I've generally taken what I want to make in the role and added 20% to it as a starting point. While this might limit me, it also keeps me from doing 100 onsite interviews only to discover their max is 2/3 of my expected comp.
I'm not going to waste my time if they want to play games like being secretive about the pay.
Which is the majority of employees. Because...
> employees who are more proactive and entrepreneurial about negotiating
...aren't going to remain employees for too long; they are going to end up starting their own businesses because they realize that the upside is so much greater. Which means, first, that, to them, the job at your company is not a career; it's a temporary day job while they get set up to pursue their real goal. And second, that at any given time these kinds of employees will be a fairly small minority of all the people in the job market.
the risks are also greater, I am 100% proactive about salary, I am 100% pretty aggressive and "disagreeable" (in the psych meaning of the term) about it as well
I however am not entrepreneurial because I have no desire to have that liability, or risk. I prefer working for a company instead of owning the company
so we established that the revenue of the company belongs to the employees that worked for it, but the company has to skimm at least the operating costs before payout as otherwise it would make a loss.
but most companies have an obligation to make profit, so there is no other way than to pay the employees less than what they're worth (because increasing revenue would also increase the value of employees accordingly)
please tell me where i'm wrong
Where did we establish this? Because it's not true, especially in a strictly legal sense.
they were really trying. this site is so strange.
Basically they refused to pay me Y because there were folks working there who had been at the company for a while and weren't making that, with very little other justification. We eventually settled on a signing bonus to make up ~80% of the difference, and I got a raise that surpassed that difference within the first year. But I probably wouldn't have taken the role without the bonus and probably would have left within the first year without the raise.
It's still not clear to me why they listed that range if their justification for not paying the top of it was a set of factors that would have been the same for any applicant.
If, in exceptional circumstances, they would pay 30% more than everyone else, they might want to hide this. Instead of saying "we do 95% to 135% of what everyone else offers", they say "we do 95% to 105% of what everyone else offers"... and suddenly they get fewer cranks and weirdos. But they still have the option of offering that 30% more, if they stumble upon some diamond in the rough.
They might want to, even if showing would bring in a few more good candidates. Is it disturbing the signal to noise ratio so much that it takes far longer and costs more to go through the whole process.
Of course, just because it might work this way in theory, it doesn't mean that it does in practice, especially consistently. So, it could be them chasing bad strategy that they can't determine to be bad strategy.
If they have a few more bad assumptions (like "our stated range is still good enough to get the decent candidates"), then they might be even more inclined to hide the range.
They're working through all sorts of bad tradeoffs too, just like you.
“I understand that you’ll need time research to give a meaningful answer, so let’s reconnect once you’ve been able to put together a range. Thanks!”
Once they've responded to that I ask something along the lines of "By the way, what's the budgeted range for this role?" or "are you forbidden from sharing the range for this role" or something along those lines.
For some reason, recruiters seem more willing to share the range after I've anchored high – perhaps because they get insecure about whether they've misjudged my qualifications.
> very few companies pay so much below market that it would be a nonstarter
I don't really agree with that statement as my experiences have been different.
I don’t think there’s a single other profession with as much compensation variability as software engineer. I’ve heard it described as bimodal or trimodal, but I’m not even sure that captures it.
There was a YC company on the hacker news homepage recently looking for senior AI engineer for 60k. Even by international standards that’s absurdly cheap , but this is a YC backed company, I don’t think their head is in the sand (though I do suspect YC coaches founders to play moneyball with hiring as YC companies as a whole seem to pay far below average).
There’s many companies that consider 150-200k as “standard”.
And there’s still many companies paying 400-600k for senior engineers. I thought in the “tech recession” with the interest rates up this wouldn’t be available for a while but an acquaintance who got laid off from Twitter did the “grind interview prep and interview a dozen companies simultaneously” strategy just this summer in 2023 and got multiple competing 500k+ offers (all liquid) for staff SWE including from some companies I didn’t realize paid that much like HubSpot.
Despite many great offers he also encountered many companies that tried to lowball by claiming “salaries are going down for engineers” but that turned out to be wishful thinking and/or a bluff on the company’s part given his final result.
So basically there is no “market rate” for senior engineers but to the extent there is one a huge percentage look to massively go under it. I don’t blame them as it’s part of the game but just be aware many companies say things like “we want the best and are willing to pay for it” but then lowball and try to bluff engineers into thinking “the market” is much lower than reality. Which they do because many many engineers fall for it.
Obviously a silly example, but the caliber of folks is totally different. If I am a job searcher, I want to know the employer understands and is willing to pay for my caliber because otherwise our ideas of what the role is and what it should pay could be vastly off.
