Patrick's "salary negotiation" piece has made the rounds here a number of times, and I always have the same reaction to it: It probably works, if you are already a software celebrity like Patrick, or some other highly sought after Captain of the software engineering industry. For us rank-and-file employee number 12887's, I just don't see it working--I've really never negotiated compensation significantly successfully in my 25+ year career. Here's how salary negotiation usually goes if you're not someone like John Carmack:
Them: We'd love to have you join the team! Here's your compensation letter, please get back to us within the next 2 weeks and we'll move forward.
You: Thank you, I believe my background and skills would suggest a compensation of $1.5X instead of $X. Is this possible with your hiring budget?
Them: The offer is for $X and we believe it is appropriate for your level.
You: Maybe my level should be higher then?
Them: Ha Ha
You: Looking at [website A, B, C] I see the average compensation for this role is $1.25X. Surely there is room to move this upward.
Them: We don't agree with that data. The offer is for $X. Shall we move forward?
You: What about equity or bonus, is there any flexibility with those numbers, or vacation time, or...?
Them: The offer is for $X. If you don't want the job, we can move on to one of our other 20 candidates who are in the pipeline for the role.
That's basically how salary negotiations went for almost the entirety of my career. If your results have been different, I'm kind of envious!
sokoloff
If you don't have a strong BATNA (Best Alternative to a Negotiated Agreement), you're not going to get very far with just asking.
"I received your offer for $X. I really enjoyed the interviews, meeting the team, and am intrigued by the problems I'd get to solve with them. Unfortunately, I have a competing offer for $1.25X from another company and I need to make sure my family is provided for. If you would match it, I'm excited to join, but if your offer is firm at $X, I'm afraid I won't be taking it."
If they really just need someone to hold down a chair, they'll probably not budge. If they really want specifically you, they're more likely to bend if they believe that's their only move.
Aurornis
> Unfortunately, I have a competing offer for $1.25X
If you can get multiple companies to time their interviews and offer stages perfectly and then get one of them to match the other, that’s quite lucky.
However, it’s not like it’s an easy solution. It’s transforming one problem into a much harder one: Now you have to get a second offer that’s even higher and get it at exactly the right time to use it as leverage. How do you negotiate that second offer to 1.25 * $X so you can leverage it to get the first to the same level? That’s left as an exercise for the reader.
“Just get a second offer for 25% more” is more of the wishful thinking negotiating strategy. In most cases it’s more realistic to set a target number and stick to it, being willing to walk away and continue the job search until it’s met.
selcuka
> that’s quite lucky
The second offer does not have to be real. If it's real, what's the point of negotiating with the first company?
If you are not willing to work for $X, simply saying that you want $1.25X won't work, but mentioning a hypothetical competitive offer might. If it doesn't, well, you weren't going to take the job (for $X) in either case anyway.
entropi
Last time I got a job offer the hiring process took ~4 months with seven steps, and I had to answer within 3 days.
I do not get how is anyone realistically supposed to coincide the multiple offers they get. Unless you are already in an extremely privileged position, I cannot even imagine how you can do that.
Magmalgebra
> I had to answer within 3 days.
If you re-read the transcript, I hope you will come to the understanding that this is a lie. The company is trying to leverage your desperation for a job.
> Last time I got a job offer the hiring process took ~4 months with seven steps
Just like increased compensation, gettting the timeline you want requires leverage. When interviewing I always communicate that I expect an offer from a peer competitor within the next few weeks - this expedies my interview process. I always end up with a minimum of 4 competing offers to use as a BATNA.
Something the article winks at here is that negotation has only a small expected payoff if you've navigated your career such that you're a "small fish in a big pond" so to speak.
Someone who can barely pass a FAANG interview likely can't negotiate much with Google but probably could negotiate at lower tier company like SAP.
*edit* I do this strategy 12-18 months whether or not I leave a company, it has never failed me
flatline
This was the standard advice 2-3 years ago when the market was hot, I can’t imagine this being feasible for most people right now.
Magmalgebra
This has never stopped working for me - I interview every year or so as a matter of course.
My experience helping others is that in a tightening labor market they are experiencing "small fish in a big pond" syndrome mentioned above.
Compensation for the bottom 50-75% of talent has dropped significantly since 2021* - if you are in that band and chasing the same comp you're dealing with the "small fish in a big pond" situation. If these people drop their compensation expectations back to 2017 levels many of them will find jobs much more plentiful - though the very bottom of the pool is being driven out of the industry entirely.
* this estimate pulled from conversations with engineering leaders and recruiters at large SV tech companies
Aurornis
> If you re-read the transcript, I hope you will come to the understanding that this is a lie. The company is trying to leverage your desperation for a job.
From the hiring side: It’s not a lie at all, it’s just that we have other serious candidates we also like. If you’re not serious about taking the job then we need to move on to the next candidate quickly.
Generally you can come back and ask if they’ll re-issue the offer letter past the expiration. Most companies will happily do it if the position hasn’t already been filled, but you may have to wait for their second-choice offer letter to also expire (see why the expiration dates exist? It’s like locking a database row with a timeout added).
In my experience, the candidates who want to extend out the negotiation process for weeks or even months are rarely serious about joining the company. Statistically they’re a waste of time to continue holding up other hires.
scarface_74
Post 2022, there are hundreds of people applying for every job and they can easily find someone good enough to fill the position.
Have you tried your strategy in the last 2-3 years?
Magmalgebra
I have - it works.
I can also assure you that despite the 100s of applicants hiring remains hard even with competitive market compensation. Filling a generalist senior eng headcount with $500k liquid total compensation can take months. Many engineers have wildly inflated ideas about their own abilities.
sokoloff
If you’re applying to Google, apply to them way ahead of the others…
rsanek
you tell everyone up front what your timeline is, months ahead of time. that way, all of them coincide and you get maximum leverage.
last job search i got 4 offers to line up that i could use in negotiations.
bigs
It happened for me once by pure chance.
I was looking to leave a secondment I was on, and received an offer, right as the leader of the client I was seconded to said we’d like to take you on permanently and we’ve cleared it with your company, here’s the offer. I used that as leverage and left.
Otherwise, I agree, it’s a snowball chance in hell to coincide them.
jayd16
Do the alternative offers need to actually be real? They just need to be realistic, no?
sokoloff
They just have to be real enough for you to convince them you’re not taking their offer. That risks you having to not take their offer, of course.
ryandrake
Basically correct. I guess my point is Patrick could have saved a lot of typing and simply wrote "Have one or more competing offers."
roncesvalles
In my experience, the proclivity of a company to negotiate entirely depends on how quickly they need to hire someone. If the requirement is to scale up immediately, once at the offer stage you're the fastest person on the planet who can start working in the role, and this gives you significant leverage.
If the company can afford to onboard someone any time in the next few months, they don't need to negotiate. They just need to keep the pipeline flowing until some candidate accepts their lowball number.
atrettel
In my experience, some employers don't even care if you have a competing offer. They will change nothing. I've written about this before [1]. To me, the best thing about having multiple offers is that you can at least make a choice.
I worked at a company where HR would request a copy of the competing offer. Very frequently, the candidate would come up with reasons why they couldn’t show the offer letter to HR. Often it was some story about having a verbal offer or something equally flimsy.
HR eventually just assumed the mythical competing offer was a bluff, and to be honest from everything I saw that was most likely correct for the average applicant.
As someone who always interviewed and negotiated honestly, it was kind of shocking to learn how often candidates lied about everything from where they worked in the past to having competing offers.
zem
honestly I have no problem with that if they are firm about not negotiating - I actually respect that stance greatly and see it as a green flag. it just bothers me if I am shortchanging myself working somewhere that other people have successfully negotiated higher salaries for and I have not.
Do you consider yourself an _excellent_ negotiator already? It really feels like you’re trying to suggest that negotiation can’t ever work for anyone except a handful of celebrities, even for those who are excellent negotiators.
Someone’s already asking about your BATNA, and I’m wondering if you negotiate all benefits (amount of time off for example) since your story focused on salary alone.
ryandrake
Based on my results, I am clearly not a skilled negotiator! I have found most companies to be inflexible around everything, from salary to equity to vacation time to health benefits to 401(k). The package is what it is, and if you don't want to take it, you can leave it.
