how you did that day, fit for the role) or not (hired internally, headcount went away, etc.) While obviously it's frustrating to fail a round / not get an offer, there's less sting to it when you manage your expectations as above, and then add to it that the frequency of at-bats + the learning process can lead to a better outcome despite - and in fact - because of - the rejections. So yes, there's a big mental/attitude component that helps you engage with this productively and see the process as something you're doing for yourself - and thus even the fails are part of the plan - versus stepping into some sort of meat grinder. And to be fair to your comment about "offered riches and status" - I would not put it that way and the 90%+ fail rate is very real. That said, I definitely feel positive about work and have been lucky with opportunities and there's no question that extensive experience interviewing - and learning from the fails - has been key to that.
    - ABCLAW 3y ago
MattGaiser 3y ago
> From that point of view, I am always surprised to hear people who hate interviewing, are reluctant to interview, etc. Interviewing is the only real way to learn "the market" - what offers to you would actually look like, and other information as well. Like if you always get offers at the low end of a range - or if you always fail interviews - is very good signal that you can act on. I don’t think anyone disputes the value of the information. It is just painful to obtain.
j1elo 3y ago
> You can always tell job X "I'd love to work with you but it's hard to accept a lower offer, can you match?" It's of course very dependant on each country and the jobs market, but in my experience the issue would be even getting to have multiple offers in a short enough period of time. To the point that it happening could be called a coincidence, more than anything. Unless you are fiercely hunting for a job (aka. doing several interviews per week), I don't see how it would happen to get an offer and telling the company "well, wait for a couple weeks or a month for my answer" just to see if it happens that offers arrive from the other places and one gets to compare simultaneously. Seems more likely that an offer comes, you accept or decline it, if declined then other will eventually come some time later, and one can compare them and maybe regret having declined the former, and so on.
- cyanydeez 3y ago
  These seem like old times or a very narrow band of. High salaries. The only general purpose advice here is the price discovery. If you want to know, you need offers.
- saagarjha 3y ago
  The article says to not do it but I’ve had pretty good results with “I’m on a short timeline due to competing offers” to speed things up.
  - xyzelement 3y ago
    Ditto. Almost every recruiter will ask you at the onset if you are interviewing with other places. They ask so they have a lever to speed up your process if necessary - eg "hey hiring manager, this dude's resume looks great and I had a good convo with him, but he's already had one round with AWS. We better line up our side of things ASAP" As I mentioned in another comment, I try to be forthcoming with companies especially in cases where the transparency doesn't hurt me and helps everyone. So if the following is the case, I would say something like "Yup, I am in a pretty active search right now, I am talking to a handful of other companies. I am definitely interested in going through the process with you as well, so if you want I will keep you abreast of how my other conversations are going throughout this process" - I've found that this both creates credibility/good vibes and the company is often able to keep pace with the process and offer timing. Elsewhere in this thread someone was asking how you can possibly get to a place where you have multiple offers around the same timeline - it's something like this.
zoomablemind 3y ago
Interviewing on the actual offer/price is not the same as interviewing about getting a chance to schedule a conversation about ability to qualify for being considered for an interview with a person who could evaluate your worthiness to fill in a position within known but flexible compensation band which may not be directly offered after all... Of course, not always it is that convoluted, but the "beef" is often that much detached from the process.
ClumsyPilot 3y ago
> am always surprised to hear people who hate interviewing, Inreviewing is expensive. I think coding tests are a strategy to make it more expensive for a candidate. Even if you are one of the best, getting a single offer can be full 2 days work - if you count the time spent searching, applying, etc.
distant_hat 3y ago
