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Comment by dpritchett | Hacker News Reader

You're still allowing the other party to frame the transaction.

Sell a vision of a positive outcome: by retaining you they'll work with someone cool and they'll get lots of money and respect out of the association. Don't sell a close match on resume filters.

It's possible that you won't be able to make the case, and that's okay. They can keep looking for someone willing to take their opening offer.

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The key point is selling. Unfortunately, many of us are very poor salespeople and are especially poor at selling ourselves.

Like coding, selling is also a skill that can be learned through practice.

This presents an interesting challenge. I'm currently engaged in negotiating a job offer, but the last time I did this was nearly 16 years ago, the rest of my sales experience is from craigslist...

There is also a difference, in a commerce transaction the best outcome is when both parties think that they got a good deal, how the parties feel about each other only matters in as much as it will impact future potential transactions (i.e. if the buyer thinks that the seller is a sucker and charged too little then as long as the seller is happy with the price the only consequence is likely in the future if the buyer tries to take advantage of the seller)

In a transaction that aims to start a long term relationship (i.e. employment!) ideally neither side should carry negative sentiment from the negotiation. Likely you are negotiating with an HR dept or recruiter who won't take it personally, that makes it easier for the applicant to be a little "harder", the reverse doesn't apply, if the company plays hard-ball it can leave a lingering sense of resentment in a new employee (who should otherwise be entering a honeymoon period)

The last time I changed companies I took a small pay cut (bottom line, headline pay was slightly more, but benefits were noticeably worse) - it grated for a long time, even though the eventual outcome was good (acquihire)

This is a very hard problem. For me it boiled down to this: I really wanted to work at a particular company. Even though what they offered was (slightly) below my expectations, I accepted it. I didn't want to haggle because I knew this was one of the few places I would be happy working and was afraid of losing that opportunity.

This is the tough one that we all face, will asking them to move "slightly" cause you to lose the opportunity.

Having been on the other side of the hiring process, I doubt it. Finding good candidates is hard, by the time that you are making an offer you are already much more invested in the candidate as a potential employee than you are in other candidates to whom you have not yet made an offer.

But, (there's always a but!) if you are happy working there, and that's the result you wanted and needed this this was a good outcome for you. Congratulations!

Thanks!

That's absolutely true. Speaking from experience, I think the best way to get better at selling yourself when you're negotiating a job offer is to participate on the hiring side.

I'm an engineer but I think dealing with people is harder than dealing with computers. I don't know if this is a general sentiment.

Agreed - I made the transition away from explicitly coding just over a year ago, and dealing with people, especially recruiting, was definitely harder than anything I'd done before.

One year later, it's only about as hard as programming, but I'm now on to a new thing that's harder than anything I've done before: managing.

Agreed. Read Negotiation Genius* and go from there.

(*or any other recommended book)

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