I don’t get the impression that his brand is based on conciseness.
k__
I mean, they don't know AND you only need one "yes"...
zem
pretty much, my first bigco job I made the mistake of only applying to the one place (had a job already, was looking for a change but without any urgency), and they would not budge on salary, just said the offer was already very generous and at the top of their salary band for my level. the next time I was job hunting I had just been laid off and so was frantically applying to a lot of places, ended up getting several offers and that definitely made a difference (though interestingly enough no one was willing to negotiate on base pay, but they would on things like stock and signing bonuses)
pinoy420(dead)
[dead]
whiplash451
> If they really just need someone to hold down a chair
I would not jump to this conclusion. The company might have a very deliberate compensation strategy. Giving $Y instead of $X to a newcomer at a given level without aligning other people at the same level to $Y raises serious concerns.
As a company, you don't have to let yourself bullied by other companies.
sokoloff
Agreed. If they just need a chair spring compressed, they won’t budge. That doesn’t mean if they don’t budge that they just need the spring compressed.
P implies Q doesn’t necessitate Q implies P.
octo888
"rank-and-file employee number 12887"s don't tend to find it easy to get multiple job offers at once to use as leverage ! Even more so in today's climate
tiffanyh
Re: BATNA. It’s extremely difficult to get two offers to coincide at the same time.
So in reality, your BATNA is your current job (if you’re employed).
idontwantthis
I think if you had a BATNA then you are much more likely to succeed at negotiation even without one.
slt2021
be ready to walk away from their offer. Thats the only secret for negotiations, there is no other secret sauce.
>Them: The offer is for $X.
You: Thank you, but I will continue my final interview process with [CompetitorA] and [CompetitorB]
>Them: How much more money do you want to accept our offer and terminate interview process with our main competitors?
You: Add Y% and I will sign the job offer right now.
This approach doesn't require you to lie, or photoshop fake offer letter (like some bad people advice on places like Blind), and doesn't require you to arrange a direct bidding war - all are huge red flags for any employer.
Again: Be honest and upfront, full integrity, never lie, dont make it about money, but rather about the mission of the job
Aurornis
Some perspective from the employer side of salary negotiations: It’s not hard to recognize when someone is following the patio11 salary negotiation guide after you recognize the pattern.
In my case I was already advocating for upper end pay packages for people joining us. One thing you learn quickly is that despite all the Internet talk about having a BATNA or putting companies in a bidding war against each other is that the majority of candidates really don’t have other options to even compare against.
Combine this with the one-size-fits-all salary negotiation advice and a problem arises: The only way they can feel like they’ve won the negotiation is to fight for some arbitrary increase and then have the company give it to them.
My mistake early on was trying to give people the best possible offer out of the gate that I could possibly justify. Many people took it because it was a big raise for them or they understood what we had discussed. However, you could tell when someone was reading a compensation negotiation guide because it was like the number did not actually matter. The only thing they cared about was getting something extra added on top of it. Some people would be so tunnel visioned on this idea of getting the extra bump that they’d threaten to walk from an excellent offer over something trivial like a $5K bump
So what’s the strategy? You start holding back that last little bit of your budget for the inevitable up negotiation round, then you give it to them when they do their negotiating script that the internet guide told them to follow.
If the person doesn’t negotiate, you then surprise them with it as bonus plan or something similar.
It works, but I hated it. Eventually you get a feel for who’s likely to play the negotiation script and who was not, so you could somewhat predict it most of the time.
wrsh07
I actually strongly disagree with this take and
1) after reading the original post immediately linked it to a friend who had an outstanding offer. She got a significant raise from fairly light negotiating
2) personally, I don't think of myself as a particularly aggressive negotiator. However, I have been able to truthfully discuss compensation using the tactics described with recruiters to get leveling and comp where I've wanted it to be for my last couple of jobs. Yes, I always had multiple offers. That's part of negotiating.
More generally, though, I think spending 30+ minutes (reading the piece and more) thinking about negotiating has helped me build a better mental model for what to bring to the table.
whiplash451
> She got a significant raise from fairly light negotiating
Either she had a competing offer, or the company she is interviewing for has weak processes. A company yielding "a significant raise from fairly light negotiating" is very worrying IMO.
Think about it: what does that tell you about the next newcomer that will come after you?
wrsh07
It was a different era, she was a particularly strong candidate and they had given a low-ball offer. I don't think she had a competing offer fwiw
(Less process is normal at smaller orgs, so that's also something to consider)
throwaway290
> Either she had a competing offer, or the company she is interviewing for has weak processes
Or she had no competing offers but said she had competing offers ;)
closeparen
L5 at FAANG and adjacent companies (Airbnb, Uber, Stripe, Block, Databricks, etc) is a rank and file, employee number 12887 rule. Yet it is compensated in the mid six figures, and the ranges are easily more than $100k wide. Position in the range depends on a number of factors, famously stock market timing is a big one, but competing offers and negotiation are certainly in there.
g9yuayon
That’s why Patrick said it helps to have a strong reputation going in. Still, you can absolutely negotiate—just make sure you have real leverage. That usually means a competing offer from another solid company (ideally a competitor).
Keep this in mind: it’s really hard for companies to hire good engineers. The onsite-to-offer ratio might be 20:1 or worse. So when a recruiter says they’ll just move on to the next candidate, they’re probably bluffing.
But what if they do have 20 people lined up? Then you don’t have leverage with that company—and that’s fine. Take the offer if it’s good enough, or walk and try elsewhere.
P.S., a fun anecdote: when Netflix was extending an offer to a renowned engineer, he brought his PR to negotiate. Apparently, it worked well for him.
P.P.S, always interview for a higher title. I get it — it’s tough with hot companies like OpenAI. But for most places, it’s worth a shot. At the very least, don’t aim lower than your current level. It’s funny how the human mind works—interviewers anchor their expectations to your title. And ironically, a senior engineer interview is often just as hard as a staff-level one. If you’re feeling cynical, just remember: title inflation is real and everywhere, and plenty of high-level ICs are great at navigating politics, drawing boxes, and sounding confident, but not necessarily skilled at offering real values like solving hard engineering problems. So if you can’t beat the game, why not play it?
jstummbillig
I would find this less confusing of a top comment, if it did not ignore vital information and advice that already is in Patricks piece (and apparently ignored, even after having seen it "a number of times"?). To anyone agreeing with this position, I would recommend giving it another read.
Which is not to say that this advice must lead to a raise for everyone who reads it, but if your current assessment of the piece is "this only works for super stars" then you have definitely not really ingested the ideas offered (but you might be making excuses for why that is).
xondono
I’m hardly a “Captain”, and I’ve successfully negotiated salary increases several times.
The only thing you need is leverage, and yes, rank-and-file are not going to have a lot of leverage at a FAANG.
You can’t negotiate if you’re not willing to let the job go through.
lnsru
I am the 12887 too. Luckily applied at the place in emergency mode and was perfect fit. Negotiated +6%. Yeah! In the second year it was reduced by 3% coupling my bonus to unachievable goals. As someone wrote on HN: it is not their first rodeo. HR knows how to attract and get to the right salary level afterwards. What can I do? Swallowing is the only way. There are no job ads in my area.
lostlogin
> HR knows how to attract and get to the right salary level afterwards.
This has to be the key point. They do this all the time as part of their job. You do it every few years, or maybe every decade. Of course they are better at it.
Lu2025
How about extra vacation time? Does anyone have experience getting it when asked (and actually being able to take that time off)?
jandrewrogers
Yes, I once added two extra weeks of vacation time.
wrsh07
I expect this is one where if you're coming from an Etsy or Google that gives 5 weeks after 5 years of tenure you could negotiate for preservation of that perk, but it seems like it could be challenging depending on your batna (see definition elsewhere in comments)
marcinzm
You still got 3% in a market that’s not in your favor. And likely you’d have had -3% otherwise and not 0%.
psanford
One of the key points to patio11's article is that there is only upside to negotiation with no downside. You are basically saying: negotiation doesn't work so why bother. Please stop.
I once negotiated a large raise at a job where afterwards my boss told me that he could not have justified giving me that raise on his own, but because I asked for it he was able to make the case.
