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Comment by hdgvhicv | Hacker News Reader

It may mean paying less to the best negotiators, but not the best performers.

These very much tend to strongly correlate. You're definitely more confident in negotiating and counter-offering if you have 10x skill as your leverage.

That’s not at all the case. Five of us recently moved internally via a remapping and they gave us pay rises. I negotiated 15% more than the initial offer, everyone else took the initial offer. Roughly same ability.

Indeed the only reason I could do this was because the new salary ranges were shown thanks to pay transparency.

"Tend to correlate" is a strictly probabilistic statement, I'm not talking about guarantees here.

And you have studies to back your claims up?

It's just sound reasoning. You're confident if you have less reasons to be desperate.

So no evidence, just claims that fly in the face of real experience.

> You're definitely more confident in negotiating and counter-offering if you have 10x skill

Not if high performers underrate their skill, and under-performers overestimate their skill, both of which studies suggest is true.

I would speculate that 10x devs' underestimation primarily concerns their percentile ranking relative to peers, not necessarily their absolute skill. Comparing yourself to the likes of Carmack and Wozniak is what pushes you to become cracked in the first place.

What matters is how they rate their skills relative to their colleagues, and how well they rate their value to the company.

people who claim to be 10x devs tend to be 0.5x devs with fancier keyboards

Just because you may have leverage does not mean that you're wise enough in negotiation skills to use that leverage effectively.

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