That's a sound advice for bonds but jobs are largely not like that by design. It is kind of like dating, and asking for a price upfront makes it closer to whoredom and companies explicitly downgrade you for being in it only for the money. If you want to sell a bond and the other person's price is too low, you don't sell it and that's that. For interviews, you end up spending hours through the interview process and may not even know whether you will end up getting a salary quote at the end of it. Getting multiple quotes is a great idea, but putting it in action is harder than it appears. It may help to go with someone like a recruiter who can disintermediate the process. I've often thought someone like an agent for software professionals could make a great idea. That person's job is to get you great gigs and good prices and she makes a percentage of your salary so is aligned with getting you the best offers.
- GVIrish 3y ago
  Typically you're not asking for a price(salary) upfront. Ideally you've done a bit of homework to figure out what positions can pay in the ballpark of what you want. Then you get their offer at the end of the interview process and negotiate as appropriate. Yeah you may go through hours of interviews and not end up with an offer in some cases but think of it this way: you could potentially earn tens of thousands to over one hundred thousand extra dollar per year off that time investment in interviewing. Attempting to line up multiple interviews and balancing offer timelines is hard, but the payoff can be huge. Considering that people spend 4 years or more working in college to get into their career, making a time investment of a few weeks to get a potentially large raise is nothing.
lylejantzi3rd 3y ago
> Like if you always get offers at the low end of a range - or if you always fail interviews - is very good signal that you can act on. Can you elaborate on that? I'm not seeing why these are good signals to act on.
- CaveTech 3y ago
  The signal is that you don’t present well and need to work on that.
  - lylejantzi3rd 3y ago
    That's a signal you can more easily get from a practice interview. In a real interview, you have no idea why you were rejected. Maybe you don't present well. Maybe you present perfectly well, but somebody else had slightly more experience dealing with a specific problem the company needs solved. Maybe they already decided to hire somebody, but needed to conduct interviews anyway to satisfy the lawyers. Is there a good way to extract that information out of an interview? I always ask for feedback, but I rarely get it.
    - CaveTech 3y ago
      OP wasn't discussing a singular instance, but what you can infer if it keeps happening. As N increases the role of luck decreases.
      - deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
  - OJFord 3y ago
    Is it though? Surely it could equally show progression - edging in to the next range up, so always offered the lower end (not the upper end of the range for the more junior role you've moved out of). Just a thought.
- xyzelement 3y ago
somsak2 3y ago
This stuff only works if market participants abide by the law, which we know they don't: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_Litigation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L... The other issue you run into is cost of getting to competing offers. In your example, you can just ask a dealer for a quote and they'll give it to you, with little to no work on your part. In tech, you have to go through multiple hours of interviews to get this information. It's no wonder that people are resistant to go interview. Especially when you can get most of this information much more easily through levels.fyi.
- xyzelement 3y ago
  I follow your logic but I am not sure it really works. Agree levels.fyi is a great resource under the right conditions. EG, if Facebook wants to interview you as an E5 engineer, it's great to look up the range for that. But if you are say a "senior developer" working outside of FAANG, what does it mean for you to know the E5 comp when you have no idea how that lines up against your profile? How would you know if FB would consider you for an E5 or even an E3 unless you interview and see how close you can get? The only other way is if you're already in a FAANG with very comparable levels. Otherwise, what's a "senior engineer" in one place may not pass the resume screen for a "junior" in another. I agree with you that it obviously takes multiple hours to go through an interview, I am calling out that it's often well worth it, because: you may actually get an offer at the end, which you may take or use to negotiate with another company, and even if you constantly fail interviews there's a very actionable signal in that too. So the return on investment for those hours - ultimately being able to get a better/more lucrative job, seems like a good use of time.
- hinkley 3y ago
  Also it's not just a matter of getting several offers in a two week period. That's somewhat doable if you are unemployed. If you're trying to interview without your current employer freaking out, you have to space these things out. You can only have so many 'appointments' in a two week period.