Negotiating often works. It has no downside for you (besides making you feel uncomfortable) and major upsides that last well beyond your current role.
tptacek
This could not be less true and I really wish people would stop spreading this idea, because it's costing other people lots of money. In fact, the Venn diagram mapping "software celebrities" like Patrick and expert negotiators has not much overlap at all. You've never heard of some of the best-compensated developers I know (and they don't work on "celebrity" projects, either); meanwhile, I can think of multiple "celebrities" who have gotten extremely raw deals --- one, for instance, was brought in to lead engineering & R&D at a security company working against organized crime, and didn't even get any equity.
Patrick is right: compensation is much more about negotiating skill than it is about reputation or (especially) notoriety, holding everything else equal.
antonymoose
When is the last time you had to negotiate a salary for a standard software firm?
tptacek
At the job I have now. I'm not a founder here. I don't know what your point is, though, because I'm not talking about me.
systemf_omega
You don't have to be a star programmer, fame isn't the only form of leverage.
If you're in demand, and you're good at what you do, the road is paved for you. Top companies have already set the bar.
Them: we offer 250k-350k
Me: I don't consider anything below 500
The answers I get vary. Some tell me to politely fvck off. Some tell me they need to discuss with leadership. Some just go for it because they know how hard it is to fill that role.
The justification is simple: why would I take a job with you if I can land an HFT gig at twice the pay?
ipdashc
> You don't have to be a star programmer
> 250k-350k
> land an HFT gig
Respectfully, your perspective may be a bit skewed? OP's context was "us rank-and-file employee number 12887's".
systemf_omega
Many people working in these companies are as rank-and-file as it gets. Non existent public profile, no open source contributions, no flashy portfolio.
Not really in the same category as Carmack
ipdashc
That's fair! I had interpreted OP's post more along the lines of, well, workers who aren't that in-demand or that high up the pay scale - I think it's fair to say 300k salaries and HFT gigs are out of consideration for most of us.
dcsan
You had me until HFT...
systemf_omega
Doesn't have to be finance. AI can pay just as well. Tech too depending on seniority.
deadbabe
The proliferation of AI and LLMs has completely obliterated leverage.
Don’t want the job for the salary offered? Too bad. Hire a cheaper person armed to the teeth with the best LLM coding tools and move on.
Unless you’re coming in with significant clout that will move revenue and relations to bridge partnerships across other companies, you will not be worth the extra $250k on skills alone.
Magmalgebra
This is situational - as a strong engineer I have more leverage than ever to demand ever more eye watering compensation.
Weaker engineers and junior engineers are in more the situation you describe. This is tough and I feel for these folks but it is possible for many people to become stronger engineers if they choose to put in the work.
I'd encourage you to not take on a feeling of hopelessness here.
systemf_omega
That's what bottom-tier companies always tell me. Last decade it used to be outsourcing. I was getting low balled left and right with phrases like "I can pay a guy from Asia a lot less for the same work".
I’m not a celebrity or superstar, and I’ve successfully used his techniques several times. The very first time it resulted in $20k improvement over the initial salary offer. Another time it resulted in an additional $40k in signing bonus.
Most recently it resulted in a modest $5k boost to the offered salary.
But the level of success you are likely to experience entirely depends on the alternatives that you have and the alternatives they have.
(I should also note that I’ve never been located anywhere like SF.)
whiplash451
You indeed have little to no leverage if you don't have a better offer elsewhere.
Was true in 2012, remains true today.
dan-robertson
Maybe this is a stupid question, but it wasn’t clear to me reading your comment: how many times did you attempt negotiation and have it fail in roughly the way you describe?
shepherdjerred
I didn't try to negotiate my first job (I was just happy to be employed, especially at AWS)
My two jobs since I've been able to get more by... just asking for more, even without competing offers.
whatshisface
You really have one option per scenario over a total of two scenarios as #12887, and they are "yes I will take this job," and "if you want me to leave my present employer, you would have to offer more than my current salary."
itronitron
I'm curious what your thoughts are on the "salary expectations" question in the initial phone screen or first stage. In my experience, I have never been asked that question and then moved onto the next step in the process, regardless of whether or how I answer the question.
So I am left thinking they are just collecting salary metrics for the position.
sokoloff
Interviewing while employed, I’ll happily give my “I’m not considering anything lower than <this>” number in the first 15 minutes of discussion. I’m not interested in spending more time without general alignment on that.
The few times early on that I didn’t do that, it was a giant waste of time.
If I was interviewing from a position where I needed a job soon, I would be less inclined to be that upfront, of course.
whiplash451
Never (ever) respond to this question early in the process. The company is just collecting market data.
Tell them that the salary should be negotiated at the end if the process is successful.
If they tell you "but we need this to make sure we're not wasting your time and ours", tell them "well give me a range for what you can do and I'll tell you if you're wasting my time"
spike021
the people who can negotiate, especially when changing jobs, are almost always the ones who can get multiple offers.
i'm usually lucky if i can get one offer when interviewing. no room to negotiate that way...
acrooks
There are two fundamental ways to win a negotiation. By "win", I mean achieve an outcome outside the norm, such as an above market rate salary.
1. Negotiate from a position of strength
You pointed out a couple of these, like when you have a strong personal brand (like Patrick) or when the market dynamics favour employees. The former is not something you can control so, when the market is in this place, you should take advantage of it to propel yourself. However, the former is completely within your control. You can spend some time and effort building a personal brand. Many people discount the value of a brand and the effort spent building one, but it totally works. I have marketing-savvy friends who, since early in their career as juniors, spent a lot of time on LinkedIn thought leadership & brand building. And it totally works. In fact, I have one such friend who was recently part of a restructuring layoff (i.e., not related to performance). Because of the brand they built, once they posted about the layoff on LinkedIn, they had 12 offers within a week all higher than their previous salary.
Another area where you can gain leverage is when you already work at a company that wants to retain you. The only time a business will bend over backwards for an employee is when the conversation is about retention. To make the conversation about retention you need to be completely willing to walk, and your negotiating position is strengthened if you have counter offers. To maintain your political capital (which will be important if you stay) you need to be careful about how you play this game. I've worked with people in the past who approached the business confrontationally, saying "if you don't give me $X, I quit" - that strategy only works once. But there are ways to structure this conversation where you don't leave a bad taste in anybody's mouth.
2. Care about something different than your counterpart
Often the person you're negotiating with cares the most about optimising certain metrics. You should try to spend some time figuring out what those metrics are and see if there is something different that makes a difference in your life.
e.g., your employer might be really under the gun about managing fixed salaries. This is very common in a lot of businesses to try to manage their headcount. So they might be more willing to give you a $50k cash bonus compared to a $25k salary increase. Or maybe they're more open to an extra week or two of vacation vs. salary.
This phenomenon has been really helpful for me in the last year. I run my own business, but my business is fully bootstrapped, so I don't have a board or any investors to please. As a result, I'm not as motivated by ARR as other SaaS companies. Sometimes I encounter customers who would rather pay me a 3-4x one-time fee instead of ARR. By making these deals I immediately guarantee what would have otherwise been four years of cash (potentially with a cancellation risk during the term). A VC-funded SaaS business would almost never make a deal like this, because such a deal would not have a material impact on valuation.
Another example - I was moving recently and sold some furniture. I was chatting with somebody who was an optometrist who wanted to buy a few things, which I listed at $200. They offered $100. I countered, asking for the right to use their employee discount, and ended up getting $500 in value.
So you should also spend some time trying to figure out what your negotiation counterpart cares about. Maybe there is an arbitrage where you can both get exactly what you want, instead of needing to find an outcome where one person wins and the other one loses.
smokel
Why would one negotiate on a few hundred dollars when they're apparently capable of negotiating deals worth hundreds of thousands? In my opinion, the marginal benefit does not outweigh the potential downside of being perceived as petty.
The only reasonable conclusion I can draw is that they simply enjoy the negotiation process itself. I guess most of us do not.
acrooks
That’s an interesting question. I think there are a couple of points here.
So, more broadly, you might be asking me “why waste your time selling $100s of furniture?” which is a completely fair question. The opportunity cost of the time spent selling it was far greater than the benefit I got. From a pure optimization perspective it was a bad use of my time.