Companies have their review schedules and the new hires would be boarded before the reviews. This would allow to hire at low ball and then give a "raise", effectively leveling it.
Not only aiming at below market figure saves company the money, this also serves as a retention tool.
So, it does pay to know an approx of the target comp band AND your own "happy" target. The hard part is to formulate it as a package.
3) Many recruiters will say yes to everything and anything to get you into the interview seat
And if you're juggling multiple FAANG offers in the same week, you probably don't need salary negotiation tips.
If they are remote jobs, you just accept them all, buy as many computers as the offers you accepted and multitask for n x the pay.
Thus if a business does not advertise pay ranges, you can assume it will not be on the high end, at least not competitive with pay in the above regions.
Like, ok your range is $150-250k, fan-fucking-tastic, that’s completely unhelpful
There's no way to tease this out before you interview, except that if you're looking for compensation that's significantly above the top of the band, it might be hard to get. (A little above the top is possible, and sometimes a lot is possible too... that's where the negotiation comes in.)
Any thoughts on how to approach that?
This may sound quaint but I find that being forthcoming and asking the question you have works.
During the latest job search, I would just ask for a range and say myself that "obviously where I fall in the range depends on my candidacy, I won't hold you to it."
If they tell you the range is something like $120K to $150K, it tells you what kind of seniority they are looking for - whether they know it or not - and how much they value people of that profile. If they tell you it's like $150K to $750K - then you know they are really wide open to range of experience and impact. Someone may say that a $600K wide range is meaningless but I don't think it is. If you're more junior you can count on being towards the left but still know they can afford to give you a bit more if they like you, and if you're very senior you can recognize that they have room for someone like you and have an appetite to pay. You'd be totally self-unaware to go into the process hoping for $750 and then landing at $150 but that's more on you.
So I am fine asking for a broad range - it's way more meaningful than no range.
If your salary range for, say, a senior staff engineer includes what you should be paying seniors: you’re wasting everyone’s time.
The fact that the range is 100k isn't that big of an impediment to utility.
That’s a strategy, for sure, but not a great one.
I think it's a horrible idea to hire someone with 5 years in tech X, 4 years in tech Z, and 6 years in method H, who wants to work for 140-150k.
I would rather interview people for a range, and if you find an awesome human - take them.
Or at least, that’s what it tells me as a 20 year veteran of this business.
If you are doing a lot of interviews and not getting jobs - then you need more practice doing them. If you're getting so many offers its boring, look for a way to interview for more demanding positions.
for me:
- it's long, often 3 stages minimum, but more typically 5-6 rounds. do I really want to take 5-10 hours per job out of my month just to "figure out my worth?". As long as I can pay the bills and I'm not miserable at my job, I'm fine.
- if you have a job, it is hard to schedule around all these rounds. In addition, it feels stressful since by most intents, a company does not react well to hearing you are shopping around
- it generally makes use of skills that do not reflect my performance in a job. I am 6 years into industry, I don't and never needed to invert a binary tree on the spot. Meanwhile, actual skills like proper coding practices/architecture, code review feedback, test coverages/edge cases, and the ability navigate through the company to find the person you need are barely even mentioned.
- it's a sterile, artificial environment that more or less makes you put on airs to show "your best self". "why do you want to work for this company" is asked in nearly every interview setting and we all know your real answer is the wrong one, as opposed to using the time to show off how much you researched the company. Even if you basically jut googled "X engineer" and applied because the salary range fit you.
I can understand testing in juniors, because there is no license exam for an engineer, and maybe on the other side of the hump you can get to a point where the companies are trying to impress you. But that middle hump feels like the worst of both worlds.
>If you're getting so many offers its boring, look for a way to interview for more demanding positions.
if you're at that point, you're probably not going to find your answer on the internet. those sorts of jobs are word of mouth.
Software engineering must be the only profession where employment history means nothing. And yet... interviewers always want salary history to knock you down. If you don't care about the work I did in the past, then why do you care about how much I was given for that work?
For the same reason artists do -- to show a potential employer what you're capable of and what your style is. Look at it from the employer's point of view -- they have very little to go on when judging ability. If you can provide examples of your work, then you're reducing their uncertainty and giving yourself an edge for the position.
> I'm not going to put proprietary code on a portfolio nor am I going to spend multiple years building some open source project when I already have a full time job.
You don't have to do either of those things. Your portfolio doesn't have to include large, complex projects. A collection of smaller ones will do nicely. Or, even easier, is what I do: I just bring in the code for the most recent hobby project that I've completed.
> interviewers always want salary history to knock you down
You don't need to provide that history. At least, I never do. When I'm asked, I respond with what my salary expectation is, not what my salary history is.
