"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.
I've been upfront and honest with recruiters and they accommodate. Having 2 offers has 2 clear benefits:
1) It will definitely help you in negotiations
2) Gives you multiple data points on what the market is willing to pay you
- Get more money than what I'm currently making and by that, I mean at least 20% more
I've no problem telling them my current salary since it's always been in the upper quartile for my area. To get me to switch, the increase has to be significant or else it's not worth the risk of plunging into the unknown and the pain of learning yet another completely different spaghetti mess where generations of architecture astronauts added layers upon layers until the complexity exceeded their mental capacity to maintain it and left.
I've worked on Titling Systems, Game Development (C/C++), Integration Systems, and Backend database systems. All those niche data models/systems live rent free in my head. It is all absolutely worthless to my current employer or people around me because they're focused on solving their unique problems which at the end of the day just become another piece of worthless business procedure in my head. It is worthless because of the fact that business and people only care about solving their problem, once its solved they just move onto the next.
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.
If you're slaving in interviews and only have one offer, I can see why the offer is compelling. In this current market, I totally get it. But just a couple short years ago, the parent poster's approach was probably sound.
Lol people explicitly directly ask to see offer letters. Bluffing like this is a great way to actually have the negotiations end prematurely because you're found to be operating in bad faith.
and you tell them that the company do not want their offer to be revealed due to confidentiality reasons. The first employer would need to take your word for it. And if they deem you lying, they can always stand hard on their offer, and risk losing the candidate.
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.
This would be a reasonable argument if the timeline was at least 7-10 days. Three days is a red flag: they’re clearly pressing you to make a bad decision.
Serious candidates have to talk things over with their family, and often have busy spouses. They often have to get legal advice, which can end up in a few days of phone tag.
A take it or leave it offer with a three day window to accept is, to be blunt, a terrible offer. That combined with the number of interviews to get that far show just how little the company respects the candidates.
You're selecting for a specific type of person, and you're going to get a culture that reflects it.
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.
Honestly curious how this conversation goes, like "I'm busy with xyz for the next four weeks, then I can do round two of interviews..." or how does that go?
one company offered to give me an offer early but warned that it would expire before my timeline. i told them they can give me an offer whenever but I will not be making a decision before the timeline i communicated. they ended up giving it to me early anyway and then extending the expiration when I said I hadn't made a decision by their original date.
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.
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.
"I'm sorry, but the offer is from a stealth startup who does not wish their name to be known."
> it was kind of shocking to learn how often candidates lied about everything from where they worked in the past to having competing offers.
That's the real gut punch. Honest hard-working people are getting shafted while liars and thieves get ahead.
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.
If someone came with that request, I’d probably be amused but I doubt I could change anything.
If you don’t have a good competing alternative offer/option, you’re not negotiating, you’re begging.
And chances are, they have alternatives.
If that's not the case, they are not excited about you (in which case, why are they hiring you?), or you have not made your case firmly and clearly.
I saw it when it was first mentioned here, many years ago, and thought the same then.
Though yours is good, it can be even simpler:
Be ready to say no.
Simply stating you have a competing offer also for $X is completely believable and will probably get you a improved offer from one of the two interviewing teams.
Even if it doesn't and you accept at $X then at the very least your new employer now knows that you liked them best. Which is not a bad way to start a new job.
Either way I would never lie and say I had an offer when I didn't. Lying in general is a bad faith strategy and will often come back on you at some point.
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.
> 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.
Maybe. But are they in your city or prepared to move there? Are they available now? Have they applied for this job? Would they even want this job?
All of these, and many more, are considerations that you need to take into account before writing yourself off so easily.
If there was, we'd try to hire both of them, because hiring is a long process, and if you find someone who seems good enough you want them on your team. You can always fire them during the trial phase if they turn out to be a bad fit.
So in reality, your BATNA is your current job (if you’re employed).
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.
This reminds me on my experience selling things on local version of eBay. No matter how good of a price it was for a used item, people would still try to lower it... until I just started setting higher prices from the get go and then selling for more after some arbitrary small drop in price after "negotiating". Wierd how people work.
That is to say - all the more reason to haggle. Or negotiate salary prices. What this experience says is that lowballs are the norm.