But also I just moved to the other side of the world and had an apartment filled with furniture that I needed to get rid of. And I am the type of person who doesn’t like waste, so sending everything to the landfill was misaligned with my personal values. And also I don’t work 24 hours per day, so it’s not like this effort takes tome away from working on the meaningful deals.
It would be reasonable to ask “why not give it away for free?” In my experience, customers that pay you nothing are a much bigger burden than customers that pay you something (and, in fact, I find that higher revenue customers are much easier to deal with on an absolute basis).
And then your more direct question: why negotiate at all? Why not just accept the offer and move on with your life? I think your guess is correct: I am a negotiator at heart. I really truly love the hustle, in all aspects of life. It doesn’t matter whether I’m earning $10, $1000 or $100k: I love making deals. And this part of my character is probably a big part of why I’ve been successful in business.
To your final point - the marginal benefit of negotiating vs. being perceived as petty. In all of these situations the audience is different and their lifetime value is different. It would be foolish to negotiate with a $100k customer over $100s; you’re right to assume that the customer might perceive it as petty (and such a move would probably diminish their lifetime value). But, on the other hand, if you sold something to a random person off Craigslist where their expected lifetime value was in the $100s wouldn’t it be foolish to not try to maximize your outcome, especially if it only added a minute or two to the transaction?
teaearlgraycold
I have never not successfully negotiated a comp over up since I was 19. Even for college jobs I’d at least get an extra $1/hr. The rest vary from small bumps up $50k extra from Google without a competing offer.
Maybe we’re just living in different worlds.
Ifkaluva
In my experience the only thing that works is competing offers.
scarface_74
I’m not a captain of industry by any means but I’m very credentialed in my niche of AWS cloud consulting specializing in app development since 2023 - 7 years of experience, 3.5 years working at AWS (Professional Services) open source contributions and a major contributor to popular official open source “AWS Solutions” in a certain niche and much more experience in general app dev - and I was not able to negotiate more than 5-10% for certain opportunities and some I couldn’t push them for more money at all.
My comp is good for non FAANG especially seeing that I work remotely in a non HCOL no state tax city. But it’s hard for normies to do significant negotiations. I also have “unlimited PTO” and fully plan to take 20-25 days at least.
gosub100
They profit from turning you away because after the Nth person turns down their low-ball salary they can use this to justify bringing in more H1B workers because "we just can't find enough candidates for this position". They hire an H1B who happily works for 0.8X and decreases the average that much more.
setheron
If you say a number, even 1.5x you've already lost.
Replying with either yes (accept) or no are the only two responses that work.
Sytten
That reads like something written pre LLM, pre mass layoffs and pre section 174. Reality is that engineers have way less bargaining power that they used to.
Aside, as a small startup I am generally upfront with the salary since if you are not in the range we can afford it is not worth having a discussion.
mgraczyk
If you have ~5+ years of experience and live in the US, things haven't changed. Regardless, negotiating matters more than ever.
At startups you negotiate for equity instead of salary but a lot of the same advice applies.
danjl
Startups also have more non-cash options. E.g. they can offer more than 4 weeks of vacation, unlike many enterprise companies. As a CEO, when I gave people 6 weeks of real vacation, they would never leave, since they cannot get that at bigger companies in the US. (We also stongly encouraged them to use their vacation, because a healthy work-life balance is better for the company.) Startups also have more flexibility on WFH, travel options, and other non-cash benefits like providing more authority over your schedule and tasks. They are typically strapped for cash, unless they are not actually startups anymore because they raised $100M, and just like the moniker.
autarch
I'm working at a mid-size company, c. 5,500 employees. We have unlimited vacation (for US employees). I have taken about 6 weeks every year with no issues. I made sure to check that this was okay before accepting the offer, because unlimited can also mean "no one ever takes vacation".
danjl
The problem with unlimited vacation is that the majority of engineers never have the guts to ask for it, just like they don't know how to negotiate. Unlimited vacation is a benefit for the company not the employee. It avoids taxes and complications due to carryover constraints.
Maybe if you have 5+ years experience at FAANG or something.
I have 5+ years experience at a no name place and can’t even get an interview anywhere. Maybe my resume is shit but I’ve tried many different versions with no luck in the last 4-5 months.
braden-lk
There's been this vein of advice from the past decade that's in the realm of "just work at FAANG". Always rubbed me the wrong way; they make it sound so easy, lol. The couple of interviews I managed to get after hundreds of ghostings, I was absolutely demolished in the interviews. It seems like if you get nervous doing math problems in front of people who really don't want to be there (and tell you to your face), you don't get to work at FAANG.
Just started my own business instead.
marcinzm
Theres a difference between something being easy, and something being achievable given a large investment of time and effort. FAANG is the second. Not for everyone but if you have anxiety then practice, therapy and possibly prescribed medications for anxiety. I’m sure there whole groups of people who mutually pair mock interview to get over anxiety like this. Or that you can pay to interview you.
braden-lk
Totally; and big respect to the people who put in hundreds of hours of prep. I did leetcode, practice interviews, 4.0 gpa, all that. I think the big hang up for me was, no matter how many practice interviews I did, there were only 4 real ones, with long waiting periods between attempts. And honestly... 3/4 my FAANG interviewers were really rude/late/apathetic. I actually did make it to second round at Google on the third try, but at that point I was so exhausted with the process, I took an offer from a company that at least pretended to give a shit whether I joined them or not. Had a wonderful 3 years there building green-field B2C products.
Getting some work experience and then starting my own thing was a better fit for me.
MichaelZuo
Clearly the advice can’t be for the literal 50th percentile HN reader in 2025… because nowadays there are hundreds of thousands of readers.
And all the FAANG combined probably don’t even have half that many positions, with negotiable salaries, in total worldwide.
You may want to try moving to the bay area or NYC for a few years if you're not already in one of those places. It's much easier to get a good job, then you can move away after you have the "right" experience. Also follow the advice in the article, in particular find people you want to work for and DM them
ikiris
Startup equity is the equivalent to the old Foxworthy bit
"You can't write me a check?" I said, "No, I -- a check? Hell yeah, I can write you a check! I thought you needed money. Tell you what, I'm just gonna pay the whole thing off right now! I'm gonna be a congressman when I grow up."
mgraczyk
It's not really, because it's finite. You don't generally dilute the options pool when you hire new employees, you give them some slice of a scarce options pool
achierius
Sure, but there's an extent to which the the board and its constitutive shareholders already expect to be giving away options for new employees, and as such will have allocated a pool for such purpose -- both for the "standard" package, and for "hard negotiators". For traditional tech startups (i.e. ones not so flush with cash as OpenAI), giving these away is far easier than giving away more real-world, honest-to-god cashflow, because that directly drains your runway, while all equity does is make your cap sheet look marginally worse.
mgraczyk
> all equity does is make your cap sheet look marginally worse
But at the time the employee is negotiating this has already been decided. The company has some valuation and you are offering some known percentage of that scarce resource. You could argue that the valuation itself is the thing being manipulated (which is partially true), but that doesn't change the cost of the offer to the company in units of equity %
paulddraper
My bank account says otherwise, but it depends.
ikiris
So do all the lottery winners. It doesn't really change how a lottery works, or the likely financial result.
Only consider equity if there is actually a market value for it. Early stage startups hand out equity options that likely will not ever be worth anything.
Trasmatta
Yeah, as someone with 10+ YOE, there seem to be tons of opportunities with good packages right now. Companies still seem to need lots of senior devs: the market looks much much harder for anyone with less experience right now
> Reality is that engineers have way less bargaining power that they used to
There is negotation power but only if you pass all the interview challenges. Only at that point you are in a position to name your number (of course you won't ask $500K when you know the company you are applying to pays around $200K... because you have done your previous research on that; you'll ask something between $200K and $250K and see how they react). Layoffs and AI hasn't change this (sure, thing, 5 years ago companies were hiring more and perhaps were more relaxed about this, but that didn't change the fact that you can only negotiate when they want you)
have-a-break
Honestly at work LLMs seemed to make me less productive. For side projects they help but I've seen papers indicating this is the case for industry.
We as engineers have let the recruiters and VC funding brainwash us into lower salaries. Kind of looking forward to a rebound.
rednafi
This is my experience too. All these LLMs and agents are great for bootstrapping projects faster than ever. They help immensely with bringing down the activation energy. So I do a lot more tinkering around in multiple languages that I wouldn’t have otherwise.
