Hacker News Reader

Comment by swyx | Hacker News Reader

I don't have proof but have a sneaking suspicion that there's a certain amount of gaslighting in the negotiation advice genre - all of them read like the sky is the limit if you were just good enough at negotiation, but they mix in anecdata of people who actually got high 5-6 figure improvements, vs the more likely outcome of a <20k/yr improvement.

don't get me wrong, this is still GREAT, and if all these pieces get you to do is negotiate at all, then that's a win. but I found myself being unhappy not managing to reach a 320k total comp recently (up from initial 210) and I realized my dissatisfaction with an otherwise great comp was due to the misleveled expectations from reading a lot of these pieces (which are better fit for extreme domain experts and independent consultants, than regular SWE employees that have to fit within a salary band)

View on HN

And imagine how readers from other countries feel! Even in Canada, the salaries people throw around in this forum are almost not believable

I fought my last employer to go from $17/hr to $18/hr starting, and they wouldn't budge. I'm 30, I have a degree, I had 2 years at the company (transferring to a different division) and another 4 years experience in a similar role. I've never in my life made more than $40k in a year.

People on this site have a completely bonkers perspective on what's normal.

This forum does select for particularly passionate engineers, that seem to be mostly in the US (assumption). The US happens to have the highest paying software jobs. Even still I feel like this forum selects for higher paid engineers through selection bias, and those willing to discuss salary are likely those on the higher end. I always forget this and feel a bit disappointed with myself when reading these discussions.

I checked indeed and it tells me the average US software engineer salary is $110k, and Cali being $136k. Indeed isn’t a perfect source but that seems more realistic than the idea you can get from here where people talk about $300k total comp

Canadian here, just signed an offer (Not FAANG) for ~360k TC, 30k of that was negotiated up based on advice from this patio11 article. The opportunities are out there, especially now that companies are going remote.

Another anecdote. I'm in the Midwest of the US and you won't get that kind of comp without getting closer to the money than an IC.

But we can do this all day. Without larger studies or well run surveys it doesn't say much to those who aren't some combination of very talented, lucky, or well connected.

Edit: some, not done

At a Canadian company? A while ago I took a position with a US company who offered quite a bit more than the Canadian org I left. Would be happy to return to Canadian tech but haven't found shops where the money is comparable. TBF haven't been aggressively searching though, but curious about your experience.

US company, but that's just my point that there are more US companies willing to hire Canadians remotely.

so they started you out at 330k? what were the determinants going into that starting offer? that's pretty great

Reply on news.ycombinator.com