atomicnumber3 3y ago
"the best negotiating advice is to have multiple offers" This is borderline "get in the job cannon and blast off to jobland" territory. Also - it can be terrifically difficult to line up multiple simultaneous offers because companies would rather explode their offer than generally let people get a better leverage. I know multiple companies who do this on purpose for this explicit reason. Is it inefficient from a market perspective? Of course. But since when has that ever stopped the owner class from oppressing the workers?
- klipt 3y ago
  It's generally easy to line up the interviews, at least at big companies you can pretty much pick your interview date. Then if you've done say 5 interviews (1 per day for a week), you can just wait for the first offer and use that as leverage to get the others to hurry up. Since they already have all the data they need.
  - el_benhameen 3y ago
    I haven’t pursued it seriously so I don’t know how much you can hurry things along, but most of the interview processes I’ve seen are weeks long. Google even warns you up front that it’ll probably take on the order of months. So it’s kind of tricky to get them to all line up like that.
    - xyzelement 3y ago
      It's still valuable info. Like let's say you actually made it thorough all the rounds at Google per your example, and are 'stuck' in hiring committee. That's a huge signal to you that you are in striking distance of the level you interviewed for, even if you don't ultimately make it this time. That means you can for example use levels.fyi number for that level at Google as 'something that applies to me'
    - jacksnipe 3y ago
      It all depends. I have done first phone call -> offer in 2 weeks at FAANG.
golemiprague 3y ago
[dead]
lelanthran 3y ago
> I used to work in trading and I think some of the principles I learned there apply directly to salary negotiations. I think exactly zero of those principles apply (assuming you are talking about stock exchange trades). All these types of "technical analysis" on price-discovery during negotiations is fairly pointless. There's only one rule that works when personally doing a trade with someone:(whether you're negotiating salary, buying a property or selling car) be likeable! The more the other party likes you, the more flexible they are going to be on their price-points. So, sure, the hiring manager has a band (say $100k to $140k). What you want is for him to make an offer at the top of his band ... or even higher - if you interview well they may decide on a more senior role for you. This is why, even if your minimum is above his maximum, be likeable! Even if you have already decided you don't want that job, be likeable! Even if you don't want to work for that particular company, be likeable! Even if you already have an offer in hand that is way above anything anyone else can offer you, be likeable! What likeable means depends on context. When selling a car, being upfront and having all the paperwork up to date, and all the services done on time and recorded as such, a clearance certificate to prove "not stolen", etc ... makes you likeable. When negotiating a salary, gush about how nice their offices are, how their mission statement resonates with you, how wonderful the interviewers have been up to that point.[1] Make a list of things you admire about the company/its products/its vision ahead of time so that you can truthfully tell them all wonderful things about themselves. Practice telling people horrible things in nice ways (called constructive criticism?). Practice, Practice, Practice! They will give you stupid challenges, maybe even broken code. How you respond must make them like you even more for the role. You must come across as a collaborator and leverager, not as a coding genius. Coding geniuses are a dime a dozen. Competent coders who can act as a force multiplier for their team, their manager or their company are rare gems who get offered much more than genius coders. Everywhere I've been at, or done work for, for over 25 years, has been filled with people who would rather work with pleasant people who are basically competent (or even slightly below average) than work with unpleasant people, no matter how good they are technically. Look at highly paid surgeons: the ones making the most money are the ones filling every single one of their slots. They know - bedside manners matter. [1] I spent a full day interview for a senior-ish (L5? L6? Dunno now) position at AWS. It was hard work, with challenges coming at me the whole day, coding, design, etc ... and yet I thanked every single interviewer for their time, and told them how much I appreciate them making the effort to interview me. I was warm, pleasant and friendly the whole day, not just civil, in spite of the constant set of new problems thrown my way.