You also "learned" this by your company themselves making it hard for candidates to have multiple offers, as you seemed to imply in another comment that you shorten the timeline near the end (after no doubt having a long application and interview process, which I'm sure is rationalised as industry standard) to prevent multiple offers ("we need to move on to the next candidate quickly")
And even had the audacity to say that people who want to extend the process aren't serious, knowing full well most companies drag on the application and interviewing process for weeks and months. It's all just power dynamics and everything else is nonsense
I'm not sure we need HR PR on this site, on this post about trying to bump salary, in this very tough climate.
Patrick is right: compensation is much more about negotiating skill than it is about reputation or (especially) notoriety, holding everything else equal.
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.
I got a great review and asked for more money than the raise my boss offered. He had no authorization to go that high, but because I asked for more and having had a good review gave me a strong position, he went to the VP and got approval for it.
It's just business: you're selling a skill. Try to get a good price for it.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jmaureenhenderson/2014/03/13/wh...
I think its telling that you have to reach for a >10 year old article for evidence that this is an actual risk.
It all felt off to me - it should be the candidates job to accept or not, rather than for the company to make that assumption.
Doing a lot of hiring now, I always offer as close to or above the top of the range the candidate is looking for if possible, and definitely have pushed that up outside our budget when we stumble across great candidates. I want to build a team that sticks around, not just have people hopping every 18 months.
If you're going to reply, please drop the absolutes -- you're asserting a confidence you can't possibly have here. "No incentive"? Of course there is, you just don't think it's big enough to worry about. So say that instead of asserting a model that can't be true.
"No downside"? Come on, reality rarely works like that.
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)
What do you care?
Or she had no competing offers but said she had competing offers ;)
You can strengthen your case extremely well by simply telling the best version of the truth
While Julia discusses interviews in this post, it is equally relevant to engaging in discussion with recruiters or hiring managers: https://jvns.ca/blog/2014/02/03/sounding-confident-in-interv...
Sure maybe offer is a bit too far, idk. Definitely no way for them to check though. And in all other ways the game is rigged because employer usually has more information than you.
If someone wants to work at a startup, Google isn't really going to compete for your offer
But if you're going to big tech cos you can get them to compete with each other.
Know your audience: say, I'm really excited about the potential of working with you, however I have a few other interviews with comparable public tech companies
I'm not ready to make a decision because I want to see that process through, although there exists a number you could tell me that would get me to stop looking immediately.
This will probably give you a worse number than you'll get if you actually get the additional offers, but if you don't have them it's a truthful way to indicate they're not quite hitting the mark
How many people do you think would hit that bar in the industry? Hundreds? I have hundreds of letters with numbers attached to them to say nothing of how many people simply negotiate, get the comp bump, and do not feel the need to email me about it.
I'm not trying to say all that matters an outsized profile. I agree that if you have that rare intersection of: 1. acing the interview, 2. a strong background with well-known companies, and 3. (critically) are job-hunting during a hiring bull market, to the point where the company cannot pick-and-choose, and they feel they must hire you, then sure, negotiation will bear some fruit. OR, if you managed to get multiple offers. I think a lot of us have never seen either of those situations.
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?
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.
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.
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).
>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
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.
Anecdotally - I’ve been through 2 technical screens where they asked me to use an AI prompt to solve a problem. For one, it was a pretty trivial problem (running an hmac over some values) so I just solved it directly. They asked why I didn’t use AI, and I told them honestly that I’ve done something like this hundreds of times, why would I use a prompt for it? Didn’t make it to the next round. Now it’s totally possible that I didn’t make it because of something else. And maybe those were outliers, but it seems like I’ll need to brush up on prompting…
Now it's LLMs. Same old.
LLM’s have similar if not worse trade offs imo.
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.
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.
Maybe we’re just living in different worlds.
This way, you don't get outlier high salaries for strong negotiators (which causes hurt feelings down the road for weaker negotiators), nor low salaries for weaker negotiators. Downside if someone pushes negotiation, there's basically no wiggle room. And the salaries themselves are a bit on the generous side of fair, so if someone thinks they're worth more, they're welcome to prove it because they probably aren't aligned with market rates.
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.)
This was before I started writing my blog.
There are jobs where I suspect I couldn't get a raise, but they're all roles where I would be unable to differentiate myself from a commodified ultra-scrub engineer (think the cheap labour you get from generic Azure consultancies).
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?
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!