That said, once the project goes beyond a certain threshold, LLMs offer little more than a highly capable autocomplete. In larger codebases, the current context window is too small for the tools to even answer questions properly, let alone make any non-trivial changes.
Productivity starts going down once you try to use LLMs in a large codebase and expect them to be as helpful as they were in a smaller one. Often, these authoritative little shits will whirl you around in a doom loop and still won’t find any useful solution. And suddenly you find yourself having to clean up the mess.
I’d still say the productivity benefit is positive, but at the same time, the hype around these is bonkers. Employers are holding onto the hype cycle to bring down wages through FUD.
roncesvalles
>Productivity starts going down once you try to use LLMs in a large codebase and expect them to be as helpful as they were in a smaller one.
Exactly this. I've really tried to find use for LLMs in my big tech company SWE job and I just can't. The context is just too large, and not just the code context. In the time that I can "explain" everything to the LLM, keep iterating until it spits out something semi-useful and massage that into something I can merge, I'd rather just do the whole thing myself.
But it's amazing for greenfield personal projects.
bluefirebrand
> LLMs offer little more than a highly capable autocomplete
I find LLM autocomplete extremely annoying compared to traditional intellisense
It is wrong way more and I don't want multi-line autocomplete, it's too intrusive
GardenLetter27
Are you using Copilot or Cursor? I find Cursor's one pretty good. Although they just butchered their pricing :(
bluefirebrand
Cursor
It's more or less the same as intellisense most of the time, but occasionally it tries to guess an entire multi-line function and it throws me way off
I don't know if it's a matter of just sticking with it to learn like any new tool, or if it is just really not as useful as people say
One thing I've noticed is that with traditional intellisense it was often fast enough to get ahead of me so I could tab complete
Cursor is slower than me. Often I am typing faster than it can think, which makes it suggest things I'm already past.
casualscience
You need to setup the problem for the llm. If I am getting an error, I can normally piece together the 10k lines of relevant code much more quickly than I can track down the bug.
Llms are still a big speed boost there
roncesvalles
If you see an error and can't immediately Cmd+Shift+F an error code or something and jump to the exact line of code that threw the error, that's an engineering problem.
JonChesterfield
I'm decently excited about the new world of hugely increased quantity of terrible code. Not absolutely sure how to go mining yet but it has opportunity written all over it.
andy99
I regularly exchange currency at the bank. There is a posted rate that I can get online. If I go to the teller, they will propose that rate as well, at which point I say "can I have the premium rate" and they say, ok, I can give you x - something 1% better or so.
Point is, I'm not negotiating with the bank teller, they have a flow chart they need to follow. For a lot of positions with big companies, it's going to be the same. There might be a path on the flowchart you can access, but you're not really negotiating. In some cases you may be able to break though this if there's a real person (not recruiter) that will push for you, but talking to recruiters / talent is like talking to the bank teller.
dan-robertson
So even if you’re just advancing down a flow chart, the ‘negotiation’ option is better, right?
RickS
I am a somewhat unremarkable product designer. I'm great at my job, but still just a guy in a chair doing the thing. And I've been using this advice for years. It has made an absolutely mind boggling impact on my life. I recently took a few years off (achievable in part thanks to the OG version of this post), and was worried about returning to the cooled-off job market thanks to all the doomers on here talking about firing hundreds of applications into the empty void. Very little has changed. The market is a bit tighter but still fine. Please do not let the other crabs convince you that the bucket is too greased to be worth clawing at. Patio11 has probably made me 1M+ over my career with his blog post. And it is not because I'm some mega genius. I am merely good enough at my job to be worth wanting on a normal team. If you aren't that, fix that. But 20-50% lift on the majority of offers is super, super, super achievable if you're able to recognize what employers value, and communicate your ability to meet those needs. Seriously. So frustrating to see how many people are here telling others this is BS and not to try. Fuck that. At least *try*.
hackitup7
Thank you for writing this. I am an employer and see versions of the advice / similar techniques to patio11's post put into practice by candidates (ie used against us) with some regularity. It doesn't always work, and we try to be disciplined, but it helps fairly often and at worst does no harm as long as you're polite.
I strongly encourage people to read the post and not give up because of the unrelenting cynicism in these comments.
brunooliv
In my experience this never worked for me for the simple fact that I never had the skill and time to even GET a second offer to bargain against. I wouldn’t say I’m a bad developer, but I’m definitely horrible at interviewing and having to jump through several different steps at different companies just to bargain for a higher end of the range makes me feel like either the market is the problem or the expectations from companies are way unrealistic
dan-robertson
I think expectations are often realistic in the sense that companies are generally able to hire sufficiently many people at acceptable prices. But I think it’s also the case that there are fashions in interviewing such that companies are mostly all trying to hire the same subset of candidates that do well at the current thing. So if you’re bad at the current style of interviewing it’s going to be more work than someone fortunate enough to do well at the current fad.
3eb7988a1663
I too have never been in situation where the timing would possibly work out to get companies to compete. Some employers take months from start to finish while others can wrap things up within two weeks. Then you get an offer that requires a decision within two-three days.
Sure, make an ask for more money, but I have never had any leverage.
ashdksnndck
I found that behavior would change a lot once I had an offer from a decent company. Suddenly all the scheduling/matching delays and processes that supposedly were delaying me would be resolved when I revealed that. It was even worth emailing recruiters that ghosted me because they would respond again. Also, offer deadlines are usually just pressure tactics and would go away if there actually was a risk of me not signing.
Caveat that I haven’t interviewed in the last couple years and this may not be the case anymore.
Tangential: What's with the disclaimer about reading on an "iDevice"? Do they struggle with lots of words on a single page?
tonfa
It's from 2012, mobile device screens were way smaller.
chgs
In 2013 I was buying books on kindle and reading them on my 4s just fine
hiAndrewQuinn
This was written over 10 years ago, when such devices had much lower resolution.
whiplash451
The main thing that changed since when this article was written is that companies are much less in a rush than they used to to hire people, which means that a lot of mechanics described in the article fall apart.
In particular, companies don't really look at how much they spend to hire someone. They'll just wait for the hiring committee to be "really excited" about a candidate before making an offer.
snowwrestler
Is this out of date in a few little ways now?
He says the hiring market for engineers is hot… is it? Maybe for certain rare species of AI specialists, but for anyone else the going looks a good bit tougher now than it did even a couple years ago.
Also, he spends a fair bit of time encouraging people not to reveal their former salary, but in all but a few rare cases your former salary is available to your new employer via data sharing service providers. The HR team at my employer now asks applicants for their former salary strictly as a test of their honesty. And yes, have kicked competitive candidates out for giving a false number. Declining to give the number is fine, but does not create any negotiating advantage.
ashdksnndck
They can find out your salary, but they won’t know your stock, which has much higher variance for software engineers.
cornhole
I just ask some stupid amount of money first because there is literally no cost or downsides.
testfrequency
I can tell you that most hiring managers and recruiters find it offensive, and the conversation quickly shifts to how much do we care about playing games with this candidate who seems a bit reckless in suggesting a salary they know isn’t realistic.
baxuz
I find it offensive and playing games when they won't give me the ranges.
I've been at companies which paid me 1/2 of what some my peers earned. I don't have time for these games. Give me your salary ranges for the position and I can negotiate. Otherwise I'm pulling numbers out of my ass.
The recruiter wants to pay me as close to 0 as possible, and it's up to me to push back on that.
cornhole
hiring managers and recruiters are not people so its ok
k__
Yeah.
The only good jobs I got directly from CEOs.
nrclark
When talking with recruiters, I usually decline to state the first number politely - saying something like "salary isn't the only reason why I'd take a job, and I always look at the whole package as well as the role. I'm sure your offer will be competitive."
On forms where I have to put a range, I put $1.00.
buttocks
Life was good for engineers 15 years ago!
grepLeigh
It still is! I think getting your foot in the door is much more difficult now compared to 5-6 years ago, similar to difficulty finding entry level work in 2008-2009 financial crisis.