mixmastamyk 3y ago

Unfortunately, a big problem is getting offers in the first place. Very hard to be the last candidate standing, and that's by design. Very little practice equals poor performance.

JohnFen 3y ago

> From that point of view, I am always surprised to hear people who hate interviewing, are reluctant to interview, etc. Interviewing is the only real way to learn "the market" Interviewing may be the best way to gather market information, but does that make it surprising that people hate doing it? There are very few activities I hate more than taking part in a job interview (on either side of the desk). That it's useful and necessary doesn't make it any less unpleasant.

xyzelement 3y ago
I can agree w that but with a caveat. There are lots of activities that fit that description (eg public speaking, exercise) that are good for you but many people hate. But there's also room to learn to enjoy and have fun with it. Maybe not available to everyone.
ABCLAW 3y ago
>but does that make it surprising that people hate doing it? When an activity validates you, it's tough to imagine other people having the opposite experience with it. Imagine every time you went to a round of interviews you were offered riches and status. It would be tough to understand why others just didn't muster up the gumption to go downtown and get what they're worth.
- xyzelement 3y ago
  I am the person y'all replying to. This is a good prompt for my mental model on interviewing. I assume that the answer in any interview process I go into will be "no" 90%+ of the time. That's not some defeated pessimism, it's just reality that the process is hairy (how many people do you go on dates with before you get married?) and every single instance can fail for reasons that have to do with you (how you did that day, fit for the role) or not (hired internally, headcount went away, etc.) While obviously it's frustrating to fail a round / not get an offer, there's less sting to it when you manage your expectations as above, and then add to it that the frequency of at-bats + the learning process can lead to a better outcome despite - and in fact - because of - the rejections. So yes, there's a big mental/attitude component that helps you engage with this productively and see the process as something you're doing for yourself - and thus even the fails are part of the plan - versus stepping into some sort of meat grinder. And to be fair to your comment about "offered riches and status" - I would not put it that way and the 90%+ fail rate is very real. That said, I definitely feel positive about work and have been lucky with opportunities and there's no question that extensive experience interviewing - and learning from the fails - has been key to that.
  - ABCLAW 3y ago

MattGaiser 3y ago

> From that point of view, I am always surprised to hear people who hate interviewing, are reluctant to interview, etc. Interviewing is the only real way to learn "the market" - what offers to you would actually look like, and other information as well. Like if you always get offers at the low end of a range - or if you always fail interviews - is very good signal that you can act on. I don’t think anyone disputes the value of the information. It is just painful to obtain.

j1elo 3y ago

> You can always tell job X "I'd love to work with you but it's hard to accept a lower offer, can you match?" It's of course very dependant on each country and the jobs market, but in my experience the issue would be even getting to have multiple offers in a short enough period of time. To the point that it happening could be called a coincidence, more than anything. Unless you are fiercely hunting for a job (aka. doing several interviews per week), I don't see how it would happen to get an offer and telling the company "well, wait for a couple weeks or a month for my answer" just to see if it happens that offers arrive from the other places and one gets to compare simultaneously. Seems more likely that an offer comes, you accept or decline it, if declined then other will eventually come some time later, and one can compare them and maybe regret having declined the former, and so on.

cyanydeez 3y ago
These seem like old times or a very narrow band of. High salaries. The only general purpose advice here is the price discovery. If you want to know, you need offers.
saagarjha 3y ago
The article says to not do it but I’ve had pretty good results with “I’m on a short timeline due to competing offers” to speed things up.
- xyzelement 3y ago
  Ditto. Almost every recruiter will ask you at the onset if you are interviewing with other places. They ask so they have a lever to speed up your process if necessary - eg "hey hiring manager, this dude's resume looks great and I had a good convo with him, but he's already had one round with AWS. We better line up our side of things ASAP" As I mentioned in another comment, I try to be forthcoming with companies especially in cases where the transparency doesn't hurt me and helps everyone. So if the following is the case, I would say something like "Yup, I am in a pretty active search right now, I am talking to a handful of other companies. I am definitely interested in going through the process with you as well, so if you want I will keep you abreast of how my other conversations are going throughout this process" - I've found that this both creates credibility/good vibes and the company is often able to keep pace with the process and offer timing. Elsewhere in this thread someone was asking how you can possibly get to a place where you have multiple offers around the same timeline - it's something like this.

zoomablemind 3y ago

Interviewing on the actual offer/price is not the same as interviewing about getting a chance to schedule a conversation about ability to qualify for being considered for an interview with a person who could evaluate your worthiness to fill in a position within known but flexible compensation band which may not be directly offered after all... Of course, not always it is that convoluted, but the "beef" is often that much detached from the process.