> For the same reason artists do
They're asking more how it would happen, less for what purpose.
Artists automatically accumulate portfolios by doing work that gets displayed in public. Programmers who work on closed-source programs don't—unless they supplement their work-for-pay in ways that artists aren't expected to. The artist's history of work itself is how they get more work; the programmer's isn't.
open source projects in a relevant industry. IME it's never been required to have sample work to show off, but many agree that having some OS contributions or even small pet projects is one of the most valuable things to leverage, outside of actual work experience.
>The artist's history of work itself is how they get more work; the programmer's isn't.
No one is really going to care behind closed doors, but _technically_ there's plenty of concept/scrapped art owned by the company that they can't directly point to on their public portfolio. It's not quite as easy for artists either to show off what may have been their best work.
> The artist's history of work itself is how they get more work; the programmer's isn't.
It's just a recommended strategy, not a requirement. In general, it's a great idea to identify a customer's pain points and reduce them. When you're looking for a job, the companies you're talking to are the customers. The easier you make things for the interviewer, the more you can reduce their pain points, the better your chances for the position.
If you're trying to explain how they can do it with the least amount of extra work, to minimize the impact of the extra expectation, please consider that not everyone has hobby projects. Even fewer people's hobby projects are presentable, and even fewer still can trust the other person not to draw some wild conclusion based on anything that might be in there.
I think everyone is clear on how the situation works, but not everyone is happy with it working that way.
Just like plumbing is literature, except with pipes.
Nah, Artists have it the worst when it comes to that. Especially early on.
SWE's for the most part leverage titles and company names a bit too much IMO. No licenses + very little way to verify actual contributions = tons of potential false positives.
> interviewers always want salary history to knock you down.
That's pretty much every single job in the history of ever. if it's not a minimum wage job, they are trying to minimize your compensation somehow.
You dont need multi year projects
Just show PoCs of complex stuff
Simple distributed apps? Compilers? Uefi drivers? Or small Libraries?
Especially if you have a job already, when they want to hire you is when you have the maximum leverage.
Simple. Only interview with companies you'd like to work with so much that you'd be willing to negotiate from a starting offer 2/3rds of what you want. When your interest in the company is sufficient, you'll be motivated to tell them that their offer is "a good starting point for discussion" and then make a counter-offer or ask for additional vacation, bonuses, or whatever you value.
Conversely, if interviewing for unattractive positions that pay well is motivated by non-negotiable financial considerations (mortgage, kids in college), then by all means, be up front about it.
This would only work in a hot market, for a desirable candidate. Not everyone has the luxury of interviewing places they really want to work at any cost.
Yes, that would be an example of "non-negotiable financial considerations". I'm going of the statement of the original comment, implying they had the luxury of choosing only those positions that meet their compensation criteria.
So… literally no-where then? Because anywhere that would offer 2/3rds is not a company I’d want to work for.
To put it another way, "total compensation package" for some people includes things that aren't money but have a value roughly equal to some amount of money for that person.
Do you, and if so how did you cultivate that? If you don't mind answering.
Design, intentionally, the dream you would live if you could. My friend often responds cynically, saying if he is asked about his dream job he would be a space explorer like some Marvel movie. I hear him as flippant and he's clear he thinks it's a dumb idealistic pontificating exercise. . I go toward the path of okay, what would it take to BE that thing or pursue it...
If you can visualize and reason your way to how something might happen, you can reverse engineer it. You can think of it like chess. Position yourself with strength, understand openings midgame and endgame, but know there are many, many, undiscovered lines left in many positions. Now expand from 64,64 squares and so many moves to the infinite variability in Life. You have levers and positions you can exploit and transpose.
Circumstances will always have a hand as will pure luck, fate, or Higher Power, but... you have immense power to craft your reality and I mean this in no woo terms. You change your thoughts, your words, your actions and most crucially, your influence and environment.
Good luck, oneironaut.
But I literally want to do nothing. I don't want to do anything - I want to not exist. Life is suffering. I derive no enjoyment from anything. I just make other people happy and wealthy and then go home and suffer until I go back to work and suffer.
I want to not dread going to work, so I only entertain offers from outfits where the job and its environment appear enjoyable. "Acceptable" is below the bar I set unless I somehow end up desperate for money.
The attitude in my case wasn't cultivated. It stems from the fact that I like what I do and I'm very good at it.
How to cultivate that is pretty straightforward. I like games, and I can tolerate making games by leveraging my existing skills. I want to make my own games one day, but I need more financial stability for that. Of course, I can't say I feel as passionate about making someone else's game as I would my own, but industry gives me experience, lets me meet other kinds of talent, and lets me prepare savings for that day I try to do my own thing. That's how I keep motivation going.