Market conditions aside, the points the OP blog post makes about asymmetrical value are evergreen.
dan-robertson
Ok, but also engineers in the US are much better paid now than 15 years ago. In 2010 the big story in engineer comp was that Google, Apple, and others were conspiring to avoid competing for talent (and thereby driving pay up) [1]. It was roughly Facebook not being part of this scheme that started driving salaries up. A few years ago the popular story was that people were switching jobs because their compensation had been inflated by massive share price increases (ie you are promised x shares vesting over 4 years at sign on with refresher grants, but the value of x shares goes up a bunch over those years) and they wanted to maintain their high realised comp even though shares were no longer rising as much. The only way for that to happen was engineers getting paid very well.
I might lose my job very soon. I assume I won't be able to negotiate salary at my new job... if I get a new job. I assume I will end up with a big pay cut in this market.
beefnugs
The whole definition of a regular joe employee is that they are working under a coercion hierarchy. There are no negotiations, either you got luck shifted into a shitrole or they go onto the next 20 options.
The only way this will ever move in the direction of the employee is if some drastic change happens where more independence and negotiation is an ongoing part of employment. Unless things are so open to negotiation that someone can go "hey i am a little burned out, but I don't want to hurt the company how about this year i work 50% for 60% compensation" And there is meaningful negotiation without immediate threats of replacement.
Joel_Mckay
Best method:
1. Get another job someplace more progressive
2. Make sure they phone your employer for a reference
3. Explain to current employer salary package is insufficient, and you are cutting back your available hours
4. Leave if they argue over something as silly as heavily taxed income
By the time people have to have this conversation, there is already a serious problem in the corporate culture.
Tech people usually must eventually leave if they want a better position. =3
moralestapia
How do you negotiate when the position already has a fixed number in there that was even published along the job description?
throwaway219450
Let's assume the amount is fixed. One approach is to ask to re-frame the position to be better value.
Ask for working hours that effectively pays you more per day, like an 80% contract at the same comp. If they mumble HR and hours, offer to do 4x10 hour days. The magic phrase in corporate is "flexible working". This doesn't solve your comp going up, but you get a 3-day weekend and 52 more holidays a year.
This one even works at intensely bureaucratic organisations like universities. With grants, the amount you can be paid is very fixed, but almost anything else can be approved if three people sign off on it.
sokoloff
If there's a single fixed number (rather than a range), there's probably a reason for that (might be a government, university, or institute role with a fixed pay schedule, for example) and as a hiring manager, I'm assuming you're applying for the job as published, including the comp number.
RickS
Did you read the post? The numbers are fake, is how. That's the whole point of this post. They're arbitrary, made up, totally subject to change. The idea that they're immutable is corpo-propaganda designed to worsen your performance in a subtly adversarial encounter where it benefits the company for you to think you have no leverage. Job offers use craigslist pricing. They don't describe the actual desired end state. They put down an anchor in a favorable direction with the expectation that it will get haggled on for a round or two.
Them: We'd love to have you join the team! Here's your compensation letter, please get back to us within the next 2 weeks and we'll move forward.
You: Thank you, I believe my background and skills would suggest a compensation of $1.5X instead of $X. Is this possible with your hiring budget?
Them: The offer is for $X and we believe it is appropriate for your level.
You: Maybe my level should be higher then?
Them: Ha Ha
You: Looking at [website A, B, C] I see the average compensation for this role is $1.25X. Surely there is room to move this upward.
Them: We don't agree with that data. The offer is for $X. Shall we move forward?
You: What about equity or bonus, is there any flexibility with those numbers, or vacation time, or...?
Them: The offer is for $X. If you don't want the job, we can move on to one of our other 20 candidates who are in the pipeline for the role.
That's basically how salary negotiations went for almost the entirety of my career. If your results have been different, I'm kind of envious!
"I received your offer for $X. I really enjoyed the interviews, meeting the team, and am intrigued by the problems I'd get to solve with them. Unfortunately, I have a competing offer for $1.25X from another company and I need to make sure my family is provided for. If you would match it, I'm excited to join, but if your offer is firm at $X, I'm afraid I won't be taking it."
If they really just need someone to hold down a chair, they'll probably not budge. If they really want specifically you, they're more likely to bend if they believe that's their only move.
If you can get multiple companies to time their interviews and offer stages perfectly and then get one of them to match the other, that’s quite lucky.
However, it’s not like it’s an easy solution. It’s transforming one problem into a much harder one: Now you have to get a second offer that’s even higher and get it at exactly the right time to use it as leverage. How do you negotiate that second offer to 1.25 * $X so you can leverage it to get the first to the same level? That’s left as an exercise for the reader.
“Just get a second offer for 25% more” is more of the wishful thinking negotiating strategy. In most cases it’s more realistic to set a target number and stick to it, being willing to walk away and continue the job search until it’s met.
The second offer does not have to be real. If it's real, what's the point of negotiating with the first company?
If you are not willing to work for $X, simply saying that you want $1.25X won't work, but mentioning a hypothetical competitive offer might. If it doesn't, well, you weren't going to take the job (for $X) in either case anyway.
I do not get how is anyone realistically supposed to coincide the multiple offers they get. Unless you are already in an extremely privileged position, I cannot even imagine how you can do that.
If you re-read the transcript, I hope you will come to the understanding that this is a lie. The company is trying to leverage your desperation for a job.
> Last time I got a job offer the hiring process took ~4 months with seven steps
Just like increased compensation, gettting the timeline you want requires leverage. When interviewing I always communicate that I expect an offer from a peer competitor within the next few weeks - this expedies my interview process. I always end up with a minimum of 4 competing offers to use as a BATNA.
Something the article winks at here is that negotation has only a small expected payoff if you've navigated your career such that you're a "small fish in a big pond" so to speak.
Someone who can barely pass a FAANG interview likely can't negotiate much with Google but probably could negotiate at lower tier company like SAP.
*edit* I do this strategy 12-18 months whether or not I leave a company, it has never failed me
My experience helping others is that in a tightening labor market they are experiencing "small fish in a big pond" syndrome mentioned above.
Compensation for the bottom 50-75% of talent has dropped significantly since 2021* - if you are in that band and chasing the same comp you're dealing with the "small fish in a big pond" situation. If these people drop their compensation expectations back to 2017 levels many of them will find jobs much more plentiful - though the very bottom of the pool is being driven out of the industry entirely.
* this estimate pulled from conversations with engineering leaders and recruiters at large SV tech companies
From the hiring side: It’s not a lie at all, it’s just that we have other serious candidates we also like. If you’re not serious about taking the job then we need to move on to the next candidate quickly.
Generally you can come back and ask if they’ll re-issue the offer letter past the expiration. Most companies will happily do it if the position hasn’t already been filled, but you may have to wait for their second-choice offer letter to also expire (see why the expiration dates exist? It’s like locking a database row with a timeout added).
In my experience, the candidates who want to extend out the negotiation process for weeks or even months are rarely serious about joining the company. Statistically they’re a waste of time to continue holding up other hires.
Have you tried your strategy in the last 2-3 years?
I can also assure you that despite the 100s of applicants hiring remains hard even with competitive market compensation. Filling a generalist senior eng headcount with $500k liquid total compensation can take months. Many engineers have wildly inflated ideas about their own abilities.
last job search i got 4 offers to line up that i could use in negotiations.
I was looking to leave a secondment I was on, and received an offer, right as the leader of the client I was seconded to said we’d like to take you on permanently and we’ve cleared it with your company, here’s the offer. I used that as leverage and left.
Otherwise, I agree, it’s a snowball chance in hell to coincide them.
If the company can afford to onboard someone any time in the next few months, they don't need to negotiate. They just need to keep the pipeline flowing until some candidate accepts their lowball number.
[1] https://www.hackerneue.com/item?id=43598192
HR eventually just assumed the mythical competing offer was a bluff, and to be honest from everything I saw that was most likely correct for the average applicant.
As someone who always interviewed and negotiated honestly, it was kind of shocking to learn how often candidates lied about everything from where they worked in the past to having competing offers.
Someone’s already asking about your BATNA, and I’m wondering if you negotiate all benefits (amount of time off for example) since your story focused on salary alone.
I would not jump to this conclusion. The company might have a very deliberate compensation strategy. Giving $Y instead of $X to a newcomer at a given level without aligning other people at the same level to $Y raises serious concerns.