ClumsyPilot 3y ago

> am always surprised to hear people who hate interviewing, Inreviewing is expensive. I think coding tests are a strategy to make it more expensive for a candidate. Even if you are one of the best, getting a single offer can be full 2 days work - if you count the time spent searching, applying, etc.

distant_hat 3y ago

That's a sound advice for bonds but jobs are largely not like that by design. It is kind of like dating, and asking for a price upfront makes it closer to whoredom and companies explicitly downgrade you for being in it only for the money. If you want to sell a bond and the other person's price is too low, you don't sell it and that's that. For interviews, you end up spending hours through the interview process and may not even know whether you will end up getting a salary quote at the end of it. Getting multiple quotes is a great idea, but putting it in action is harder than it appears. It may help to go with someone like a recruiter who can disintermediate the process. I've often thought someone like an agent for software professionals could make a great idea. That person's job is to get you great gigs and good prices and she makes a percentage of your salary so is aligned with getting you the best offers.

GVIrish 3y ago
Typically you're not asking for a price(salary) upfront. Ideally you've done a bit of homework to figure out what positions can pay in the ballpark of what you want. Then you get their offer at the end of the interview process and negotiate as appropriate. Yeah you may go through hours of interviews and not end up with an offer in some cases but think of it this way: you could potentially earn tens of thousands to over one hundred thousand extra dollar per year off that time investment in interviewing. Attempting to line up multiple interviews and balancing offer timelines is hard, but the payoff can be huge. Considering that people spend 4 years or more working in college to get into their career, making a time investment of a few weeks to get a potentially large raise is nothing.

lylejantzi3rd 3y ago

> Like if you always get offers at the low end of a range - or if you always fail interviews - is very good signal that you can act on. Can you elaborate on that? I'm not seeing why these are good signals to act on.

CaveTech 3y ago
The signal is that you don’t present well and need to work on that.
- lylejantzi3rd 3y ago
  That's a signal you can more easily get from a practice interview. In a real interview, you have no idea why you were rejected. Maybe you don't present well. Maybe you present perfectly well, but somebody else had slightly more experience dealing with a specific problem the company needs solved. Maybe they already decided to hire somebody, but needed to conduct interviews anyway to satisfy the lawyers. Is there a good way to extract that information out of an interview? I always ask for feedback, but I rarely get it.
  - CaveTech 3y ago
    OP wasn't discussing a singular instance, but what you can infer if it keeps happening. As N increases the role of luck decreases.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
- OJFord 3y ago
  Is it though? Surely it could equally show progression - edging in to the next range up, so always offered the lower end (not the upper end of the range for the more junior role you've moved out of). Just a thought.
xyzelement 3y ago

somsak2 3y ago

This stuff only works if market participants abide by the law, which we know they don't: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_Litigation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L... The other issue you run into is cost of getting to competing offers. In your example, you can just ask a dealer for a quote and they'll give it to you, with little to no work on your part. In tech, you have to go through multiple hours of interviews to get this information. It's no wonder that people are resistant to go interview. Especially when you can get most of this information much more easily through levels.fyi.

xyzelement 3y ago
I follow your logic but I am not sure it really works. Agree levels.fyi is a great resource under the right conditions. EG, if Facebook wants to interview you as an E5 engineer, it's great to look up the range for that. But if you are say a "senior developer" working outside of FAANG, what does it mean for you to know the E5 comp when you have no idea how that lines up against your profile? How would you know if FB would consider you for an E5 or even an E3 unless you interview and see how close you can get? The only other way is if you're already in a FAANG with very comparable levels. Otherwise, what's a "senior engineer" in one place may not pass the resume screen for a "junior" in another. I agree with you that it obviously takes multiple hours to go through an interview, I am calling out that it's often well worth it, because: you may actually get an offer at the end, which you may take or use to negotiate with another company, and even if you constantly fail interviews there's a very actionable signal in that too. So the return on investment for those hours - ultimately being able to get a better/more lucrative job, seems like a good use of time.
hinkley 3y ago
Also it's not just a matter of getting several offers in a two week period. That's somewhat doable if you are unemployed. If you're trying to interview without your current employer freaking out, you have to space these things out. You can only have so many 'appointments' in a two week period.

