Comment by vladimirralev | Hacker News Reader

Comment by vladimirralev | Hacker News Reader

This just seems like a walkthrough how to educate a shitty manager who got their "business-degree" from dilbert comic strips. The last thing a manager wants to do is to lowball a guy who's performance depends on his own good faith. If I have to explain to the manager why this is a bad idea and why he is putting me at disadvantage while keeping key information from me and using sleazy tactics he saw in the "boiler room" against me then how can I trust this guy to have my back in the future?

I got to say this almost never happens in the big5 companies nowadays. There are countless internal trainings for recruiters specifically not to do stuff like that and especially anything remotely similar to what you see in pop-culture. I mean what are the chances none of your candidates would have seen "Suits" or "The Wolf from Wall Str." after all? Even if you manage to hire somebody below their market rate it will be just a few months hanging out with peers and he will find out and be resentful.

He doesn't even have to hang out with peers, one simple search across some popular job site nowadays (e.g. glassdoor) will immediately land you with a decent salary amount for your desired position. We've already entered the brave new world where the concept "salary is private information" is dead, and, if one is a developer active on Github (or other OSS platform), then the concept "my work portfolio is private" is also dead.

So you're absolutely right, the worst thing for a hiring manager and a potential employee to do is set themselves up into adversarial positions of who can best manipulate and "break" the other person first. Because a company built with employees and management who can't trust each other, and are in constant underground wars to gouge the most out of each other, is bound to get trounced by competitor companies in the open market

I have friend who got an offer at a large, well known tech company. When he graduated he ended up negotiating a significant five figure raise by looking at other companies.

So I don't agree with that statement. He was basically a new grad, so the standard offer was probably obtainable especially considering he knew employees at that company. And they still did not make him an initial offer that was competitive with other places.

It turns out there are a lot more than 5 companies out there in the marketplace... And if you think you got a fair initial offer you almost certainly did not.

I referred to top5 just as an example of professionalism, possibly backed by tons of data and analytics internally too. Which to me means it's the best methodology currently known.

Well if I didn't get a fair initial offer then the manager must think the risk of me finding out will not affect his goals. I accept that, as long as they accept it too. But I don't want to find out I was lied to and then expect me to be loyal.

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