As a company, you don't have to let yourself bullied by other companies.
P implies Q doesn’t necessitate Q implies P.
So in reality, your BATNA is your current job (if you’re employed).
>Them: The offer is for $X.
You: Thank you, but I will continue my final interview process with [CompetitorA] and [CompetitorB]
>Them: How much more money do you want to accept our offer and terminate interview process with our main competitors?
You: Add Y% and I will sign the job offer right now.
This approach doesn't require you to lie, or photoshop fake offer letter (like some bad people advice on places like Blind), and doesn't require you to arrange a direct bidding war - all are huge red flags for any employer.
Again: Be honest and upfront, full integrity, never lie, dont make it about money, but rather about the mission of the job
In my case I was already advocating for upper end pay packages for people joining us. One thing you learn quickly is that despite all the Internet talk about having a BATNA or putting companies in a bidding war against each other is that the majority of candidates really don’t have other options to even compare against.
Combine this with the one-size-fits-all salary negotiation advice and a problem arises: The only way they can feel like they’ve won the negotiation is to fight for some arbitrary increase and then have the company give it to them.
My mistake early on was trying to give people the best possible offer out of the gate that I could possibly justify. Many people took it because it was a big raise for them or they understood what we had discussed. However, you could tell when someone was reading a compensation negotiation guide because it was like the number did not actually matter. The only thing they cared about was getting something extra added on top of it. Some people would be so tunnel visioned on this idea of getting the extra bump that they’d threaten to walk from an excellent offer over something trivial like a $5K bump
So what’s the strategy? You start holding back that last little bit of your budget for the inevitable up negotiation round, then you give it to them when they do their negotiating script that the internet guide told them to follow.
If the person doesn’t negotiate, you then surprise them with it as bonus plan or something similar.
It works, but I hated it. Eventually you get a feel for who’s likely to play the negotiation script and who was not, so you could somewhat predict it most of the time.
1) after reading the original post immediately linked it to a friend who had an outstanding offer. She got a significant raise from fairly light negotiating
2) personally, I don't think of myself as a particularly aggressive negotiator. However, I have been able to truthfully discuss compensation using the tactics described with recruiters to get leveling and comp where I've wanted it to be for my last couple of jobs. Yes, I always had multiple offers. That's part of negotiating.
More generally, though, I think spending 30+ minutes (reading the piece and more) thinking about negotiating has helped me build a better mental model for what to bring to the table.
Either she had a competing offer, or the company she is interviewing for has weak processes. A company yielding "a significant raise from fairly light negotiating" is very worrying IMO.
Think about it: what does that tell you about the next newcomer that will come after you?
(Less process is normal at smaller orgs, so that's also something to consider)
Or she had no competing offers but said she had competing offers ;)
Keep this in mind: it’s really hard for companies to hire good engineers. The onsite-to-offer ratio might be 20:1 or worse. So when a recruiter says they’ll just move on to the next candidate, they’re probably bluffing.
But what if they do have 20 people lined up? Then you don’t have leverage with that company—and that’s fine. Take the offer if it’s good enough, or walk and try elsewhere.
P.S., a fun anecdote: when Netflix was extending an offer to a renowned engineer, he brought his PR to negotiate. Apparently, it worked well for him.
P.P.S, always interview for a higher title. I get it — it’s tough with hot companies like OpenAI. But for most places, it’s worth a shot. At the very least, don’t aim lower than your current level. It’s funny how the human mind works—interviewers anchor their expectations to your title. And ironically, a senior engineer interview is often just as hard as a staff-level one. If you’re feeling cynical, just remember: title inflation is real and everywhere, and plenty of high-level ICs are great at navigating politics, drawing boxes, and sounding confident, but not necessarily skilled at offering real values like solving hard engineering problems. So if you can’t beat the game, why not play it?
Which is not to say that this advice must lead to a raise for everyone who reads it, but if your current assessment of the piece is "this only works for super stars" then you have definitely not really ingested the ideas offered (but you might be making excuses for why that is).
The only thing you need is leverage, and yes, rank-and-file are not going to have a lot of leverage at a FAANG.
You can’t negotiate if you’re not willing to let the job go through.
This has to be the key point. They do this all the time as part of their job. You do it every few years, or maybe every decade. Of course they are better at it.
I once negotiated a large raise at a job where afterwards my boss told me that he could not have justified giving me that raise on his own, but because I asked for it he was able to make the case.
Negotiating often works. It has no downside for you (besides making you feel uncomfortable) and major upsides that last well beyond your current role.
Patrick is right: compensation is much more about negotiating skill than it is about reputation or (especially) notoriety, holding everything else equal.
If you're in demand, and you're good at what you do, the road is paved for you. Top companies have already set the bar.
Them: we offer 250k-350k
Me: I don't consider anything below 500
The answers I get vary. Some tell me to politely fvck off. Some tell me they need to discuss with leadership. Some just go for it because they know how hard it is to fill that role.
The justification is simple: why would I take a job with you if I can land an HFT gig at twice the pay?
> 250k-350k
> land an HFT gig
Respectfully, your perspective may be a bit skewed? OP's context was "us rank-and-file employee number 12887's".
Not really in the same category as Carmack
Don’t want the job for the salary offered? Too bad. Hire a cheaper person armed to the teeth with the best LLM coding tools and move on.
Unless you’re coming in with significant clout that will move revenue and relations to bridge partnerships across other companies, you will not be worth the extra $250k on skills alone.
Weaker engineers and junior engineers are in more the situation you describe. This is tough and I feel for these folks but it is possible for many people to become stronger engineers if they choose to put in the work.
I'd encourage you to not take on a feeling of hopelessness here.
Now it's LLMs. Same old.
Most recently it resulted in a modest $5k boost to the offered salary.
But the level of success you are likely to experience entirely depends on the alternatives that you have and the alternatives they have.
(I should also note that I’ve never been located anywhere like SF.)
Was true in 2012, remains true today.
My two jobs since I've been able to get more by... just asking for more, even without competing offers.
So I am left thinking they are just collecting salary metrics for the position.
The few times early on that I didn’t do that, it was a giant waste of time.
If I was interviewing from a position where I needed a job soon, I would be less inclined to be that upfront, of course.
Tell them that the salary should be negotiated at the end if the process is successful.
If they tell you "but we need this to make sure we're not wasting your time and ours", tell them "well give me a range for what you can do and I'll tell you if you're wasting my time"
i'm usually lucky if i can get one offer when interviewing. no room to negotiate that way...
1. Negotiate from a position of strength
You pointed out a couple of these, like when you have a strong personal brand (like Patrick) or when the market dynamics favour employees. The former is not something you can control so, when the market is in this place, you should take advantage of it to propel yourself. However, the former is completely within your control. You can spend some time and effort building a personal brand. Many people discount the value of a brand and the effort spent building one, but it totally works. I have marketing-savvy friends who, since early in their career as juniors, spent a lot of time on LinkedIn thought leadership & brand building. And it totally works. In fact, I have one such friend who was recently part of a restructuring layoff (i.e., not related to performance). Because of the brand they built, once they posted about the layoff on LinkedIn, they had 12 offers within a week all higher than their previous salary.
Another area where you can gain leverage is when you already work at a company that wants to retain you. The only time a business will bend over backwards for an employee is when the conversation is about retention. To make the conversation about retention you need to be completely willing to walk, and your negotiating position is strengthened if you have counter offers. To maintain your political capital (which will be important if you stay) you need to be careful about how you play this game. I've worked with people in the past who approached the business confrontationally, saying "if you don't give me $X, I quit" - that strategy only works once. But there are ways to structure this conversation where you don't leave a bad taste in anybody's mouth.
2. Care about something different than your counterpart
Often the person you're negotiating with cares the most about optimising certain metrics. You should try to spend some time figuring out what those metrics are and see if there is something different that makes a difference in your life.
e.g., your employer might be really under the gun about managing fixed salaries. This is very common in a lot of businesses to try to manage their headcount. So they might be more willing to give you a $50k cash bonus compared to a $25k salary increase. Or maybe they're more open to an extra week or two of vacation vs. salary.