atomicnumber3 3y ago

"the best negotiating advice is to have multiple offers" This is borderline "get in the job cannon and blast off to jobland" territory. Also - it can be terrifically difficult to line up multiple simultaneous offers because companies would rather explode their offer than generally let people get a better leverage. I know multiple companies who do this on purpose for this explicit reason. Is it inefficient from a market perspective? Of course. But since when has that ever stopped the owner class from oppressing the workers?

klipt 3y ago
It's generally easy to line up the interviews, at least at big companies you can pretty much pick your interview date. Then if you've done say 5 interviews (1 per day for a week), you can just wait for the first offer and use that as leverage to get the others to hurry up. Since they already have all the data they need.
- el_benhameen 3y ago
  I haven’t pursued it seriously so I don’t know how much you can hurry things along, but most of the interview processes I’ve seen are weeks long. Google even warns you up front that it’ll probably take on the order of months. So it’s kind of tricky to get them to all line up like that.
  - xyzelement 3y ago
    It's still valuable info. Like let's say you actually made it thorough all the rounds at Google per your example, and are 'stuck' in hiring committee. That's a huge signal to you that you are in striking distance of the level you interviewed for, even if you don't ultimately make it this time. That means you can for example use levels.fyi number for that level at Google as 'something that applies to me'
  - jacksnipe 3y ago
    It all depends. I have done first phone call -> offer in 2 weeks at FAANG.

golemiprague 3y ago

[dead]

lelanthran 3y ago

> I used to work in trading and I think some of the principles I learned there apply directly to salary negotiations. I think exactly zero of those principles apply (assuming you are talking about stock exchange trades). All these types of "technical analysis" on price-discovery during negotiations is fairly pointless. There's only one rule that works when personally doing a trade with someone:(whether you're negotiating salary, buying a property or selling car) be likeable! The more the other party likes you, the more flexible they are going to be on their price-points. So, sure, the hiring manager has a band (say $100k to $140k). What you want is for him to make an offer at the top of his band ... or even higher - if you interview well they may decide on a more senior role for you. This is why, even if your minimum is above his maximum, be likeable! Even if you have already decided you don't want that job, be likeable! Even if you don't want to work for that particular company, be likeable! Even if you already have an offer in hand that is way above anything anyone else can offer you, be likeable! What likeable means depends on context. When selling a car, being upfront and having all the paperwork up to date, and all the services done on time and recorded as such, a clearance certificate to prove "not stolen", etc ... makes you likeable. When negotiating a salary, gush about how nice their offices are, how their mission statement resonates with you, how wonderful the interviewers have been up to that point.[1] Make a list of things you admire about the company/its products/its vision ahead of time so that you can truthfully tell them all wonderful things about themselves. Practice telling people horrible things in nice ways (called constructive criticism?). Practice, Practice, Practice! They will give you stupid challenges, maybe even broken code. How you respond must make them like you even more for the role. You must come across as a collaborator and leverager, not as a coding genius. Coding geniuses are a dime a dozen. Competent coders who can act as a force multiplier for their team, their manager or their company are rare gems who get offered much more than genius coders. Everywhere I've been at, or done work for, for over 25 years, has been filled with people who would rather work with pleasant people who are basically competent (or even slightly below average) than work with unpleasant people, no matter how good they are technically. Look at highly paid surgeons: the ones making the most money are the ones filling every single one of their slots. They know - bedside manners matter. [1] I spent a full day interview for a senior-ish (L5? L6? Dunno now) position at AWS. It was hard work, with challenges coming at me the whole day, coding, design, etc ... and yet I thanked every single interviewer for their time, and told them how much I appreciate them making the effort to interview me. I was warm, pleasant and friendly the whole day, not just civil, in spite of the constant set of new problems thrown my way.