This phenomenon has been really helpful for me in the last year. I run my own business, but my business is fully bootstrapped, so I don't have a board or any investors to please. As a result, I'm not as motivated by ARR as other SaaS companies. Sometimes I encounter customers who would rather pay me a 3-4x one-time fee instead of ARR. By making these deals I immediately guarantee what would have otherwise been four years of cash (potentially with a cancellation risk during the term). A VC-funded SaaS business would almost never make a deal like this, because such a deal would not have a material impact on valuation.
Another example - I was moving recently and sold some furniture. I was chatting with somebody who was an optometrist who wanted to buy a few things, which I listed at $200. They offered $100. I countered, asking for the right to use their employee discount, and ended up getting $500 in value.
So you should also spend some time trying to figure out what your negotiation counterpart cares about. Maybe there is an arbitrage where you can both get exactly what you want, instead of needing to find an outcome where one person wins and the other one loses.
The only reasonable conclusion I can draw is that they simply enjoy the negotiation process itself. I guess most of us do not.
So, more broadly, you might be asking me “why waste your time selling $100s of furniture?” which is a completely fair question. The opportunity cost of the time spent selling it was far greater than the benefit I got. From a pure optimization perspective it was a bad use of my time.
But also I just moved to the other side of the world and had an apartment filled with furniture that I needed to get rid of. And I am the type of person who doesn’t like waste, so sending everything to the landfill was misaligned with my personal values. And also I don’t work 24 hours per day, so it’s not like this effort takes tome away from working on the meaningful deals.
It would be reasonable to ask “why not give it away for free?” In my experience, customers that pay you nothing are a much bigger burden than customers that pay you something (and, in fact, I find that higher revenue customers are much easier to deal with on an absolute basis).
And then your more direct question: why negotiate at all? Why not just accept the offer and move on with your life? I think your guess is correct: I am a negotiator at heart. I really truly love the hustle, in all aspects of life. It doesn’t matter whether I’m earning $10, $1000 or $100k: I love making deals. And this part of my character is probably a big part of why I’ve been successful in business.
To your final point - the marginal benefit of negotiating vs. being perceived as petty. In all of these situations the audience is different and their lifetime value is different. It would be foolish to negotiate with a $100k customer over $100s; you’re right to assume that the customer might perceive it as petty (and such a move would probably diminish their lifetime value). But, on the other hand, if you sold something to a random person off Craigslist where their expected lifetime value was in the $100s wouldn’t it be foolish to not try to maximize your outcome, especially if it only added a minute or two to the transaction?
Maybe we’re just living in different worlds.
My comp is good for non FAANG especially seeing that I work remotely in a non HCOL no state tax city. But it’s hard for normies to do significant negotiations. I also have “unlimited PTO” and fully plan to take 20-25 days at least.
Aside, as a small startup I am generally upfront with the salary since if you are not in the range we can afford it is not worth having a discussion.
At startups you negotiate for equity instead of salary but a lot of the same advice applies.
I have 5+ years experience at a no name place and can’t even get an interview anywhere. Maybe my resume is shit but I’ve tried many different versions with no luck in the last 4-5 months.
Just started my own business instead.
Getting some work experience and then starting my own thing was a better fit for me.
And all the FAANG combined probably don’t even have half that many positions, with negotiable salaries, in total worldwide.
"You can't write me a check?" I said, "No, I -- a check? Hell yeah, I can write you a check! I thought you needed money. Tell you what, I'm just gonna pay the whole thing off right now! I'm gonna be a congressman when I grow up."
But at the time the employee is negotiating this has already been decided. The company has some valuation and you are offering some known percentage of that scarce resource. You could argue that the valuation itself is the thing being manipulated (which is partially true), but that doesn't change the cost of the offer to the company in units of equity %
There is negotation power but only if you pass all the interview challenges. Only at that point you are in a position to name your number (of course you won't ask $500K when you know the company you are applying to pays around $200K... because you have done your previous research on that; you'll ask something between $200K and $250K and see how they react). Layoffs and AI hasn't change this (sure, thing, 5 years ago companies were hiring more and perhaps were more relaxed about this, but that didn't change the fact that you can only negotiate when they want you)
We as engineers have let the recruiters and VC funding brainwash us into lower salaries. Kind of looking forward to a rebound.
That said, once the project goes beyond a certain threshold, LLMs offer little more than a highly capable autocomplete. In larger codebases, the current context window is too small for the tools to even answer questions properly, let alone make any non-trivial changes.
Productivity starts going down once you try to use LLMs in a large codebase and expect them to be as helpful as they were in a smaller one. Often, these authoritative little shits will whirl you around in a doom loop and still won’t find any useful solution. And suddenly you find yourself having to clean up the mess.
I’d still say the productivity benefit is positive, but at the same time, the hype around these is bonkers. Employers are holding onto the hype cycle to bring down wages through FUD.
Exactly this. I've really tried to find use for LLMs in my big tech company SWE job and I just can't. The context is just too large, and not just the code context. In the time that I can "explain" everything to the LLM, keep iterating until it spits out something semi-useful and massage that into something I can merge, I'd rather just do the whole thing myself.
But it's amazing for greenfield personal projects.
I find LLM autocomplete extremely annoying compared to traditional intellisense
It is wrong way more and I don't want multi-line autocomplete, it's too intrusive
It's more or less the same as intellisense most of the time, but occasionally it tries to guess an entire multi-line function and it throws me way off
I don't know if it's a matter of just sticking with it to learn like any new tool, or if it is just really not as useful as people say
One thing I've noticed is that with traditional intellisense it was often fast enough to get ahead of me so I could tab complete
Cursor is slower than me. Often I am typing faster than it can think, which makes it suggest things I'm already past.
Llms are still a big speed boost there
Point is, I'm not negotiating with the bank teller, they have a flow chart they need to follow. For a lot of positions with big companies, it's going to be the same. There might be a path on the flowchart you can access, but you're not really negotiating. In some cases you may be able to break though this if there's a real person (not recruiter) that will push for you, but talking to recruiters / talent is like talking to the bank teller.
I strongly encourage people to read the post and not give up because of the unrelenting cynicism in these comments.
Sure, make an ask for more money, but I have never had any leverage.
Caveat that I haven’t interviewed in the last couple years and this may not be the case anymore.
In particular, companies don't really look at how much they spend to hire someone. They'll just wait for the hiring committee to be "really excited" about a candidate before making an offer.
He says the hiring market for engineers is hot… is it? Maybe for certain rare species of AI specialists, but for anyone else the going looks a good bit tougher now than it did even a couple years ago.
Also, he spends a fair bit of time encouraging people not to reveal their former salary, but in all but a few rare cases your former salary is available to your new employer via data sharing service providers. The HR team at my employer now asks applicants for their former salary strictly as a test of their honesty. And yes, have kicked competitive candidates out for giving a false number. Declining to give the number is fine, but does not create any negotiating advantage.
I've been at companies which paid me 1/2 of what some my peers earned. I don't have time for these games. Give me your salary ranges for the position and I can negotiate. Otherwise I'm pulling numbers out of my ass.
The recruiter wants to pay me as close to 0 as possible, and it's up to me to push back on that.
The only good jobs I got directly from CEOs.
On forms where I have to put a range, I put $1.00.
Market conditions aside, the points the OP blog post makes about asymmetrical value are evergreen.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...
The only way this will ever move in the direction of the employee is if some drastic change happens where more independence and negotiation is an ongoing part of employment. Unless things are so open to negotiation that someone can go "hey i am a little burned out, but I don't want to hurt the company how about this year i work 50% for 60% compensation" And there is meaningful negotiation without immediate threats of replacement.
1. Get another job someplace more progressive
2. Make sure they phone your employer for a reference
3. Explain to current employer salary package is insufficient, and you are cutting back your available hours
4. Leave if they argue over something as silly as heavily taxed income
By the time people have to have this conversation, there is already a serious problem in the corporate culture.
Tech people usually must eventually leave if they want a better position. =3
Ask for working hours that effectively pays you more per day, like an 80% contract at the same comp. If they mumble HR and hours, offer to do 4x10 hour days. The magic phrase in corporate is "flexible working". This doesn't solve your comp going up, but you get a 3-day weekend and 52 more holidays a year.
This one even works at intensely bureaucratic organisations like universities. With grants, the amount you can be paid is very fixed, but almost anything else can be approved if three people sign off on it.